After all networked smartphones and computers were placed under control of the regime, resistance hackers relied on microcontrollers harvested from ordinary household devices like smart lamps and vape pens to slowly rebuild the covert but resilient mesh internetwork that became known as FreeNet.
Just curious: if you wanted to do something like that, but prevent a... thermal event, how would you protect an experimental battery realistically? Build a brick enclosure? A fire safe?
If you have the space for it, just put it outdoors 5' from anything flammable and you're good to go. This is not a hobby for folks in apartments unfortunately.
I've had one of my DIY ebike batteries short and fail spectacularly at near full charge and was able to push it with a broom out of the garage into the driveway before any damage was done. Now I have a bench with wheels that I can take into the driveway for initial testing.
Ideally build it in away from your house, as others have said, but in terms of actual safety systems:
-get a high quality BMS from a reputable source, it should supports current limits and thermal probes
- configure current limits with as much overhead as possible, the less you drive them, the cooler they'll stay
- make sure you have sufficient thermal probes inside key points in the pack(s) and that they're configured in the BMS to cut draw
- add thermal fuses as well, knowing where to put these is important, too
- house the packs so to minimize fire risk and cascading issues, especially if space is not a concern
Current building regulations in the UK are moving towards outside storage of batteries now because of NMC's having a high tendency to combust. The battery management systems do detect a lot of issues, thermal and shorts but at some point I think government is going to force these to be on the outside of houses.
The right answer is LifePO4 for home storage, does not combust and has good enough density.
Agreed. I think that about ten years out, when solid state batteries are widely available, lithium-ion batteries bigger than laptop-sized will be prohibited.
Once we have solid state cells I really hope the entire industry moves over to them and we just have solid state, LFP and Sodium Ion, all nicely non combustable chemistries that offer different price, power and weight density trade offs.
Small outbuilding. Concrete pad. Cinderblock walls. Sheet metal roof. Safe distance from anything important. Typical cost is $3000-$4000. Farms often have little buildings like this.
(There are pictures of such buildings online. Search is returning awful LLM-generated garbage landing pages, so I don't have a link.)
Shameless plug: we're building a repairable e-bike battery where you can use your own cells at https://infinite-battery.com
We worked on a very sturdy casing, with some specific features to release pressure and limit the fire event propagating cell to cell, you can check it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0NXXfCA2CY
The amount of e-waste in general is truly nauseating. My employer just cleaned 30 years of “junk” out of our in house IT “tech shop” and the number of working but obsolete computers that went out (many simply because they couldn’t support Windows 11) is sickening to me. The amount of carbon generated from the mining activities, steel production, etc. that went into producing “obsolete” computers has to absolutely dwarf any carbon “savings” you get by replacing them with more “efficient” machines. Especially when you consider that renewable power is taking over and many places aren’t burning coal to run the things anymore. A 12 year old i7 server runs my NVR, home automation setup, web server, and network router (not to mention a small handful of other services) without even breaking 25% CPU usage. We could replace so many data centers with old desktops.
"We could replace so many data centers with old desktops."
But I assume for way more energy costs? And the manual labour to sort out the different mainboards and make everything interoperable is not free either. But I guess it means lots of opportunity for unconventional low costs projects to scramble things together. Win 10 got another year of support, but I assume next year, even more computers will be avaiable quite cheap or for free.
See my other reply, when people count energy costs they fail to take into account the existing sunk cost of producing said resources, and the energy from having to build out new infrastructure to create these “more efficient” datacenters.
It’s like when people replace their fridge with a “more efficient” one and wipe out any energy savings with the cost of the new fridge. The difference in energy use will not pay for the new fridge for many years and by then you’ve already replaced the new fridge with another newer “better” one.
Well luckily according to Bill Gates the climate is not really an issue anymore [1]:
> There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:
> In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us—just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.
> Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise.
Note that this is from someone who used to be one of the most focal "doomsday viewers", see for example [2] or [3].
> A 12 year old i7 server runs my NVR, home automation setup, web server, and network router (not to mention a small handful of other services) without even breaking 25% CPU usage. We could replace so many data centers with old desktops.
Replacing concentrated and highly optimized data center servers with 10-1000X as many old desktop computers idling away at 50-100W or more would be a terrible tradeoff. That would explode the energy usage by orders of magnitude.
Unless you count in the effects of distributed solar and the environmental effects of building said datacenters in the first place. Many homes with solar produce more than they consume, and many homes pay for heat. Instead of new construction (concrete is another huge CO2 contributor) and AC units or pumping surface water for cooling, putting a server in your house is basically free heat and making use of an existing, underutilized resource.
I could run my entire rack off of one to two solar panels (decommissioned ones from a power farm might I add). Even that would take a few years to pay for itself (when you factor in the costs of mounting and permitting) and my power company over 80% renewables the last time I checked anyway.
In some cases but the economics need to be improved. Companies don’t have to pay for the externalities so it’s often cheaper to build new things instead of recycling, but if that shifted we’d see a lot more capacity arise.
Unless you're a hacker, and you like hacking on stuff, then by all means, read through all the warnings and please do consider doing similar to what OP did, it's a lot of fun and you'll learn a lot!
Eh, as a hacker who has wasted time on a lot of dumb stuff I would encourage people to not follow absolutely every obsession you have and think of the opportunity costs of new projects you take on.
Manufacturers should be required to actually take back anything with that logo. You can buy so much stuff that becomes a serious problem to dispose of and that stupid logo is all that's required of the manufacturer. Cost of disposal would then get added to the price of the object, as it should to begin with!
Everything with a sealed, soldered battery makes me furious on this front. Every item with a battery that recharges through the device instead of having a battery door like a Game Boy is on a timer, and for no good reason other than planned obsolescence.
They are illegal in Australia, but they are all over the ground. Littered like cigarette butts. Only now instead of just being plastic and some slightly toxic substances. It's a whole e-waste package.
When I first read your comment, it makes it sound like you've been watching the video for 20 minutes and it wasn't mentioned once. Turns out he starts talking about it around the 2:00 minute mark...
After all networked smartphones and computers were placed under control of the regime, resistance hackers relied on microcontrollers harvested from ordinary household devices like smart lamps and vape pens to slowly rebuild the covert but resilient mesh internetwork that became known as FreeNet.
Maybe this is not such a bad side of history to be on after all.
Just curious: if you wanted to do something like that, but prevent a... thermal event, how would you protect an experimental battery realistically? Build a brick enclosure? A fire safe?
If you have the space for it, just put it outdoors 5' from anything flammable and you're good to go. This is not a hobby for folks in apartments unfortunately.
I've had one of my DIY ebike batteries short and fail spectacularly at near full charge and was able to push it with a broom out of the garage into the driveway before any damage was done. Now I have a bench with wheels that I can take into the driveway for initial testing.
Ideally build it in away from your house, as others have said, but in terms of actual safety systems:
-get a high quality BMS from a reputable source, it should supports current limits and thermal probes - configure current limits with as much overhead as possible, the less you drive them, the cooler they'll stay - make sure you have sufficient thermal probes inside key points in the pack(s) and that they're configured in the BMS to cut draw - add thermal fuses as well, knowing where to put these is important, too - house the packs so to minimize fire risk and cascading issues, especially if space is not a concern
Current building regulations in the UK are moving towards outside storage of batteries now because of NMC's having a high tendency to combust. The battery management systems do detect a lot of issues, thermal and shorts but at some point I think government is going to force these to be on the outside of houses.
The right answer is LifePO4 for home storage, does not combust and has good enough density.
Agreed. I think that about ten years out, when solid state batteries are widely available, lithium-ion batteries bigger than laptop-sized will be prohibited.
Once we have solid state cells I really hope the entire industry moves over to them and we just have solid state, LFP and Sodium Ion, all nicely non combustable chemistries that offer different price, power and weight density trade offs.
It's usually not the batteries causing fire. A broken fuse. Or something else. I can create a pretty heavy welder from my 1000 amps of 48v system.
Doesn't matter. If you try any of these techniques your insurer will still void your home insurance if your house catches fire.
Proper cooling seems to be the primary thing to do.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259017452...
Proper Home Storage systems are pretty safe:
https://www.bves.de/en/2024/12/17/study-home-batteries-fire-...
There are special containers for transport of (even damaged) lithium batteries, which don't look overly bulky:
https://www.zarges.com/en/solutions/transport-and-storage-of...
I think there’s not much you can do other than placing it very far away from the house. Those big packs just have way too much energy.
Small outbuilding. Concrete pad. Cinderblock walls. Sheet metal roof. Safe distance from anything important. Typical cost is $3000-$4000. Farms often have little buildings like this.
(There are pictures of such buildings online. Search is returning awful LLM-generated garbage landing pages, so I don't have a link.)
A runaway NMC battery is notoriously difficult to extinguish, so the best thing to do is to not do it and investigate LFP prismatic cells instead.
Many people building home storage batteries use a shed a few meters away from their home.
what's a NMC battery?
Nickel Manganese Cobalt - a type of Lithium battery chemistry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_nickel_manganese_cobal...
Nickel manganese cadmium maybe?
Shameless plug: we're building a repairable e-bike battery where you can use your own cells at https://infinite-battery.com
We worked on a very sturdy casing, with some specific features to release pressure and limit the fire event propagating cell to cell, you can check it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0NXXfCA2CY
There are a million ways this can turn into a fireball, dont' try it, at least don't put it at home.
Don’t try this at home. Try it in someone else’s home first.
The creator of the video made this very clear already.
The amount of e-waste in general is truly nauseating. My employer just cleaned 30 years of “junk” out of our in house IT “tech shop” and the number of working but obsolete computers that went out (many simply because they couldn’t support Windows 11) is sickening to me. The amount of carbon generated from the mining activities, steel production, etc. that went into producing “obsolete” computers has to absolutely dwarf any carbon “savings” you get by replacing them with more “efficient” machines. Especially when you consider that renewable power is taking over and many places aren’t burning coal to run the things anymore. A 12 year old i7 server runs my NVR, home automation setup, web server, and network router (not to mention a small handful of other services) without even breaking 25% CPU usage. We could replace so many data centers with old desktops.
"We could replace so many data centers with old desktops."
But I assume for way more energy costs? And the manual labour to sort out the different mainboards and make everything interoperable is not free either. But I guess it means lots of opportunity for unconventional low costs projects to scramble things together. Win 10 got another year of support, but I assume next year, even more computers will be avaiable quite cheap or for free.
GP already replied in a sibling comment, so all I can add is another article about this in case you want to read more about it with concrete numbers: https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...
See my other reply, when people count energy costs they fail to take into account the existing sunk cost of producing said resources, and the energy from having to build out new infrastructure to create these “more efficient” datacenters.
It’s like when people replace their fridge with a “more efficient” one and wipe out any energy savings with the cost of the new fridge. The difference in energy use will not pay for the new fridge for many years and by then you’ve already replaced the new fridge with another newer “better” one.
Well luckily according to Bill Gates the climate is not really an issue anymore [1]:
> There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:
> In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us—just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.
> Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise.
Note that this is from someone who used to be one of the most focal "doomsday viewers", see for example [2] or [3].
[1]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/home/home-page-topic/reader/three...
[2]: https://youtu.be/rhNxDp8e7p8
[3]: https://youtu.be/zrM1mcKmX_c
> A 12 year old i7 server runs my NVR, home automation setup, web server, and network router (not to mention a small handful of other services) without even breaking 25% CPU usage. We could replace so many data centers with old desktops.
Replacing concentrated and highly optimized data center servers with 10-1000X as many old desktop computers idling away at 50-100W or more would be a terrible tradeoff. That would explode the energy usage by orders of magnitude.
Unless you count in the effects of distributed solar and the environmental effects of building said datacenters in the first place. Many homes with solar produce more than they consume, and many homes pay for heat. Instead of new construction (concrete is another huge CO2 contributor) and AC units or pumping surface water for cooling, putting a server in your house is basically free heat and making use of an existing, underutilized resource.
I could run my entire rack off of one to two solar panels (decommissioned ones from a power farm might I add). Even that would take a few years to pay for itself (when you factor in the costs of mounting and permitting) and my power company over 80% renewables the last time I checked anyway.
Isn't a lot of e-waste recyclable?
In some cases but the economics need to be improved. Companies don’t have to pay for the externalities so it’s often cheaper to build new things instead of recycling, but if that shifted we’d see a lot more capacity arise.
Never ever consider doing something like this.
There is a good reason why most home battery storage solutions are based on LFP batteries and not NMC as used in vapes.
LFP is a much safer chemistry that can withstand higher temperatures and won’t bust into thermal runaway like NMC.
> Never ever consider doing something like this.
Unless you're a hacker, and you like hacking on stuff, then by all means, read through all the warnings and please do consider doing similar to what OP did, it's a lot of fun and you'll learn a lot!
Eh, as a hacker who has wasted time on a lot of dumb stuff I would encourage people to not follow absolutely every obsession you have and think of the opportunity costs of new projects you take on.
Not designed to be charged? So its also disposable?
The thought that disposable vapes are still not forbidden in my country (EU) is making me sick.
My reading of the WEEE directive is that no electrical equipment can be "disposable", it should all be recyclable and recycled.
Actual enforcement of this is non-existent. If you see a "disposable" vape discarded in the street, look for the crossed out bin logo.
Manufacturers should be required to actually take back anything with that logo. You can buy so much stuff that becomes a serious problem to dispose of and that stupid logo is all that's required of the manufacturer. Cost of disposal would then get added to the price of the object, as it should to begin with!
Everything with a sealed, soldered battery makes me furious on this front. Every item with a battery that recharges through the device instead of having a battery door like a Game Boy is on a timer, and for no good reason other than planned obsolescence.
They are illegal now in the UK.
'illegal' in that manufacturers add on a usb port and the basic board to tick the reusable check box.
I'm still seeing almost as many of these cast on the streets as I did a year ago.
From what I know the law is passed already. And they will become illegal end of 2026.
i see more and more of them thrown in small streets and parks these days (FR).. if I had secure storage i'd take them just like that youtuber, alas
They are illegal in Australia, but they are all over the ground. Littered like cigarette butts. Only now instead of just being plastic and some slightly toxic substances. It's a whole e-waste package.
On the other hand, free parts!
Everything is reusable if you're determined enough.
The problem is how do recover these parts from a heap of trash
i did not know these existed. very sick indeed.
Does he ever once mention where he gets all these disposable vapes or what we can do about stopping them from entering the landfills?
When I first read your comment, it makes it sound like you've been watching the video for 20 minutes and it wasn't mentioned once. Turns out he starts talking about it around the 2:00 minute mark...
Yeah he does, watch the video.