Self-built battery storage Youtuber supplies house with electricity from 500 disposable e-cigarettes
Youtuber Chris Doel demonstrates the devastating waste of resources caused by disposable e-cigarettes with a spectacular DIY project. He built a battery storage unit from 500 discarded devices.
No time? blue News summarizes for you
- Millions of disposable e-cigarettes thrown away are a major environmental problem.
- Yet they contain ordinary lithium-ion batteries that can be recharged.
- In a DIY project, Youtuber Chris Doel used 500 discarded batteries from disposable e-cigarettes to build a powerwall.
- The 50-volt battery was able to provide enough power to supply his home.
Every day, millions of disposable e-cigarettes are thrown away worldwide. This is not only a problem for the environment, but also a huge waste of valuable resources. This is because disposable 'vapes' contain ordinary lithium-ion batteries that can be recharged hundreds of times.
So how can these free rechargeable batteries be used on a large scale? YouTuber Chris Doel was determined to find an answer to this question. On his channel, the Englishman shows how wasteful society is with resources. He has already used discarded batteries to power e-bikes and build a fast-charging power bank.
So Doel started a month-long DIY project to reuse 500 e-cigarettes that had been discarded or found on the street. The result was a Powerwall that can power his entire house.
"The problem with disposable e-cigarettes is inside them," explains Doel in the video, which has already been viewed three million times after 12 days.
Hundreds of batteries tested
For his recycling project, Doel first had to break open hundreds of e-cigarettes of all shapes and sizes to get to their lithium-ion batteries.
The problem with this is that there is no quick and easy way to determine which e-cigarette batteries are still usable. "If a lithium cell is ever discharged below 3 volts, it becomes damaged and unusable. As we can see here, that's the case with about half of these batteries," he said, pointing to two stacks of removed batteries.
So what is the easiest way to test the functionality of the batteries in advance? You simply use them for their original purpose. So that Doel doesn't have to draw on the discarded e-cigarettes himself, he uses a discarded CPAP ventilator. In medicine, it supports patients' breathing and is also used to treat sleep apnoea.
Battery storage can power the house
After testing and collecting hundreds of e-cigarettes, Doel was able to sort the battery cells according to their capacity in order to finally operate them in parallel. It was a huge piece of work, says the YouTuber. This shows "why recycling programs for these things are such an enormous challenge and usually barely feasible".
Using some 3D-printed modules to hold the batteries, Doel finally painstakingly soldered the individual batteries together to form a huge battery storage unit.
The result looks a little wild, but is a fully-fledged 50-volt battery. The YouTuber runs it through an inverter to generate electricity for his household. "All my devices are now powered 100 percent by the discarded batteries," says Doel, and finally disconnects the house from the power grid.
"So to answer the question of whether you can power an entire house using only disposable vape cells, which are thrown away by the millions: Yes, it's absolutely possible," he says proudly. Now he wants to combine his Powerwall with solar cells.
