The tour of the recycling facility would arguably be some of the most interesting content you could put out. If it's possible, please do! Thanks Linus!
11:15 Yeah those sparks are from improper welding, not the cell rupturing. Just weld it again and it's perfectly fine. It may look scary but I've had way worse sparks when spotwelding battery packs and nothing happened. You'd notice pretty quickly when a cell is actually damaged because it would start spewing sparks, smoke and maybe even fire. That happens quickly IF you manage to damage it enough
@@Akkbar21 The source is my own experience. As I said I had worse sparks myself when spotwelding batteries. It's when you don't make great contact and end up vaporizing a bit of the nickel strips Shorting out the battery (usually) doesn't spark like that and just causes the wrongly placed nickel strip (or whatever is shorting the pack) to heat up. Lithium batteries may be volatile and scary but they aren't that volatile and scary
@@Akkbar21 My own experience also backs this up. If you actually rupture a cell, it'll get hot as "rupturing a cell" is called short circuiting the cell. Then it releases a ton of smoke and depending on how direct the short was, lights on fire. That did not happen with any of the sparky cells thus no rupturing occurred. Maybe it did and they just didn't show the "after" part, but I suspect every cell that they "ruptured" is just fine or at least in not significantly worse condition than what they had in the beginning. I blame bad equipment and possibly improper welding order/not well balanced cells from LTT's side as the general technique and spot weld settings seemed fine.
I've done a lot of these battery rebuilds and just because the spot welder Sparks badly like that doesn't mean the battery was affected at all. That's just the spot welder reacting to a bad connection. So your batteries are fine.
Yeah I was going to say the same thing, the shop that I work at mainly does nickel metal hydride and nickel cadmium and our spot welder arcs like that all the time
@@rydz656 back in the 80s we sometimes burned trash and with it some 1.5v batteries, those carbon manganese non rechargeable types, one time it exploded and launched into the air like 15 feet, luckily it went straight up vertically and no one was hit.. I've come to the conclusion that burning non rechargeable dry cell batteries are dangerous
A word of caution; Linus, you are handling these open packs and cells with a wedding ring on your finger. This is a really good way to loose a finger or worse! Never handle these cells or open packs with ANY metal jewelry on your hands, wrist or anywhere else that could potentially make contact. Rings, watches, bracelets or even long necklaces/chains are a big no no. Way too many amps, way too fast can, like a Vulcan Mind Meld,(Weld?), instantly make you one with the battery pack! For 40+ years, I worked with everything from mini computers to 3 Phase 480V power systems. I never wore any jewelry, rings etc. for this very reason. I just never wanted to forget to remove them and tempt fate. To the point of your video, the deliberate manufacturing of more E-Waste by manufacturers is intolerable and should be made illegal!
I've hear of the danger of jewelry in the context of car batteries and residental/industial power, but hadn't considered that such small cells could output so much. Apparently the 18650 cells can output 30 amps each.
@@alexlevoy9803 Those small cells can actually pack a really big punch. Lithium cells like the 18650's can actually dump even more than 30 amps if short circuited by something like a ring directly at the positive terminal. They won't do this for long before venting and very possibly creating a little Lithium fed blow torch on your finger. Not fun.
There is absolutely no reason to throw those cells away. The spark is because you were not applying pressure properly and there was a small airgap for a spark to jump. Those were not ruptured cells.
I want some of whatever you guys were smoking because I've had one of these rupture inside a vape and since then I would rather jump off a 3 story building than weld one of those with my face that close to the lithium cell without a face shield >.>. The vape shop just sets aside batteries they decide are even slightly compromised. Probably a good business practice.
Having built multiple 3+ kwh battery packs.....those sparks weren't dangerous, they were just not having a good contact with the spot welder. If you had actually set off one of the cells, there would be smoke pretty quick.
Exactly, they were so blinded with safety and fear of lithium batteries, they overreacted to simple bad contact... Throwing out so much good batteries... What a waste.
Correct, I also built few battery packs myself so I know what's up with those sparks, Linus is just overreacting so much needlessly. TBH, this entire video is kinda meh, I get it that this is not "Linus Tech Tips" forte, they are about more like computer-like components, not like about electrical engineering, but this video is just wack. I like how this video raised awareness on intentional e-waste that is created by manufacturers, I didn't like the repairing attempt video at all.
technical work on this channel has always been cringe-worthy, and today was no exception. The spot welder seems to be putting in a LOT more power than is necessary, I didn't see the batteries actually catch fire or short. Also, that's not a soldering iron suitable for electronics. While the RED battery packs may really kill themselves, I doubt this is true of the Sony battery pack. If I am not mistaken, the BMS will power down totally when the battery is low to prevent parasitic current - it will power up again by applying a bit of voltage (charge, ie) to the output terminals. Please buy a proper soldering iron, Linus!
A reputable recycling center tour would be interesting. Especially when alot of them send stuff overseas that just get open pit burned and metals skimmed off
If you go to Retriev's website and click on lithium ion, it seems like they also do this. "The metal-enriched liquid is solidified using filtering technology, and is sent off-site for further metal purification." Prove us wrong!
As someone who works at a BatteriesPlus, where part of my job is to rebuild battery packs, this is both incredibly impressive, and also gives me severe anxiety
I worked at a few of them as well from 2008 to 2013. This video made me grateful I never had to spot weld lithium cells and for the jank designed bicycle pedal used to lower the welder.
I was a store manager of a Batteries Plus for many years, went to the headquarters in Hartland, WI near the Ascent warehouse when I first became a manager for training and saw the big ole testing rack they had for lithium cells ranging from 18650s to cell batteries from Rayovac. They had me sit at a bench and spot weld a dyson vacuum cleaner battery and damn near blew my eyebrows off. While we were never required to rebuild lithium, tool and appliance industries are moving more and more towards lithium and we needed to learn. I just said fuck it and made our policy to just order already built packs from Empire or Ascent and forego the risks of loosing material in the case of a hiccup. The customer only has to pay like $10 difference for a superior product than a done 30 times to get it right rebuilt one. The owner of my store hated loosing money rebuilding lithium's anyway so it was an easy choice to opt out of that risk. As long as you stock and have the product you're golden.
I thought sparking is okay while connecting batteries for a pack, I'm gonna be making my battery pack for my go kart next week. Seeing the level of caution over here and throwing the entire pack away at a spark gives me the feel I don't know enough.
Bebop being the battery supplier for Arri is just so fitting. For those unaware, Arri's company philosophy is pretty much the exact opposite of RED's in every way. They started making film cameras over 100 years ago and went from making the best analogue motion picture cameras to making the best digital cinema cams. They realise that their products are, first and foremost, tools for professionals who need to do a job quickly and efficiently. They don't give a fuck which battery or SSD you use, because there are industry-wide standards that assure compatibility. They don't try to be a stupid lifestyle brand, upselling you on shit you don't need and locking you into a massively overpriced proprietary ecosystem. IMO the only reason RED has any foothold in the movie industry (looking at the Oscar nominees of the past ~70 years Arri has an absurd market share) is that Netflix required their own productions to be shot on a native 4K sensor and the only Arri camera you could buy that had that was absurdly expensive. That's why the Netflix market was and probably still is dominated by RED.
As someone whos a huge advocate for recyclable batteries, i would love for a video in a recycling facility to make people more aware of the growing issue with non recyclable batteries in cars and electronics.
1) The sparking here should be harmless, that's just the spot welder not making good contact (you can literally see that at 17:28 in the stock footage). 2) Wearing a ring while dealing with Li-Ions is a very bad idea, if that shorts across the contacts it gets hot fast and you might lose the finger.
Completely agree. I spot weld my own battery packs and sparks happen but the battery cell is unaffected. I have never had a cell explode from spot welding. You just need to monitor the cell's temperature and it starts to heat up then you throw it the sand bucket.
I thought that was the case. I didn't see anything that looked like a short. They could probably have guarded against shorts by using tape on the parts they weren't working on.
Battery recycling factory tour would be immensely interesting. I've always wondered what they do with spent cells, and how they may - if possible - reclaim used lithium
As a safety engineer working with batteries I must tell you that you should split an "evil" category into "really smart" and "evil". Why? Old cells may have increased self-discharge and if they discharge below certain level they start to damage themselves internally in a way they become unsafe when charged. Mildly overdischaged cells may be safely charged with a very small current while below certain voltage there is so high riosk of internal damage that it should not be attempted. Battery manufacturers take this into account by including a pre-charge feature, but also a lockout function which bricks the battery if any of the cells go down below certain voltage, say 2.0 V. Guess what happens when you try to swap cells and suddenly there is no cell? Yep, it bricks itself as a precaution. Now, that's a "really smart" battery that in turn is PITA to swap cells, but with a right tool a BMS chip on such battery may be turned back on. Then we come to "evil" batteries: They do the same, but they have ENCRYPTED BMS chips or even do some trickery to measure cycle count or cell capacity changes.
Therein lies the problem though. Nobody makes the reset tool readily available, so frankly, they're no better than the evil ones who encrypt. To that end, it makes more economic sense for someone to find an aftermarket BMS that will play nice or be sneaky and clip a few power supply outputs (at the appropriate voltage(s)) to the BMS before disconnecting the battery pack. It ought to be on the battery manufacturer to have a tamper indicator so that when it does go up in smoke, should the tamper indicator survive the blaze, the manufacturer can wash their hands clean of a DIY'er failing to repack their battery while still allowing the DIY'er to perform the task instead of gouging them for another expensive pack.
@@inventor121 We're talking about replacing cells within battery packs here, not batteries inside phones. Totally different paradigm (though Apple are evil for what they do with their batteries too).
It seems the same thing about inkjet printers: in the past my dad used to recharge ink cartridges, he bought 4 bottles of ink for basically nothing, useful to charge the cartridges forever basically. They could be filled by a hole under the sticker with a syringe veri easily. Then we bought an Epson printer, when it detected that the ink was finished there was nothing to do, it couldn't be reset. Even if you did refill the cartridge it was useless. Of course we did toss that printer away and go for a laser one, but still. There is no reason to allow the BMS to be reset easily: you don't need any fancy stuff, since the BMS is probably a microcontroller, do you tell me that you don't have a spare GPIO that can be brought out to a board contact that if connected to GND will reset that protection? Do you tell me that coding that feature requires more than 10 minutes? And do you tell me that you don't already have that feature for use during manufacturing, but you on purpose disable it after the battery leave the factory to avoid people replacing them? Well.... exactly as the ink cartridge, it's a product made with the purpose of being not user serviceable.
When Linus turns the spot welder on, you can see the wires move apart from each other due to the immense magnetic fields created by the high current. That's pretty cool.
"if you as a manufacturer have done this, shame on you" Frankly, I don't understand why we as a society in 2022 still tolerate and support manufacturers doing this kind of things.
Sometimes there aren't any other options, and if there are, they aren't feasible for everyone. Same reason why Walmart is so popular in the USA despite decades of anti-competitive practice, destroying local economies, and abusing workers before Amazon took the crown.
Standard consumer does not understand the situation and corps actively hide this information. Think apple who deletes posts on their forums if anyone even so much as implies a iDevice can be repaired without going to apple.
9:50 I spotweld a lot of batteries, and I can tell you the electrodes were not the issue. The main issue was the welding time, that timer you are using is literally making your batteries glow. There is way too much heat for way too long there. Use a spotwelder designed for spotwelding batteries like the kWeld. Your welder is designed for big metal sheets, not batteries!! Even if the batteries would have survived that torture, they would propably leak electrolyte caused by cracks from heat.
I'm completely ignorant of these things, could you explain what causes those sparks they were getting? And why do they have to throw away everything after those sparks occurr?
I have designed Li-Ion battery packs for commercial sale and can say that in the case of high end smart battery packs with charge tracking and modeling capabilities, it is not a simple matter of just replacing cells. On our packs, the battery monitor chip required precise initial conditions for each cell in the pack in order to provide a sufficiently accurate lifetime prediction. Of course, the packs I designed were for medical devices, and I think equipment like cameras and power tools do not require that level of precision and I agree with the premise that batteries should be designed to be as serviceable as the use application allows.
Yeah. I believe most packs I've seen are just fine replacing cells. Of course capacity information after replace is is off and it's required that the cells you use for replacing can handle the conditions the circuit puts on them. For the capacity however it's usually a matter of fully discharging and charging them a few times and capcity reporting is about right again. No matter how sophisticated you try to make the measurement you just can't and it ends up being a qualified guess which tends to drift over time unless it somehow is recalibrated - and that is usually total discharge and total recharge. I agree medical devices can have special requirements. However unless a fever thermometer, ordinary blood pressure meter or similar non critical device you can just grab another off the shelf I really can't imagine anybody will risk going on compromise there.
Translation: We designed the BMS so that it won't accept a replacement battery to force them to buy whole new equipment, and we said "our equipment is too advanced to accept just ANY old battery! Just buy a new one instead!"
@@HifiCentretid be fine with having US hospitals use only new medical devices but we should still let them be repairable in case other poorer countries want to buy them used.
Some BMS's have a safety feature that if the temperature gets too high, or voltage too high or low, the BMS will basically kill itself. For example Makita batteries have this feature.. I was working with a freshly charged battery outside in cold temperatures, and as the battery drained in combination with the low temperatures, the voltage probably dropped below the point where it would allow the batteries to be charged, BMS just permanently disables itself for safety. The only option you have at that point is to replace the BMS. In some cases even desoldering the batteries from the BMS will basically kill it.
1. the sparks were completely harmless, thats just from the nickel. Ive done my own spotwelding and get that all the time, you even get it when you weld only nickel, without the batteries. 2. the bms probably didnt work because if it detects a voltage lower than ~2.8v per cell it shuts off to protect the cells (when you remove the cells this also happens) and you just need to charge it for a second or apply a positive voltage to the bms, to simulate charging
some people here pointed out that it was the case for the sony batteries but RED batteries actually used volatile bms like DJI does with their drone batteries. However they can easily be bypassed by having a parallel battery with the same voltage connected before unsoldering used cells
Those AC welders have a tendency to be crap where they can rupture a cell literally making a hole in the side. They should have been using k weld or a similar mosfet based spot welder.
@@internetusername9593 yeah there’s all sorts in this vid like lack of barley paper ends. Which help insulate the anode attached nickel strip to the cathode creating a short.
I have a few tips for you guys: 1. Take off all jewelry on your hands! You could easily accidentally short across a ring and end up with a horrible burn. 2. 3D print jigs to hold your cells 3. Use superglue to tack cells together once they are arranged in place 4. cut nickel strips on a router or drag knife
That's what I was thinking. Use a 3d printer to stick them together, they even have a really expensive one too from when they made the case from a 3d printer.
Please don’t use superglue.. high temperature adhesive that comes on a role is the best bet if you can’t use cell holders as it adds a small gap between cells.. superglue grips the wrapper so tight and forms such a hard surface that it can pull the wrap off and cause a short if the pack is dropped etc..
I'd subscribe again instead of coming by occasionally if he got a horrible burn. That would be a must see video. That video would probably be the most viewed LTT ever. Stupid games DESERVES stupid prizes. Get er done, Linus!
Having seen industrial spot welding before: I dont think those sparks you saw where hazardous. They are just from the spot welding and not from a defunct battery. What i would worry more about is the fact that you can clearly see a red afterglow on the welded plates, which means you put a lot of heat into them.
I'm no expert but I was thinking similarly. The welder basically works by short-circuiting through the part you're welding, I'd be amazed if they never sparked. Poor contact on one of the tips I assume?
Well an other hint is that hey were welding only one side of the pack at that time. There should be no possibility to create a short as the circuit is still open. Next with the sony pack yes sony has a chip that rejects 3rd party batteries but any BMS worth its money has also a undervoltage cutoff so after disconnecting you need to try to rechage first to try to reactivate the pack. And last discharge LITHIUM-Cells to about 3.2V so that the energy left in the cell is limited. A fully charged 18650 cell has about the same energy in storage as a .308 rifle bullet so allways be carefull - about a small syringe of arctic silver halve filled with gasoline for non US nerds sounds little but is sufficient for a lot of harm depending of how fast it is released.
Linus, i understand your pain. As a battery recycler, including laptop batteries. All BMS boards have proprietary firmware on them thats usually password or code protected. The manufacturers call it manufacturers security access. They claim its for security when in reality its a money cash cow. There are several groups that have hacked firmware from battery controller chips and found all access codes. Black hat event anyone? A very clever individual reverse engineered an apple mac battery....clever stuff!
Right to Repair must be very independent of Battery Repair. Don’t mess with flammable in which fire mitigation does not exist in an extinguisher. Notice that Linus held an ABC extinguisher which does not cover electrochemical. BMS security is the only method protect idiots from either electrocuting themselves or burning down their houses. I’ve seen Linus do some dumb things, and as a practicing electrical AND electronics engineer, Linus has done several practices that are very unsafe but well enough with the budget to him. His budget for appropriate materials is likely much larger than yours. Do not attempt to perform your own battery repairs. However, other repairs on phones and tablets, by all means, go ahead.
@@diehardAMD Even if its not repairable by average consumer, it still should be repairable by 3rd party repair shops with tools and skills. Thus BMS security should still be able to be circumvented. How do you define what's too dangerous? People will kill themselves even with glass shards from shattered phones, since there is always one, or loose fingers repairing their tractors. Also by making "too dangerous" exception might just encourage manufacturers to make repairs dangerous.
@@diehardAMD I shouldn't try cooking recipes then, b/c .. _fire_ 😱 Nanny mentality like that is blackpill enough to show that this generation is so f*cked & coddled ... that mentality is why we have incompetents like TrueDoh or Bidumb in positions of power.. Are you familiar with the prison experiment? People align to assigned roles. If you imply competency, then that will become the average behavior. Let the outliers take care of their own aspirations for a Darwin award; the easier they are to spot, the easier they are to mitigate. The bigger safety problem comes from gatekeeping knowledge: partially-implemented ideas are dangerous, so why not freely provide full knowledge to include hazard management - especially since curiosity can't be regulated?
Thanks for the video. 2 major problems here: 1) After replacing cells, many BMS keep the battery disconnected from the output until a charger has been connected. You need to try connecting the charger briefly before testing the battery. 2) The sparks I saw seem to be from the spot welder, rather than the cells venting. Go through the sand box and I bet those are still OK.
That's what I was thinking too. He does comment about keeping the tips clean between pulses, but I don't know if there was junk on the tips or if he was anticipating a spark or an explosion, causing him to flinch a little and break contact.
I agree with you. 1: yes, sometimes it's connecting the two poles befor and after the switching mosfets. 2: You can smell the electrolyte very well when you blow up the cell housing, if they don't smell a thing, it was just the strip exploding because of bad contact. ( happens often when i build batteries ^^ it's scary )
@@socks2441 battery is kind of different though, it's a higher density product (price wise) recycling a 50c bottle just to sell it again for plastics that are only worth 30c doesn't sound economically viable but lithium isn't the cheapest thing to buy
As has been mentioned, some BMS's need to be "woken up" with a hit of charger before working fully. Also while replacing a single cell isn't always a good idea, you can use the good cells for other things. I have multiple things around my house converted from 2x AA or 1x 2032 to run off a single 18650 with a cheap 1s bms from drill batteries.
An individual well behaved cell can pretty much always be used. If you notice it getting hotter than necessary, then you can chuck it. If you're going to put them in a pack, there is additional hazard. In most cases it's fine. But eventually you might encounter a cell that while it initially matches other cells, happens to degrade faster for some reason, then in particular if the pack contains parallel elements besides series ones, the neighbour cells may very well end up feeding the cell's unhealthy smoking habit. Odds are if you're attentive you may notice things before there's actual fire, but just something to be kept in mind.
If you're going to recycle old cells by repacking them, it's crucial to 1/ test the capacity of every cell, 2/ repack them so each group has approximately the same mAh total capacity, and 3/ use a smart BMS to ensure the groups stay balanced. Even then, it's more risky since the chance of an internal short circuit goes up over the lifespan of the cell.
For 1 cell you can also use TP4056 charger module to handle battery protection and charging (they even come with type-c port now) If your device use different voltage but not a lot of currents you can connect output to converter like MrMonotone mention.
Those sparks had nothing to do with the cells being in any danger, it was from improper weld settings/technique. I appreciate the safety concern but I hope those perfectly good cells weren't wasted
Thank you! I was wondering why they were spooked with a few spark from the welder. While I don't have direct knowledge about welding tabs for battery, I was confused because I've never heard about dumping the batteries for something like that.
The first set they were worried about connecting positive and negative terminals together, but hadn't connected any of the terminals at the other end of the cells yet. It just showed a lack of even basic understanding of how a battery works. The BMS lockout on the red pack could maybe be defeated.. Discharge the pack down to 3v then put a coin cell battery across the the terminals while the 18650 pack is rebuilt.
@@termn8er331 as a kid who used to take apart old laptop batteries and make my own battery packs with eBay bms, I am very confused with how overly cautious they are being. They worries about welding sparks whereas I literally used to solder them together. I also tried to make a battery explode purposefly and couldn't get anything to happen. They are obviously not toys and can be dangerous but not as volatile as made out in the video.
Yeah, I'd usually think that, if there's a big spark and you're not sure what caused it or why, exercise extreme caution. But even I think that was a bit over the top. Also, I figure the sparks probably were caused by sanding the welding tip, having metal dust on the tip would probably make the normal small spark just way bigger.
This is an excellent presentation. This is exactly what TH-cam should be for. You showed exactly what can go wrong. No one should be doing this without very very careful consideration. Very valuable and very worthwhile.
might have been useful to look into spot welding before you did this. those sparks were from the spot welding, not the batteries. if it were the batteries, the thing would have arced (likely no sparks) as soon as the nickel touched both batteries and any potential differential would have jumped across. the sparks may have been grease from your fingers or some other kind of oil or dirt. it's also possible you had it too hot and the metal vaporized underneath where there's not enough space for it to expand without sparking like that. this is standard in spot welding, and while it doesn't make your welds any better, still plenty of industrial sights just have the their spot welders configured to pretty much always spark. just look at any car factory video and you'll likely see just that and also, I didn't watch your diy spot welder video, but grabbing some TIG welder tungsten electrodes for the spot welding prongs probably would have been a very nice idea (as would have been here).
Another thing that might be happening is the dielectric strength of the air between the electrodes was low enough that the resistance in the metal strip, from heating, rose above it. So the electrons jumped instead of passing through the nickel. It's definitely not something to be worried about.
@@TheZankoh I mean, I could. That’s not the point. It’s my opinion that LTT does a good job with this format of video and I want to express to them that I would like to see more of this content. Believe it or not, when a creator asks for their demographic’s input in this manner, they actually do want to know. I’m sure it requires a specific budget to create, and Linus would like to know that if he does this, his viewers would actually be interested in watching it.
As a DIYPowerwaller, I love how this was presented - informative, safe & entertaining. Its a pitty you couldn't revive the red battery and you wasted great cells in the process.
@@EbonyPope Because they don't know what they're doing and don't understand how a spot welder works. Nor do they understand how electricity works or what a circuit actually is. There was no circuit there, they had only connected to one end of the battery.
Would love to see a Retriev Technologies - recycling facility tour. There aren't many with the capability and expertise on the tech-field to ask poignant questions. Thank you for keeping it real for all these years.
I've been fixing "broken things" well over fifty years, and simply hate the "throw away mentality", because it's such a waste, deliberate. I think you nailed it with "Evil". I grew up "picking the trash" in Chicago, and selling the really weird and cool things from a century before, bought lots of tools with it. I've only just begun delving into battery packs, just to look see, so far.
I know what you mean, I myself love fixing things and love to repurpose or re-use components in whatever I plan on building or fixing. I even go as far as to re-use plastics which many would throw away (as an example - zip/cable ties for plastic welding) . This is why I like it when a Chinese company decides to copy the design and improve it and plus to that sell the product at a lower price.
This mentality is intentionally pursued by the marketing ideology of our economic system, it recently had a spike of attention with the 'Keep only things you feel harmony with' Marie Kondo book that came out a few years ago and led to millions of people throwing stuff away Though Goodwill was great for a while
I've recently just said YOLO and decided I'm going to start repairing phones! I'm 16, always been into them, so it should be pretty fun and I'll be saving some phones from being ewaste. After all it'll be my generation that has to live with the consequences of the pollution that ewaste creates.
Yes Tyler at THTBattery.com actually told me this and I have yet to be back at office to try - will update this post with the result -CW EDIT: The battery DID successfully work after popping it on the charger for a second! I've added a card comment in the video for future viewers noting this.
This is a common feature on battery management IC's, they go into "shipping mode" when powered on the first time (ie after the battery has been removed and reconnected). This ensures that the batteries don't discharge while the device is sitting in a warehouse.
Too many devices that still have life left end up as recycling because replacement batteries are not properly available. I think that standardization and government regulation are needed. Good video!
Electrical Engineer here, Your BMS may require a "jump" before use. I would attempt to charge the battery pack with the BMS wired on and wait until the cells are balanced and then attempt to use the cell. Just a suggestion 😁
My thoughts exactly. I've repacked old laptop batteries and some of them were as simple as a jumper between the positive terminal of the last series connection of cells (the one which will read about 12.6V when referenced to GND) and the positive rail of the battery pack which interfaces with the motherboard.
I recently tried mounting new cells on an old asus laptop, i found out after the replacement that the bms ic is hardcoded to pop an internal fuse when it detects zero volts at one cell input. The whole operation resulted in a big waste of money and time. By the way, I'm writing a master's degree thesis on active cell balancing, I hope they get more popular over time :)
Thats why you dont replace cells.... You "build" a whole new battery, different mindset, even the case for it, 3d print. Also.... An entire thesis on just balancing... Hmm.. I feel like a more exciting subject would be the difference between the traditional lithium cell and teslas new ones, mainly the internal layout and path the electrons take to get from + to - because that shits fascinating Omnomnom
great video! as an old navy trained EE and DIY EV builder, i am painfully familiar with the subject. Wish people would quit posting battery "fix" videos with no safety in mind. Clearly you knew what you were up against and were ready for it. Thanks for not hiding the failures, people need to see just how dangerous this can be!!!
forgot to ask, did you check the voltages of built pack? some BMS' cant handle low voltage so will have to charge cells before hooking to bms or not recognized...
As you commented, since almost everything we use these days has batteries, I would love to see how the old dead bricks do get recycled. The upside is that you would be raising the awareness of battery waste and encouraging your viewers to take it more seriously. Again you guys have made a great piece of content. Thank you.
Often the charge is first discharged with salty water to make them safe to handle to begin with. especially with potentially unstable / no terminals to discharge from. would be interesting to see rest of the steps for sure.
even though it sounds like the first chip was already gone from disconnected the battery... the first thing i would do is hook up the battery and THEN disconnect the first to avoid any cut off protection
Check that camera pack again. Sometimes if it's a smart BMS with a microcontroller, it needs to be reset, and typically charging the pack will do that. You only need to charge it for a few seconds to initialise the BMS, then it should output the voltage from the batteries. I've had this happen to me before when I've been using a battery pack in a project, and I've had to unsolder then resolder the BMS
Some packs will self reset when installed into a charger, others (provided they are not an 'evil' one) require pack voltage to be applied to specific pins on the BMS to turn it back on. I believe the difference is if the charger can detect a failed pack and not charge it. In either case power from the pack keeps the BMS enabled, when the voltage drops too low (lower then where the BMS cuts off output) the BMS itself enters a fail-safe mode because if cells are that run down they might be damaged thus becoming a fire risk if charging is attempted.
Happened to me too to some repacks. I thought the battery circuit was dead until I tried to recharge it thru the device's charger. Linus can also lessen the number of cells he used. He really only needs one cell per series. The RED battery packs would've been way easier with just 4s1p. Better for novice repacking. Better a "lite" pack than a dead pack.
@@ayuchanayuko Those Red cameras are power hogs though. When they first came out, you couldn't even use most other V-mount batteries on them, you needed their special high-amp batteries. Nowadays I think all of the V-mount batteries are rated for high amperage because they are commonly used on LED lights as well, and they can draw a lot of power.
A big thing people miss is that a lot of bms's are essentially "off" when freshly hooked up. You have to supply a charge current to them let's say it's a 4s Lifepo4 pack you can hit it with something like 14volts and 1 amp for a couple seconds. After that the BMS Remains on.
Yep, exactly, many don't start on their own just by connecting to the battery. This is a safety feature. Most BMS controller chips are from a well known manufacturers, so you can find detailed docs about how they start and work.
Exactly! That Sony cell needed some voltage applied to its terminals to come back to life. A few of the packs Linus put in the sand because of sparks, just seemed to be some molten nickel flying away, not electrical shorting too. It would be interesting if Linus were to have a look at the ICs on the BMS and look up the datasheets on them, they are readily accessible, and I have replaced a few.
@@davidstech1445 Yep def just some molten chunks and he tossed a good set of batteries. All BMS boards I've ever bought did also indeed require a charge voltage be applied to the pack after an overcurrent trip before the output mosfets would turn back on.
I know Linus is giving engineers fits with this one, but IMO this is a GREAT video, showing a novice running risks and tackling a valid issue. It's the sort of stuff we tinkerers can appreciate.
I would love to see how a battery recycling facility operates... as it is, it's just not something I hear about in my day to day life and I would love to learn more
There is loads of information on the topic. It's better to get someone to build the pack for you unless you are going to do it all the time. Still though it's a fascinating topic. Watch out for the scam sites. They are just lying to you about some new tech that doesn't exist.These Lion batteries are going to get so much better in the next year they have solved some defects in the tech in the last year.
I love that you use your platform to bring attention to these types of issues. Keep pushing for Right to Repair! I'm looking forward to the battery recycling video.
The precut nickel strips has fuse on them. So whenever they short, the strips automatically melts then disconnects them to the pack. Lowering the amps on the spot wield would reduce the chances of you having a spark.
@@Knebebelmeyer Due to the high current he is probably producing high temperatures which will melt the insulated cover of the battery which will expose the negative part of the battery. It would have been better if he lowered the current and cut those nickel strips to the appropriate length to prevent any contact from the negative part of the battery when you're wielding on the positive part, as the whole body of the battery is negative except from the small circle which is the positive side.
@@Nyte1997 yes...exactly this is the case!! he use stips that are way to long and reach the negative side on the top of the battery! i saw that in the video but im not so familar with english, so i cant find the right words to tell it proper... i tryed^^...
You just need to apply proper voltage to the board right before you disconnect the batteries. You can also repurpose the batteries for things like Ryobi battery packs or portable phone chargers that aren't evil lol.
My thoughts exactly! As far as I know, for many BMS boards a reset is required after a cell swap. Connecting a charger usually does the trick, if you are lucky. But sometimes you may be not, like when battery board has a gas gauge chip - this is a whole another world of hassle))
@@CountParadox That's true. You need to wake up the BMS most of the time. This is normal behavior. Also you should charge the pack through the BMS as well.
A lot of BMS if disconnect from batteries go into a sleep mode, and to wake them up, you just need to provide charging voltage to them on the output.... Charge then test!
Most lithium battery protection circuits will remain disabled for safety until they are first charged (TI, OnSemi, ...). So the pack was probably perfectly fine, you just needed to connect it to a charger once, as mike pointed out.
The most important thing when sanding the tips of your spot welder is keeping them perfectly squared off in my experience. You’ll get sparks when welding if you don’t hold the contacts perfectly perpendicular to the tabs. I haven’t done lithium stuff, but I have a fair bit of experience building nicd and nimh battery packs and there’s a fair bit of sparks if you’re not perfectly square. Won’t hurt the battery but you won’t get a good spot weld and could blow a hole in your tab. On a side note, we have a jig for spot welding that uses a pedal to bring the contacts down to the battery. It seems like a much better way to get a clean weld.
I always remember one of the many electronics professor I had on my engineering college times, saying that one of the main problems of electric cars was the disposal of the batteries. I'd love to see that tour!
I first learned about planned obselecense in my IT class. It blew my mind. I was thinking so many countries make big manufacturers adhere to certain emission regulations, but no one seems to carethat much about planned obsolescence except for the user? Just blows my mind.
Ehhh. Sometimes people are just buying and creating a demand for products with too many bells and whistles, that and too many people do not bother to fix or maintain their stuff well. If you want a dryer and washer With 20 modes and smart functions to be affordable companies are just going to have to cut corners and the people that buy them don't bother to care about what it can handle or make sure its well maintained. It's no wonder stuff doesn't last long. My tip is to go simple but strong, don't cheap out too much and learn about what you're buying including basic maintenance.
@@irregulargamer1352 This is basically what I do, I will run all my gear to the ground and then fix it back up again. It just makes it a hell of a lot easier when there are manuals for stuff thats out of your comfort zone
15:58 Nah, Linus. The "evil" BMS is in every single removable laptop battery out there. In order to swap cells in such a battery, you would have to clamp an external voltage source onto the leads of the not yet dead but week cell, then cut out the cell and solder on a new one, all with the external voltage source still attached, which will mask the removal of the original cell and thus the BMS won't notice. A difficult task imo.
But even if you accomplished the cell swap, the BMS might shut down on you after 1 or 2 cycles when it has detected a rapid change in capacity. Had this happen to me before.
I built a 4S pack from second hand 1865(0), 196 of them, it has been running my 4x4 fridge for around 2 years now via 350w solar with controller and BMS and temp module. Understanding resistance and cell type makes it possible to safely use 2nd-hand batteries which is beneficial to reduce land-fill. It really depends on your skill level. You took the right approach with this video to educate layman to use new batteries.
You have taken the appropriate time to self educate and likely didn’t skimp out on necessary parts for a risky procedure. I would ask that you warn others to take due diligence or don’t do it at all. And yes, I’m a degrees and practicing electrical engineer. ABC extinguishers won’t cover this and we’re never meant to.
Lets talk about it... First, use only one run of nickel strip that matches the load rating of your pack, OR run a 1 amp load wire that matches the C rating of your 18650 (as the chemical composition can differ between manufacturers) to a copper bus-line so that you can avoid spot welding completely, and as well insulate to avoid shortages during installation. NEVER EVER overlap nickel strip - You will never see this done in production as this can result in arcing, excessive heat, spot detachment and shortages causing the batteries to literally explode !BOOM! Each 1 amp load wire acts as a fuse in case you do unknowingly have a defective cell (yes, even brand spanking new cells can be defective and NO taking a voltage reading at 4.2v is not the correct way to determine if they are good as you can push bad cells way past 4.2v) Additionally, the BMS lines need to be wired in a specific order, re-soldering the balancing lines ONLY after you connect B-/P- , otherwise, you will put a full load across the balance lines and pop the internal safety and maybe even the MCU and it will never turn back on. You can measure to see if you triggered this by reading the resistance across P- to B-. Far from lastly, these RED BMS circuits go into deep sleep when the battery is disconnected completely. You need to wake them up by signaling P- and B- using a controlled voltage source (iMAXB6) and overcoming the battery load. Which is why you do not weld 4.2v batteries into a BMS, when the nominal voltage is 3.7v with an even lower maintenance voltage. This can lead to signaling a source that is both damaging to the BMS and the batteries. Almost every BMS can be woken up easily if done correctly. These BMS circuits aren’t protecting a right to repair, they are trying to avoid serious injury when people who aren’t aware of how to operate them properly decide to pop them open. Also, proper testing of the 18650 with an mAh meter can tell you internal resistance and characteristics of the batteries so that you can pre “bottom or top balance” the batteries, then bring them down for maintenance before assembling them. On a side note, batteries that drain quickly or have a lower voltage coming out of a package might have internal discharge issues and should be tested with an 18650 cycle tester before determining their usability. These are highly volatile batteries that have the potential to take off like a rocket and/or explode like a grenade.
based on your thorough analysis here, seems like LTT was completely in the dark on how to structure out this DIY experiment and in doing so have disparaged the RED battery manufacturer. Love LTT but this is pretty weak. I rarely comment on TH-cam at all but felt compelled to do so here. You guys should apologize to RED for being idiots.
I am so glad someone took the time to explain this. You sir are spot on! This video is how not to even think about re-celling, I was screaming when they checked the no load voltage and deemed two groups by open voltage...... What in the hell....
You already have a lot of safety advice here, but having worked with combat robots in the past, one thing I thought was really clever that the safety team always had on hand, back in the builder's pit, was a bucket of saltwater, rather than sand. Rather than trying to keep the oxygen away from the, as you said, almost inextinguishable fire, it provides another pathway for the battery's energy to deplete, so you have less 'fuel' for your fire. At that point, the whole thing is a lost cause anyway, so there's no real harm in damaging anything else attached to the batteries by getting it wet.
@@TheIdiotPlays Yes, you need to first match the new cells with the old cells and then have a power supply always provide the old cell voltage to the BMS when replacing the batteries...
I, and some people I knew, was into RC car racing at some point when I was younger, right around the time LiPo batteries became common use. I've seen my fair share of battery fires from shortages, so I just nod my head in agreement every time someone, like Linus, mentions how gnarly they can be when they short out. Shit's no joke people.
I had a battery powered desk fan blow up on me just a few months ago. Luckily I was able to quickly put out the fire and the only real casualty was the fan it's self.
Having worked and designed BMS systems (or PCM as their also referred to) I can add that these protection modules will almost always include an “under voltage protection” (UVP) in addition to over voltage, current and temperature protection. The UVP will lock out the battery from the system if it falls below a pre-determined value (either a specific cell or the entire pack). If you remove the BMS from the battery pack it will likely trigger the UVP and disconnect the cell. Usually this is resettable and only requires it to be armed by applying a voltage to the cell to system side of the BMS. This can be done by placing a power supply on the cell briefly to arm the BMS, the charger (depending on how it’s implemented) may also be able to arm the battery. Having said this, some aspects of the BMS might be non-resettable, if for example they have a physical fuse or a thermal fuse on the main output to protect the battery. And, of course there do exist “evil” packs that have a microcontroller that disables the battery like Linus describes, but I doubt that the Sony battery is built like this. I hope this helped
I love that you sourced your cells from a vape shop. We're pretty particular in the industry about cell safety in e-cigarettes. Counterfeits are absolutely no joke and INCREDIBLE rampant. I also appreciate your overabundance of caution, even with some minor sparking (which, really, probably didn't do anything to the cell). Thank you for stressing the safety of how to handle them, because a lot of people treat Li-Ion cells the same as a set of AAs, and they're just... not at all the same. Those minty green cells are actually the same ones I'm currently using in my e-cigarette right now. They're great, last ages, and are very reliable. It'd be nice to see you guys do something about the difference between ICR, IMR, and INR cells.
My local vape shop sells Imren cells (chinese rewraps) so your milage may vary. I really wouldn't source cells from a vape shop for any purpose, including vapes, unless they had Molicel cells with proof it came from an authorized distributor (outside of some chinese brands I'm unaware of any cells that have authorized distributors other than Molicel).
@@ahayesm Most people are sourcing Samsung batteries these days. Sony also makes good cells, but they're harder to source, and more likely to be counterfeited. That said, vape shops are far less "wild west" than they were, and reliable genuine sources for batteries are far easier to find now than they used to be.
7:17 one thing can use is type of “clay” to hold electronics for soldering or if can’t find, the molded play sand that kids use….works great & doesn’t leave residue
Usually BMS need to initially go into "charge" state in order to turn output power back on (only needed if discharged to very low voltage or batteries disconnected)
Late to the party again, but: TL;DR: TRY CHARGING FIRST! Long story long: Some BMS are disabled by default until you apply charging voltage to the connector. This is a safety measure to allow the BMS to evaluate the cells before it allows to draw any current from them. Background: I used to refurbish laptop batteries for a living. I also developed a product with 18650 battery pack on the inside and had to do some reading on BMS chips. Of course there are some BMSes with a kill-switch. It's a kind of one-time fuse which can be tripped by the electronics if they detect a fault condition. One of the fault conditions detected by the BMS was "any voltage missing". So basically desoldering any wire would instantly kill the BMS PCB (there were workarounds for this tho). I hope you LTT guys actually read those comments cause this video deserves a "Part Two: Success!" PS: it wasn't clear from the video material provided but some of the sparks that made you panic could have just been your spot welder arcing.
I'm glad that you have a good enough relationship with a vape shop to trust their batteries. I feel like that's an important part of any 18650 adventure.
@@PrograError it's the name of the battery type for all the old fat vapes that no one uses anymore. I used to have one, not for too long though. I figured there's no point risking popcorn lungs when I don't even have a nicotine addiction.
@@cosmic_gate476 so you know nothing about vaping recently. 18650 is still very popular and they stopped using diacytl years ago. Popcorn lung is because the flavor is actually what popcorn butter is hence the name. Nobody has had to worry about that for years. Thanks for misinforming the masses with more anti vape nonsense.
@@Carebearlillian48203 not to mention cigarettes produce about 100x more diacetyl than vapes when they're combusted and no smoker has gotten popcorn lung. lol I've got an 18650 and a new 21700 box on my desk right now. but I guess he has a point, "old fat vapes" have been pretty much politically killed in favor of the pods sold by tobacco companies
Definitely wanna see the battery recycle process. As indicated here, this has to be one of the biggest recyclers out there with how much battery waste we go through as a society, and seeing behind the curtain on that might make some people more inclined to do so. That and more knowledge is something we should never decline.
Using volitile memory for program storage actually is a well known DRM and anti repair measure. A lot of the old capcom arcade game boards have their data on volatile to prevent piracy, and it was quite effective.
@@LiEnby if its integrated ram, how will you read it? Typically you would need to etch or mill away the epoxy and other work intensive stuff. Doing that while connected to power is guranteed to fail.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 can't have been streight xor since that's vulnerable to a known plaintext attack if you could guess the plaintext anywhere in the file you'd be able to get the key .. hmmm
Hasty reaction to sparks that happen from spot welding. You'll have heating/glowing thin metal and smoke usually in seconds if it's what you thought it was. Love the precautions though! 17:26 the footage shows sparks flying in a professional setting.
Yeah, it was a little cringe... even if you shortly short those cells, nothing much will happen besides sparks. If there actually is a dangerous currentflow through the cells, you'll notice.
@@aidanfarley9566 Yea, I didn't really watch the whole video but he was concerned about connecting a pos and neg terminal on the batteries while the other side wasn't even connected yet, right? Or did I miss where they connected the other side first?
Seemed like the pulse length was too long when you were spot welding. See how the were glowing, that's what spot welding is trying to avoid, excess heat... and it's quicker than soldering. The 14 on your spot welder must have been 140 ms not 14 ms. Either way... more power less time is what you needed, and those sparks were not the battery, it was because you weren't pushing down evenly across both probes of the welder and the side that sparked had less contact with the nickel, and it was vaporised from the bulk current.
Yes, yes. This and balancing batteries before spot welding them as it's possible and best practice to balance them before welding. Despite they reputation, lithium batteries can take some heat, Is just not great for battery life and more risky. So they may have thrown away batteries in good condition.
@@heatshield because of the current going trough the cable. When a current is flowing through a conductor a magnetic field is emitted. And this is moving the cable.
@@t0k4m4k7 I was confused watching the video because the batteries did not seem to be shorted. If you permanently short an 18650, you're gonna see a different result than a short little spark. And how would they have been shorted anyways? The nickel strips were in the right place before the weld, where was that short supposed to be coming from?
I love these types of videos and would love a permanent "Watchmen" style content from LTT. Nobody watches these manufacturers. We see it here with batteries. We saw it with the HDMI cables. Your new work space is perfect for buying, testing, and 'keeping them honest' videos for years to come.
I've actually manufactured a wide range of the PCB's for ARRI. While they are an absolute pain from a manufacturing and assembly standpoint (IPC class 3, which is also the standard for some military and aviation applications), they got some really ingenious designs, I've never came across anywhere else. Also they seem to be a very nice company 👍
I'm so happy you're wearing safety glasses. Those are always the number one safety gear when soldering I just went through a similar process while trying to figure out how to refurb my power tool batteries! It always bothered me how similar the insides of each are, while the connector and BMS is what makes each one proprietary to their own product lineup. Batteries are often more expensive than the tools these days it seems. "Buy a battery and charger for $300 and get the $200 tool for free!" "why not just sell both the battery and the tool for $150 each all the time?" "... Throw him in the cement mixer, boys."
The evil BMS reminds me of the trick that Epson used to employ (maybe they still do?) in their laser printer photoconductor units. The unit had a fuse which would blow the instant you fitted the new unit into the printer. This would trigger a counter in the software which would count down until reaching zero. The printer would then reject the fitted unit and insist on a new one, even though the "old" unit was good for at least four times round the merry go rounds of counter life - something we discovered after investing in a bag of replacement glass fuses..
Love one trick on Xerox printers I had in my previous work, if you try to print a banknote (definetly USD and Euros) it will show an error and if you try to print it the second time it will brick your printer.
I got an OKI C511 that does the exact same thing from my old school. At least i could trick it with some software menus so it only complains after ~10 printjobs after wich you just turn it off and on again but who cares free color laser printer.
When you got a spark, it must have been from the welder, not the batteries. To get a spark from unbalanced batteries, you would have had to weld the second side. Edit: On the first one anyways. Second one was way to much energy through that nickle.
Exactly what I was thinking. From the size of the sparks I saw and the location they came from... That was the welder. I've built a few packs as a hobby and trust me, relatively small welder sparks on occasion are normal, especially on the positive side due to its smaller size and the air-gap. And hard to tell on camera but from the amount of light they were getting, I think their welder was also turned up too high, so no wonder they got sparks. Batteries are probably fine and they just threw away a ton of 100% working batteries lol
Yeah, these guys are newbies and they're being overly cautious, but that's okay. The sparks are just the nickel strip vaporizing and nothing to do with the battery itself. It's a pretty normal part of spot welding batteries and it's fine as long as they're wearing safety glasses. It looks like their welder settings are off by quite a bit. Usually battery spot welders do two very short and high powered pulses to fuse the nickle. The first pulse is shorter and does the initial join, and once the electrical connection is made, the second pulse completely melts them together, usually with a 10-20ms pulse. Nothing should get noticeably red hot. Here they are doing a less intense but longer hit, for what looks like up to 1/4 of a second, which is far too long and heats everything up to red hot, which is not good for the batteries. Honestly, it appears that this spot welder is designed for more heavy duty applications which require penetrating welds, which isn't what you want for bonding nickel to lipos.
@@ryan.crosby well, during the short actual welding I have the tips of the welder as well as the spots go red hot. But that is for such a short amount of time that it may even be not noticeable. I also thought it had to be the welder that caused the sparking. Either the tips not connected properly or having kind of an edge from scratching with the sandpaper (which should not be necessary either with a proper welding tip, but I guess Linus put a note on that in the subtitle already) or just the nickel being not completely clean or not laying completely flat. I somewhat wondered what they panicked about, especially with the small battery pack when they still were on the first side and nothing could short out yet. On the other hand, doesn't hurt to be more careful than necessary with those things.
Regarding their double welding technique, it's too much heat all at once doing the first and then immediately doing the second. The whole point of spot welding is to minimize internal cell heating that can cause damage. So do the first weld and wait for the metal to cool before doing the second weld. Probably should have a fan or compressed air blower nozzle to rapidly cool the first weld.
@@ryan.crosby My thoughts exactly. You can even see an example of it done properly in the B roll footage of a professional pack assembly near the end of the video (at 17:26). In that clip, the weld pulse is much faster than what Linus is using. It also sparks a fair bit, but it's not a big deal because it's just from the weld process and not the battery itself. With a shorter pulse, I bet their weld tips last much longer as well.
Years ago I was working at a golf course in Alton when a huge pile of lead acid batteries shorted, overheated and exploded. I was a few miles away and high up. The sight of the flames and amount of smoke was unimaginable. It took over a week to put out. Since then battery storage laws were introduced. You could still smell it months later...
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I love how you didn’t just had planned the safety but also talked about it, it’s always important.
Damn this is crazy tbh, none of the circuits or batteries themselves look too hard to DIY/repair if you need too... You could even 3D print yourself a pack like that, order some reputable 18650 cells and boom, but nooo...
@@aeoteroa818 Interestingly the 21700s didn't take off as much as I thought they would a few years back, guessing just the economies of scale of how many 18650 were already being produced
As someone who does this sort of repair and build at least daily, a couple of suggestions: Don't use tape to bind your pack, use a quick-drying epoxy between each cell. You're not going to swap individuals out later, no need to pack loose. When assembling batteries, gravity is your friend. Build a small ramp, kinda like a card dealer's shoe, with a back edge and an edge to hold the batteries in line. Use this to line up single sheets of batteries, then epoxy them together. Always use the lowest tolerable schedule for tacking together nickel plating on lithium builds.
While generally switching individual cells can seriously unbalance a battery, switching out DoA or otherwise prematurely failing cells still makes sense, and gets blocked by epoxying everything together before even knowing if there are any bad cells in the batch.
"use the lowest tolerable schedule for tacking together nickel plating" What do you mean by "lowest tolerable schedule"? Do you mean we should use the thinnest nickel strips practical? If so, why? Thanks for all the great suggestions.
@@ddegn You want the thinnest nickel strips that will carry the load because they require the least heat to weld and therefore have the least chance of damaging the cell. You then want to use the lightest spot welds that will take the strain for similar reasons. Honestly, the amount of glow they were getting from their welder had me a bit concerned... Most other battery spot welding I've seen or done doesn't get anywhere near that bright. Maybe their tips were terrible, or maybe it was their camera, but it just looked like too much.
Love that LTT is shining light on this issue that has been running ramped and negatively impacting the general consumers mindset on repairing their devices. I owned and operated a Phone/Computer Repair shop before the pandemic hit. I got many requests if this service was something we offered.
@@flatearth9140 I WENT TO A BATTERY RECYCLING FACTORY ONCE !! WE ALL GOT ON A BUS AND WE WENT TO A LARGE STEEL BIN GETTING LOADED ONTO A SHIP TO INDIA !!
it's really important that people learn how Li-Ion and Li-Po are recycled. This is one of the main issues people point out when talking about how useful to the environment electric cars are
Almost nothign is recycled. 99% of Li batteries you'd throw in the "battery recycling" bin will end up in the landfill after pack disassembly or most likely before. There are some youtubers and a couple of enterprises that "upcycle" or resell cells from old devices on ebay, but that is literally a mouse's fart against the hurricane of millions of EVs and power grid devices being produced and scrapped today. Or do you have any proof of thousands of metric tons of Li cells being actually recycled? I bet you don't.
Jmo, I've worked with many lithium cells, have my own spot welder, 3.2v to 3.4 volts is not a major voltage imbalance....if it were a half volt or more, yes, but even that can be evened out by the BMS....I've had no issues with a slight imbalance of 2 tenths of a volt. Enjoy the safety precautions you take and good video.
protip: if you charge each cell individually in bulk, you can get their voltage to be the same when you put them together to avoid sparks just as long as you dont rupture.
This also looks like only the Nickel sparks and not the battery itself. I made a battery pack and also got a few sparks because the current went through the nickel and not through the battery pad because I didn't press the nickel down with enough force.
One of these days somebody will design a battery that behaves like a regular battery instead of a computer dependant fusion reactor on steroids. Or maybe not. Probably not.
Pro tip: Don't get your cells as excited as humanly possible before doing surgery on them. The less angry pixies the better, moron. When you're a pro you can start giving pro tips.
Hey Linus, at this point I've watched to 6:58 in this video. I'm a professional battery tech. In our shop, we hot glue cells together with a jig that rest the cells at a 45 degree angle while we work. Hope this helps in the future to make things quick, easy, and professional.
I’m not a battery tech, but I do have a decent understanding of electronics, and plenty of experience with high power audio and high voltage tune amps... I would have expected they would have graded the cells in a smart charger first, and then discharged the cells to say 5% prior to spot welding. Then bought the cells up to say 50% with a smart charger before connecting the BMS. That said, I would expect all sorts of shenanigans from companies when it comes to locking people out of their “stuff”
@@MidlifeRenaissanceMan That was the way it was done on NiCad or Pb cells etc, but on Li-ion you have no memory effect, so you want them around 50% or nominal 3.5-3.6v is how they are shipped and used. I build ebike E-motorcycles batteries for a living that use 400 to 1000+ cell's 18560 or 21700 cells, and we need to test every one, so they are all matched before spot welding. And to charge Li-ion cells from laptops to EVs you use CC-CV power and the BMS does the cell level sorting and protection.
@@hardergamer cheers for that. the energy density of these Lithium cells is nuts when you think about it. While you could trigger a petrol explosion with a static discharge, in theory, something going wrong, when it comes to electronics, is an inevitability, rather than an outside chance, Everyone who owns a Tesla, I ask them to show me how the electric doors work. Then I ask them. “If you’re in an accident and the battery shorts, catches fire, how are you going to get out of your car ?”
@@MidlifeRenaissanceMan “If you’re in an accident and the battery shorts, catches fire, how are you going to get out of your car ?” I don't know how Teslas are build, but I would expect that if they are going to use electric doors, that they should fail-open, which is that when the door is unpowered, the locking mechanism should unlock itself automatically (and the unlocking mechanism shouldn't require power). In other words, the door should be designed so that the locking state requires constant power. That's how most electric door locks are usually designed, for fire safety reasons, and it's not uncommon for your local building fire code to require that electric locks are fail-open. The simplest of this design is that the door or locking mechanism is held in place with electromagnets, so that when power fails, springs or gravity would release the door/locking bar. The thinking is that the security of whatever's behind the door is never worth the potential loss of live that can result from a fail-secure lock, and by failing open, it also allows entry by fire fighters in case of emergency power loss. There are also lock designs that are direction, by allowing unpowered exit, but requires power to be available for entry. Again, this is used for fire safety, to always allow people to exit no matter the availability of power.
@@MidlifeRenaissanceMan Discharging a lithium cell that far causes a very unstable situation and can cause cell failure. Please, stay away from lithium cells.
About the "DON'T replace only the bad cells" thing: there's why battery testers exists, where it does a couple of charges and discharges to check the health of each cell, so you only mix the ones that the health matches.
Its better policy to replace the pack with new cells and then bin the old cells into like performance rather than just slapping one new cell into the pack. Generaly speaking proprietary BMSs for sealed packs won't be the best at handling just a couple of new cells
I dont think it is recommended for people who dont do it professionally or regularly enough to be confident in their abilities. When doing risky repairs, always make sure you know what you are doing.
This is the industry standard, the way it works is that there's a fault flag in the BMSs memory, if a cell string is disconnected (even just 1 cell string), the fault flag is set, and the BMS won't output any power (some can be revived by plugging into a charger, but that is rare) This is comically easy to bypass, though it is a bit tedious You need cells equal to the series number (3 cells for 3S, 4 for 4S and so on) you connect those "bridging cells" to the BMS (solder to the tabs on the PCB) you have to connect them fully, including the intermediate voltage tabs, then you can safely re-cell the pack and the bridging cells will keep the BMS powered up and happy Then once the new cells are connected, you desolder the bridging cells, run the pack through a dozen or so charge cycles, and it should work fine thereafter I've been doing this with laptop batteries for years I have a thinkpad T420S with a 380wh battery, and a Dell latitude E5430 with a 160wh slice battery and 120wh primary battery
Wish I'd have known that trick before I took apart 2 laptop battery packs to make 1 'better' one. Both BMS shut down and the end result is my having bought and used equipment without any gain. Thanks for confirming my idea on how to get around it should I ever try again. :)
16:40 This can probably be avoided by connecting the cell pads to a voltage source similar to the battery bank before actually disconnecting the cells. This way the BMS wouldn't have an idea whether or not the cells have been removed or replaced.
Probably right, assuming it is either NVRAM or voltage detection issue. In the 1990's, OEM manufacturers for car radios had anti-theft systems which would disable the radio if you lost power, requiring an unlock code. As a car stereo installer, this was a huge pain as only dealers could access these codes, and they wanted to charge $$$ for that. So we figured out to solder a 9V battery to a cigarette lighter plug whenever we needed to disconnect the battery. Things got a little more hairy if we had to disconnect the radio for any reason, but normally if we did that it was because we were replacing the radio. For that, we had a collection of common harnessed wired to 12v battery packs. As long as you immediately plugged this in after removing the radio (typically
@@andrewakrause good idea with the 9 volt. When I was turning wrenches, we used a dedicated battery pack that was plugged into the OBD port that did the same thing (it also kept the computer from resetting). The radio thing was mostly Hondas and thankfully Honda has a website now that will let you retrieve the code.
It's like when I replace the battery in a car at the shop ,i use a jump box connected to a memory saver then installed into OBDII. keep alive memory stays ...well ,alive!... This is coming from someone who has limited electrial background. i ALWAYS SEEM to land on Linustechtips...so keeep up the good work~!
@@andrewakrause exactly! same thing with the idle control for toyotas & various vehicles . major PITA.....soldering the 9 Volt battery is pretty interesting . BUT I LOVE ITI think I'll stick with the schaumaker memory saver... BuTI'm always down for a good hack
This is one of the reasons why I would love to see right to repair laws be passed in the U.S. and in Canada (if they are not already). So much of our e-waste could be dealt with in a different manner if we were just more responsible with it. I would also simply love it if companies took more of a cradle-to-grave approach to their products, and considered what will happen to their products when they truly reach end-of-life. Considering that would lead to much less waste in general, and perhaps lead to more advances all around.
Cradle to grave ewaste laws are often twisted by evil manufacturers to demand the used products back and then physically destroying them while pretending to recycle the parts. For products containing user or company data, even worse possibilities exist.
How much e-waste because ppl dont even think about repairing, because good reason to buy new better? How many devices could be fixed by replacing few capacitors costing pennies..
@@johndododoe1411 Sad reality is with android OS even if you recycled / refurbished tablets or phones even longer by sending them to 2nd or 3rd world getting security updates is fully dependent upon the device manufacturer to accommodate updated OS.
@@Cerberus984 Well, there is replacement firmware available from independent projects that supply their own OS updates. But driver updates are still dependent on manufacturers supplying updated files.
Things are designed to fail. The design causes a safe failure rather than an unsafe failure. A good example is a house fan There is a small device in the motor winding. It will work for a relatively certain amount of time before it quits. If not for this the fan would work until the motor winding shorted out overheating and possibly causing a fire.
Love the long term planning talk about how the manufacturers should be liable on determining what happens to the end of the life-cycle of their products. The only big hurdle is now consumers to learn and be willing to spend proper amount of money on good products; instead of incentivizing bad and cheap manufacturers.
Part of the problem are the drop shippers. You get two types - you get the "we make it, probably using slave labour, probably using cheap parts, and you can buy the cheap version or the up-spec version, stick your brand on it and you're good to go. We don't care what happens with it, how it affects the user, how it affects the environment" and these are what you get of Aliexpress and the like. Many wasted products, that took jobs away from reputable local sellers, so the jobless person takes the cheap option, which is these. The other type is the "we are genuine _insert brand here_ battery packs, honest. Totally not shitty and questionable quality 18650s made in China that have caught fire before. What a bargain, right?" And again, taking sales away from reputably safe genuine brands, because the sellers don't care and trademarks won't be enforced. So the solution has to be regulation on these kinds of sites. There really is no other way about it.
The problem is: sometimes you don't have a choice between "good products" and "bad products". Let's take professional cameras as an example. You can either buy Red, Arri, Sony, Panasonic or Canon. They all have the same battery policies, even trying to block third-party manufacturers like Swit or idx by blocking those batteries with detection chips whenever they can. Just a year ago, Sony sued Swit and some other manufacturers because they were bypassing their proprietary battery system for the Sony FS7 and FS7 Mk2 cameras. They had to take those batteries off the market. There are literally no manufacturers on that market with better policies.
They don't, just like how plastic doesn't get recycled. Like maybe a fraction of them do but the cost benefit doesn't add up with how dangerous it is dealing with lithium ion batteries.
From an engineering and manufacturing perspective, even though rivets are "one time use" they are actually fantastic in a variety of applications that allow us to fasten dissimilar materials, stacks of thinner materials without the need for welding (this is especially true with aluminum body panels), better fatigue resistance for the joint, as well as reducing the chance of the joint becoming loose over time (in the case of bolts or screws), and none of these things address how much more cheaply we can use some single sided fasteners. While I'm 100% behind the right to repair (I fix everything myself even if companies don't want me to be able to...) there are instances where single use fasteners and designs do make sense. Love the content and bringing awareness to these issues btw!
A tip as I rebuild batteries professionally: Once completed rebuilding and reattaching the BMS to the new cells and everything is hooked up, short the actual cell pack's negative to the BMS output negative. This will wake up nearly all smart BMSs that aren't "evil'."
Hey, regarding the battery recycling tour: I would love to see a video covering this in-depth not just for my own curiosity, but so that I can have something informative and approachable to refer people to when attempting to discourage individuals from incorrectly disposing of batteries. This is such a widespread issue outside of the tech-space that I think we have a responsibility as a community to better inform and educate those who aren't exposed to the concept of E-waste on a day-to-day basis. I know that it's more of a GN-style tour, but I firmly believe that the LTT reach could be used to great effect here.
I recently encountered some of the "evil" variety in a dell laptop. It's extremely irritating because it won't even let you use the laptop with the battery connected if it's bad (fair enough), but you also cannot use it without a battery either! So not only can you not use it as a "docked" desktop, but you have to spend the $80 or so to buy a new one if you ever want the computer to turn back on.
About 6 months ago I re-celled a customer's Dell E6420 battery pack with 6 new 18650 cells. Worked beautifully. So I guess maybe the newer ones are the 'evil' ones?
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I'd love to see a tour on how these batteries are recycled
I loved it too
Plotwist - there's nothing to show
Yes please!
eh they wont they will end up somewhere in africa in a landfill.
Yes please
I've always wondered how they recycle batteries. A factory tour would be excellent second monitor content.
They don't... its chemical waste..
@@flexairz right, because chemicals can't be recycled and because companies that do recycle chemicals would totally exist if it was not possible.
Ouch, delegating to the second monitor
@@kennymuller3115 5% of batteries get recycled. To recycle a battery is much more expensive than it is to make a new one... Same case with plastic
@@kennymuller3115 it's not that they can't, you're being silly to think that any meaningful amount of batteries are recycled
The tour of the recycling facility would arguably be some of the most interesting content you could put out. If it's possible, please do! Thanks Linus!
And of course point out the industry ups and downs.
UP
I don’t know what kind of question that was??? Do it!
Indeed!
Same
11:15
Yeah those sparks are from improper welding, not the cell rupturing. Just weld it again and it's perfectly fine. It may look scary but I've had way worse sparks when spotwelding battery packs and nothing happened.
You'd notice pretty quickly when a cell is actually damaged because it would start spewing sparks, smoke and maybe even fire. That happens quickly IF you manage to damage it enough
@@Akkbar21 The source is my own experience. As I said I had worse sparks myself when spotwelding batteries. It's when you don't make great contact and end up vaporizing a bit of the nickel strips
Shorting out the battery (usually) doesn't spark like that and just causes the wrongly placed nickel strip (or whatever is shorting the pack) to heat up.
Lithium batteries may be volatile and scary but they aren't that volatile and scary
@@PapaLurts well, you still sound like "dude, trust me"...
(although it makes perfectly sense)
@@Akkbar21 My own experience also backs this up. If you actually rupture a cell, it'll get hot as "rupturing a cell" is called short circuiting the cell. Then it releases a ton of smoke and depending on how direct the short was, lights on fire. That did not happen with any of the sparky cells thus no rupturing occurred. Maybe it did and they just didn't show the "after" part, but I suspect every cell that they "ruptured" is just fine or at least in not significantly worse condition than what they had in the beginning.
I blame bad equipment and possibly improper welding order/not well balanced cells from LTT's side as the general technique and spot weld settings seemed fine.
I agree 100% I’ve accidentally shorted one down to 0 V and it got hot to the touch but never exploded
@@PapaLurts I worked at batteries plus bulbs and i have rebuilt many a drill pack tho they are nickel metal hydride or whatever. same thing happens
I've done a lot of these battery rebuilds and just because the spot welder Sparks badly like that doesn't mean the battery was affected at all. That's just the spot welder reacting to a bad connection. So your batteries are fine.
yeah was a lot of overreatcing in this video
Yeah I was going to say the same thing, the shop that I work at mainly does nickel metal hydride and nickel cadmium and our spot welder arcs like that all the time
@@ProfessorShroom its a linus video did you expect correct information and useful instructions?
I was going to say, lol. The spot welder is arcing, the batteries are fine.
@@theairaccumulator7144 You're right, how dare they show safe precautionary practices to follow to a largely uneducated audience about the subject.
The tour would, if anything, bring awareness to how problematic batteries are when improperly disposed of. Please do the tour!
Easy, just burn them.
Yap, same. Please do the video.
@@rydz656 back in the 80s we sometimes burned trash and with it some 1.5v batteries, those carbon manganese non rechargeable types, one time it exploded and launched into the air like 15 feet, luckily it went straight up vertically and no one was hit.. I've come to the conclusion that burning non rechargeable dry cell batteries are dangerous
Also would just be hella interesting IMO.
Would definitely want to see how this works
A word of caution; Linus, you are handling these open packs and cells with a wedding ring on your finger. This is a really good way to loose a finger or worse! Never handle these cells or open packs with ANY metal jewelry on your hands, wrist or anywhere else that could potentially make contact. Rings, watches, bracelets or even long necklaces/chains are a big no no. Way too many amps, way too fast can, like a Vulcan Mind Meld,(Weld?), instantly make you one with the battery pack! For 40+ years, I worked with everything from mini computers to 3 Phase 480V power systems. I never wore any jewelry, rings etc. for this very reason. I just never wanted to forget to remove them and tempt fate. To the point of your video, the deliberate manufacturing of more E-Waste by manufacturers is intolerable and should be made illegal!
You can spot the most dedicated ele techs by a complete lack of jewelry, wedding, or otherwise.
I've hear of the danger of jewelry in the context of car batteries and residental/industial power, but hadn't considered that such small cells could output so much. Apparently the 18650 cells can output 30 amps each.
@@alexlevoy9803 Those small cells can actually pack a really big punch. Lithium cells like the 18650's can actually dump even more than 30 amps if short circuited by something like a ring directly at the positive terminal. They won't do this for long before venting and very possibly creating a little Lithium fed blow torch on your finger. Not fun.
Great advice!
I'd have never even considered this, nice tip
There is absolutely no reason to throw those cells away. The spark is because you were not applying pressure properly and there was a small airgap for a spark to jump. Those were not ruptured cells.
That's what I was thinking!
They're so scared because they really don't fully understand what they're doing.
That sight got my heart to drop, yep
I want some of whatever you guys were smoking because I've had one of these rupture inside a vape and since then I would rather jump off a 3 story building than weld one of those with my face that close to the lithium cell without a face shield >.>. The vape shop just sets aside batteries they decide are even slightly compromised. Probably a good business practice.
They just kept wasting batteries. Absolutely stupid without any understanding of what is going on 🤣🤣
Having built multiple 3+ kwh battery packs.....those sparks weren't dangerous, they were just not having a good contact with the spot welder. If you had actually set off one of the cells, there would be smoke pretty quick.
Exactly, they were so blinded with safety and fear of lithium batteries, they overreacted to simple bad contact... Throwing out so much good batteries... What a waste.
Ironically how a video about anti-ewaste turned into just that
Correct, I also built few battery packs myself so I know what's up with those sparks, Linus is just overreacting so much needlessly. TBH, this entire video is kinda meh, I get it that this is not "Linus Tech Tips" forte, they are about more like computer-like components, not like about electrical engineering, but this video is just wack. I like how this video raised awareness on intentional e-waste that is created by manufacturers, I didn't like the repairing attempt video at all.
technical work on this channel has always been cringe-worthy, and today was no exception. The spot welder seems to be putting in a LOT more power than is necessary, I didn't see the batteries actually catch fire or short. Also, that's not a soldering iron suitable for electronics. While the RED battery packs may really kill themselves, I doubt this is true of the Sony battery pack. If I am not mistaken, the BMS will power down totally when the battery is low to prevent parasitic current - it will power up again by applying a bit of voltage (charge, ie) to the output terminals. Please buy a proper soldering iron, Linus!
To give him a chance, this was most likely his first time doing this.
A reputable recycling center tour would be interesting. Especially when alot of them send stuff overseas that just get open pit burned and metals skimmed off
If you go to Retriev's website and click on lithium ion, it seems like they also do this. "The metal-enriched liquid is solidified using filtering technology, and is sent off-site for further metal purification."
Prove us wrong!
As someone who works at a BatteriesPlus, where part of my job is to rebuild battery packs, this is both incredibly impressive, and also gives me severe anxiety
I worked at a few of them as well from 2008 to 2013. This video made me grateful I never had to spot weld lithium cells and for the jank designed bicycle pedal used to lower the welder.
I was a store manager of a Batteries Plus for many years, went to the headquarters in Hartland, WI near the Ascent warehouse when I first became a manager for training and saw the big ole testing rack they had for lithium cells ranging from 18650s to cell batteries from Rayovac. They had me sit at a bench and spot weld a dyson vacuum cleaner battery and damn near blew my eyebrows off. While we were never required to rebuild lithium, tool and appliance industries are moving more and more towards lithium and we needed to learn. I just said fuck it and made our policy to just order already built packs from Empire or Ascent and forego the risks of loosing material in the case of a hiccup. The customer only has to pay like $10 difference for a superior product than a done 30 times to get it right rebuilt one. The owner of my store hated loosing money rebuilding lithium's anyway so it was an easy choice to opt out of that risk. As long as you stock and have the product you're golden.
i watch a channel called vortecks and he has done many battery packs for Ebikes scooters etc
he should also cover the cells he isnt working on in case he drops a strip across them
I thought sparking is okay while connecting batteries for a pack, I'm gonna be making my battery pack for my go kart next week. Seeing the level of caution over here and throwing the entire pack away at a spark gives me the feel I don't know enough.
Bebop being the battery supplier for Arri is just so fitting.
For those unaware, Arri's company philosophy is pretty much the exact opposite of RED's in every way.
They started making film cameras over 100 years ago and went from making the best analogue motion picture cameras to making the best digital cinema cams. They realise that their products are, first and foremost, tools for professionals who need to do a job quickly and efficiently. They don't give a fuck which battery or SSD you use, because there are industry-wide standards that assure compatibility.
They don't try to be a stupid lifestyle brand, upselling you on shit you don't need and locking you into a massively overpriced proprietary ecosystem.
IMO the only reason RED has any foothold in the movie industry (looking at the Oscar nominees of the past ~70 years Arri has an absurd market share) is that Netflix required their own productions to be shot on a native 4K sensor and the only Arri camera you could buy that had that was absurdly expensive. That's why the Netflix market was and probably still is dominated by RED.
Well put, and don’t forget they will sue any manufacturer who implements internal compressed raw.
yea, Linus needs to switch to arris haha
ok, but do they allow the users, or even better explain how they could change the battery themselves? (Otherwise, it's just another way to make money)
Amen! Their color science is unmatched. Never met anyone in G&E that didn't fawn over their lights either.
note to self: Remeber this guy's post if ever I buy a camera
As someone whos a huge advocate for recyclable batteries, i would love for a video in a recycling facility to make people more aware of the growing issue with non recyclable batteries in cars and electronics.
Everything is recyclable
@@jamesdean8431 No it's not.
@@JamieReynolds89 with enough money and the right tech it is.
Or how metals and minerals are mined and processed...
Every car battery is recyclable.
1) The sparking here should be harmless, that's just the spot welder not making good contact (you can literally see that at 17:28 in the stock footage).
2) Wearing a ring while dealing with Li-Ions is a very bad idea, if that shorts across the contacts it gets hot fast and you might lose the finger.
Exactly, i already got kinda annoyed that they probably threw those perfectly good batteries away. But props for doing it as safe as possible i guess
This! It was hilarious to see them panic over nothing. If Alex was there he would have probably known it was harmless.
Completely agree. I spot weld my own battery packs and sparks happen but the battery cell is unaffected. I have never had a cell explode from spot welding. You just need to monitor the cell's temperature and it starts to heat up then you throw it the sand bucket.
I thought that was the case. I didn't see anything that looked like a short. They could probably have guarded against shorts by using tape on the parts they weren't working on.
This^
Battery recycling factory tour would be immensely interesting. I've always wondered what they do with spent cells, and how they may - if possible - reclaim used lithium
As a safety engineer working with batteries I must tell you that you should split an "evil" category into "really smart" and "evil". Why? Old cells may have increased self-discharge and if they discharge below certain level they start to damage themselves internally in a way they become unsafe when charged. Mildly overdischaged cells may be safely charged with a very small current while below certain voltage there is so high riosk of internal damage that it should not be attempted. Battery manufacturers take this into account by including a pre-charge feature, but also a lockout function which bricks the battery if any of the cells go down below certain voltage, say 2.0 V. Guess what happens when you try to swap cells and suddenly there is no cell? Yep, it bricks itself as a precaution. Now, that's a "really smart" battery that in turn is PITA to swap cells, but with a right tool a BMS chip on such battery may be turned back on. Then we come to "evil" batteries: They do the same, but they have ENCRYPTED BMS chips or even do some trickery to measure cycle count or cell capacity changes.
I have 18650 cells from laptop packs that were made before 9/11 happened, and they're still fine.
Therein lies the problem though. Nobody makes the reset tool readily available, so frankly, they're no better than the evil ones who encrypt. To that end, it makes more economic sense for someone to find an aftermarket BMS that will play nice or be sneaky and clip a few power supply outputs (at the appropriate voltage(s)) to the BMS before disconnecting the battery pack.
It ought to be on the battery manufacturer to have a tamper indicator so that when it does go up in smoke, should the tamper indicator survive the blaze, the manufacturer can wash their hands clean of a DIY'er failing to repack their battery while still allowing the DIY'er to perform the task instead of gouging them for another expensive pack.
@@larzblast Apple's tamper indicator bricks their entire phone when tripped.
@@inventor121 We're talking about replacing cells within battery packs here, not batteries inside phones. Totally different paradigm (though Apple are evil for what they do with their batteries too).
It seems the same thing about inkjet printers: in the past my dad used to recharge ink cartridges, he bought 4 bottles of ink for basically nothing, useful to charge the cartridges forever basically. They could be filled by a hole under the sticker with a syringe veri easily. Then we bought an Epson printer, when it detected that the ink was finished there was nothing to do, it couldn't be reset. Even if you did refill the cartridge it was useless. Of course we did toss that printer away and go for a laser one, but still.
There is no reason to allow the BMS to be reset easily: you don't need any fancy stuff, since the BMS is probably a microcontroller, do you tell me that you don't have a spare GPIO that can be brought out to a board contact that if connected to GND will reset that protection? Do you tell me that coding that feature requires more than 10 minutes? And do you tell me that you don't already have that feature for use during manufacturing, but you on purpose disable it after the battery leave the factory to avoid people replacing them? Well.... exactly as the ink cartridge, it's a product made with the purpose of being not user serviceable.
When Linus turns the spot welder on, you can see the wires move apart from each other due to the immense magnetic fields created by the high current. That's pretty cool.
I saw that, and I was like, "WTF. Those aren't water or air pressure hoses." Was wondering what made them move. That makes sense.
I noticed that aswell. I was like shoot thats heck of power flowing through those wires!
timestamp
Isn't that Lorentz forces due to the generated magnetic field? Not entirely sure.
9:32
"if you as a manufacturer have done this, shame on you"
Frankly, I don't understand why we as a society in 2022 still tolerate and support manufacturers doing this kind of things.
Sometimes there aren't any other options, and if there are, they aren't feasible for everyone. Same reason why Walmart is so popular in the USA despite decades of anti-competitive practice, destroying local economies, and abusing workers before Amazon took the crown.
When most of them do it, it’s hard to find one that doesn’t and still has a good enough product.
Because, for every industry, only a hand full of brands own the hundreds to thousands of brands you can choose from.
Standard consumer does not understand the situation and corps actively hide this information. Think apple who deletes posts on their forums if anyone even so much as implies a iDevice can be repaired without going to apple.
We don’t have that many options, some big company like apple and in this case red does it
9:50 I spotweld a lot of batteries, and I can tell you the electrodes were not the issue. The main issue was the welding time, that timer you are using is literally making your batteries glow. There is way too much heat for way too long there. Use a spotwelder designed for spotwelding batteries like the kWeld. Your welder is designed for big metal sheets, not batteries!!
Even if the batteries would have survived that torture, they would propably leak electrolyte caused by cracks from heat.
Clearly they didn't do a good at this , I noticed that immediately
Linus always messes up and blames others instead of himself
I'm completely ignorant of these things, could you explain what causes those sparks they were getting? And why do they have to throw away everything after those sparks occurr?
@@Michelino_M5 The spark is a short that potentially damaged the battery. They are throwing them out because damaged lithium batteries are dangerous.
Yeah, I agree with you Leo. I'm an electronic tech and also weld and can absolutely say the weld time was to long.
I have designed Li-Ion battery packs for commercial sale and can say that in the case of high end smart battery packs with charge tracking and modeling capabilities, it is not a simple matter of just replacing cells. On our packs, the battery monitor chip required precise initial conditions for each cell in the pack in order to provide a sufficiently accurate lifetime prediction. Of course, the packs I designed were for medical devices, and I think equipment like cameras and power tools do not require that level of precision and I agree with the premise that batteries should be designed to be as serviceable as the use application allows.
Yeah. I believe most packs I've seen are just fine replacing cells. Of course capacity information after replace is is off and it's required that the cells you use for replacing can handle the conditions the circuit puts on them.
For the capacity however it's usually a matter of fully discharging and charging them a few times and capcity reporting is about right again. No matter how sophisticated you try to make the measurement you just can't and it ends up being a qualified guess which tends to drift over time unless it somehow is recalibrated - and that is usually total discharge and total recharge.
I agree medical devices can have special requirements. However unless a fever thermometer, ordinary blood pressure meter or similar non critical device you can just grab another off the shelf I really can't imagine anybody will risk going on compromise there.
@@HifiCentret I've replaced cells in power tools a few times always worked
Translation: We designed the BMS so that it won't accept a replacement battery to force them to buy whole new equipment, and we said "our equipment is too advanced to accept just ANY old battery! Just buy a new one instead!"
@@HifiCentretid be fine with having US hospitals use only new medical devices but we should still let them be repairable in case other poorer countries want to buy them used.
Some BMS's have a safety feature that if the temperature gets too high, or voltage too high or low, the BMS will basically kill itself. For example Makita batteries have this feature.. I was working with a freshly charged battery outside in cold temperatures, and as the battery drained in combination with the low temperatures, the voltage probably dropped below the point where it would allow the batteries to be charged, BMS just permanently disables itself for safety. The only option you have at that point is to replace the BMS. In some cases even desoldering the batteries from the BMS will basically kill it.
1. the sparks were completely harmless, thats just from the nickel. Ive done my own spotwelding and get that all the time, you even get it when you weld only nickel, without the batteries.
2. the bms probably didnt work because if it detects a voltage lower than ~2.8v per cell it shuts off to protect the cells (when you remove the cells this also happens) and you just need to charge it for a second or apply a positive voltage to the bms, to simulate charging
some people here pointed out that it was the case for the sony batteries but RED batteries actually used volatile bms like DJI does with their drone batteries. However they can easily be bypassed by having a parallel battery with the same voltage connected before unsoldering used cells
Those AC welders have a tendency to be crap where they can rupture a cell literally making a hole in the side. They should have been using k weld or a similar mosfet based spot welder.
@@ps3customgamer lol holy fuck. i really hope this video gets flagged.
@@internetusername9593 huh?
@@internetusername9593 yeah there’s all sorts in this vid like lack of barley paper ends. Which help insulate the anode attached nickel strip to the cathode creating a short.
Yes, a factory tour and a breakdown of the process of recycling a battery would be hella interesting! Do it Linus!
I have a few tips for you guys:
1. Take off all jewelry on your hands! You could easily accidentally short across a ring and end up with a horrible burn.
2. 3D print jigs to hold your cells
3. Use superglue to tack cells together once they are arranged in place
4. cut nickel strips on a router or drag knife
That's what I was thinking. Use a 3d printer to stick them together, they even have a really expensive one too from when they made the case from a 3d printer.
Please don’t use superglue.. high temperature adhesive that comes on a role is the best bet if you can’t use cell holders as it adds a small gap between cells.. superglue grips the wrapper so tight and forms such a hard surface that it can pull the wrap off and cause a short if the pack is dropped etc..
@@jjjones6786 Exactly!
I'd subscribe again instead of coming by occasionally if he got a horrible burn. That would be a must see video. That video would probably be the most viewed LTT ever. Stupid games DESERVES stupid prizes. Get er done, Linus!
Wait...So we're all just watching for him to blow him self up?...I thought it was just me
Having seen industrial spot welding before: I dont think those sparks you saw where hazardous. They are just from the spot welding and not from a defunct battery. What i would worry more about is the fact that you can clearly see a red afterglow on the welded plates, which means you put a lot of heat into them.
I'm no expert but I was thinking similarly. The welder basically works by short-circuiting through the part you're welding, I'd be amazed if they never sparked. Poor contact on one of the tips I assume?
@@SqueakyNeb bingo. It happens all the time with shitty tips.
this
I too came here to say this. Dudes tossing undamaged batteries left and right
Well an other hint is that hey were welding only one side of the pack at that time. There should be no possibility to create a short as the circuit is still open.
Next with the sony pack yes sony has a chip that rejects 3rd party batteries but any BMS worth its money has also a undervoltage cutoff so after disconnecting you need to try to rechage first to try to reactivate the pack.
And last discharge LITHIUM-Cells to about 3.2V so that the energy left in the cell is limited. A fully charged 18650 cell has about the same energy in storage as a .308 rifle bullet so allways be carefull - about a small syringe of arctic silver halve filled with gasoline for non US nerds sounds little but is sufficient for a lot of harm depending of how fast it is released.
Linus, i understand your pain. As a battery recycler, including laptop batteries. All BMS boards have proprietary firmware on them thats usually password or code protected. The manufacturers call it manufacturers security access. They claim its for security when in reality its a money cash cow.
There are several groups that have hacked firmware from battery controller chips and found all access codes. Black hat event anyone? A very clever individual reverse engineered an apple mac battery....clever stuff!
Right To Battery Repair ?
Right to Repair must be very independent of Battery Repair. Don’t mess with flammable in which fire mitigation does not exist in an extinguisher. Notice that Linus held an ABC extinguisher which does not cover electrochemical. BMS security is the only method protect idiots from either electrocuting themselves or burning down their houses. I’ve seen Linus do some dumb things, and as a practicing electrical AND electronics engineer, Linus has done several practices that are very unsafe but well enough with the budget to him. His budget for appropriate materials is likely much larger than yours. Do not attempt to perform your own battery repairs. However, other repairs on phones and tablets, by all means, go ahead.
@@diehardAMD Even if its not repairable by average consumer, it still should be repairable by 3rd party repair shops with tools and skills. Thus BMS security should still be able to be circumvented.
How do you define what's too dangerous? People will kill themselves even with glass shards from shattered phones, since there is always one, or loose fingers repairing their tractors.
Also by making "too dangerous" exception might just encourage manufacturers to make repairs dangerous.
HACK THIS SHIT!!!! The Manufactuers shall see nothing else but our MIDDLEFINGER in their faces!
@@diehardAMD I shouldn't try cooking recipes then, b/c .. _fire_ 😱
Nanny mentality like that is blackpill enough to show that this generation is so f*cked & coddled ... that mentality is why we have incompetents like TrueDoh or Bidumb in positions of power..
Are you familiar with the prison experiment? People align to assigned roles. If you imply competency, then that will become the average behavior. Let the outliers take care of their own aspirations for a Darwin award; the easier they are to spot, the easier they are to mitigate.
The bigger safety problem comes from gatekeeping knowledge: partially-implemented ideas are dangerous, so why not freely provide full knowledge to include hazard management - especially since curiosity can't be regulated?
Thanks for the video. 2 major problems here:
1) After replacing cells, many BMS keep the battery disconnected from the output until a charger has been connected. You need to try connecting the charger briefly before testing the battery.
2) The sparks I saw seem to be from the spot welder, rather than the cells venting. Go through the sand box and I bet those are still OK.
That's what I was thinking too. He does comment about keeping the tips clean between pulses, but I don't know if there was junk on the tips or if he was anticipating a spark or an explosion, causing him to flinch a little and break contact.
Also BMS chip can have "kick start" protection when you should power up one of its legs
Yeah every time I’ve seen a lithium battery vent it was obvious and immediate. Like before you would have time to get it in the bucket.
I agree with you.
1: yes, sometimes it's connecting the two poles befor and after the switching mosfets.
2: You can smell the electrolyte very well when you blow up the cell housing, if they don't smell a thing, it was just the strip exploding because of bad contact. ( happens often when i build batteries ^^ it's scary )
This ^ Such a huge waste of batteries. Their engineers should have looked back at the footage and been able to tell that.
Having worked at a "recycling center", I would love to see how LiON batteries are recycled.
@@socks2441 battery is kind of different though, it's a higher density product (price wise)
recycling a 50c bottle just to sell it again for plastics that are only worth 30c doesn't sound economically viable
but lithium isn't the cheapest thing to buy
@@aronseptianto8142 it gives you 30 cent back plus the clean up cost that the plastic would otherwise necessitate
@@aronseptianto8142 However the batteries are orders of magnitude more difficult to recycle, which is why there are very few companies who do it.
Oh easy, they're just thrown into the ocean and new ones are stamped "made from recycled materials"
As has been mentioned, some BMS's need to be "woken up" with a hit of charger before working fully.
Also while replacing a single cell isn't always a good idea, you can use the good cells for other things. I have multiple things around my house converted from 2x AA or 1x 2032 to run off a single 18650 with a cheap 1s bms from drill batteries.
You could also add a cheap DC-DC convertor to run 5V and other voltages,like usb battery banks do.
@@DoubleMonoLR Indeed, I bought some usb battery bank boards from amazon to reuse some old vape lipo's they work great for LEDs and arduinos.
An individual well behaved cell can pretty much always be used. If you notice it getting hotter than necessary, then you can chuck it.
If you're going to put them in a pack, there is additional hazard. In most cases it's fine. But eventually you might encounter a cell that while it initially matches other cells, happens to degrade faster for some reason, then in particular if the pack contains parallel elements besides series ones, the neighbour cells may very well end up feeding the cell's unhealthy smoking habit. Odds are if you're attentive you may notice things before there's actual fire, but just something to be kept in mind.
If you're going to recycle old cells by repacking them, it's crucial to 1/ test the capacity of every cell, 2/ repack them so each group has approximately the same mAh total capacity, and 3/ use a smart BMS to ensure the groups stay balanced. Even then, it's more risky since the chance of an internal short circuit goes up over the lifespan of the cell.
For 1 cell you can also use TP4056 charger module to handle battery protection and charging (they even come with type-c port now)
If your device use different voltage but not a lot of currents you can connect output to converter like MrMonotone mention.
Those sparks had nothing to do with the cells being in any danger, it was from improper weld settings/technique. I appreciate the safety concern but I hope those perfectly good cells weren't wasted
Thank you! I was wondering why they were spooked with a few spark from the welder. While I don't have direct knowledge about welding tabs for battery, I was confused because I've never heard about dumping the batteries for something like that.
As a DIY battery builder this was just painful to watch and full of bad information.
The first set they were worried about connecting positive and negative terminals together, but hadn't connected any of the terminals at the other end of the cells yet.
It just showed a lack of even basic understanding of how a battery works.
The BMS lockout on the red pack could maybe be defeated..
Discharge the pack down to 3v then put a coin cell battery across the the terminals while the 18650 pack is rebuilt.
@@termn8er331 as a kid who used to take apart old laptop batteries and make my own battery packs with eBay bms, I am very confused with how overly cautious they are being. They worries about welding sparks whereas I literally used to solder them together. I also tried to make a battery explode purposefly and couldn't get anything to happen. They are obviously not toys and can be dangerous but not as volatile as made out in the video.
Yeah, I'd usually think that, if there's a big spark and you're not sure what caused it or why, exercise extreme caution. But even I think that was a bit over the top.
Also, I figure the sparks probably were caused by sanding the welding tip, having metal dust on the tip would probably make the normal small spark just way bigger.
This is an excellent presentation. This is exactly what TH-cam should be for. You showed exactly what can go wrong. No one should be doing this without very very careful consideration. Very valuable and very worthwhile.
might have been useful to look into spot welding before you did this. those sparks were from the spot welding, not the batteries. if it were the batteries, the thing would have arced (likely no sparks) as soon as the nickel touched both batteries and any potential differential would have jumped across.
the sparks may have been grease from your fingers or some other kind of oil or dirt. it's also possible you had it too hot and the metal vaporized underneath where there's not enough space for it to expand without sparking like that. this is standard in spot welding, and while it doesn't make your welds any better, still plenty of industrial sights just have the their spot welders configured to pretty much always spark. just look at any car factory video and you'll likely see just that
and also, I didn't watch your diy spot welder video, but grabbing some TIG welder tungsten electrodes for the spot welding prongs probably would have been a very nice idea (as would have been here).
Another thing that might be happening is the dielectric strength of the air between the electrodes was low enough that the resistance in the metal strip, from heating, rose above it. So the electrons jumped instead of passing through the nickel. It's definitely not something to be worried about.
I was thinking the exact same thing that they never youtubed how to do this LOL
You can even see the sparks in the stock footage they used around 17:25.
Would definitely watch a first hand look at the Retrieve process, sounds very interesting. I always have wondered what that process looks like.
It sounds so interesting that you can't be bothered to look up a video of it being done?
@@TheZankoh I mean, I could. That’s not the point. It’s my opinion that LTT does a good job with this format of video and I want to express to them that I would like to see more of this content. Believe it or not, when a creator asks for their demographic’s input in this manner, they actually do want to know. I’m sure it requires a specific budget to create, and Linus would like to know that if he does this, his viewers would actually be interested in watching it.
As a DIYPowerwaller, I love how this was presented - informative, safe & entertaining. Its a pitty you couldn't revive the red battery and you wasted great cells in the process.
Is good than people put this battery to waste .. after that's man how make thinks of old battery have more of them 😅😅😅
Why did they throw it away? They didn't catch fire. Just a little spark.
@@EbonyPope I'm assuming it has to do with the possibility that a spark can make the battery blow up...
@@EbonyPope That spark can be the start of a chain reaction that has no other outward signs until it bursts. They're playing it safe.
@@EbonyPope Because they don't know what they're doing and don't understand how a spot welder works.
Nor do they understand how electricity works or what a circuit actually is.
There was no circuit there, they had only connected to one end of the battery.
Would love to see a Retriev Technologies - recycling facility tour. There aren't many with the capability and expertise on the tech-field to ask poignant questions. Thank you for keeping it real for all these years.
I've been fixing "broken things" well over fifty years, and simply hate the "throw away mentality", because it's such a waste, deliberate. I think you nailed it with "Evil". I grew up "picking the trash" in Chicago, and selling the really weird and cool things from a century before, bought lots of tools with it. I've only just begun delving into battery packs, just to look see, so far.
I know what you mean, I myself love fixing things and love to repurpose or re-use components in whatever I plan on building or fixing. I even go as far as to re-use plastics which many would throw away (as an example - zip/cable ties for plastic welding) . This is why I like it when a Chinese company decides to copy the design and improve it and plus to that sell the product at a lower price.
This mentality is intentionally pursued by the marketing ideology of our economic system,
it recently had a spike of attention with the 'Keep only things you feel harmony with' Marie Kondo book that came out a few years ago and led to millions of people throwing stuff away
Though Goodwill was great for a while
I've recently just said YOLO and decided I'm going to start repairing phones! I'm 16, always been into them, so it should be pretty fun and I'll be saving some phones from being ewaste. After all it'll be my generation that has to live with the consequences of the pollution that ewaste creates.
@@sabersz awesome, good luck! just be careful with the infamous glued-in batteries!
It basically ALL stems from this, which I call "The Lightbulb Mafia" heh:
th-cam.com/video/j5v8D-alAKE/w-d-xo.html
There is a chance you had to put the battery in the charger to 'reactivate' the BMS, rather than it being the BMS having completely killed itself.
Yep, had this happen to me before. Thought I'd hosed the BMS, but just needed to reset the microcontroller on it by charging for a few seconds
Yes Tyler at THTBattery.com actually told me this and I have yet to be back at office to try - will update this post with the result -CW
EDIT: The battery DID successfully work after popping it on the charger for a second! I've added a card comment in the video for future viewers noting this.
Yep. The safety ICs I work with also have shorting the pack- and the system GND to activate it.
This is a common feature on battery management IC's, they go into "shipping mode" when powered on the first time (ie after the battery has been removed and reconnected). This ensures that the batteries don't discharge while the device is sitting in a warehouse.
This should be higher up in the comments.
HELL yes I want LTT to bring more awareness to battery care. It's mind-blowing how much of our modern lives are dependent on power storage
Too many devices that still have life left end up as recycling because replacement batteries are not properly available. I think that standardization and government regulation are needed. Good video!
Electrical Engineer here,
Your BMS may require a "jump" before use. I would attempt to charge the battery pack with the BMS wired on and wait until the cells are balanced and then attempt to use the cell. Just a suggestion 😁
Good point! Might not even be a volatile storage issue! Just not enough amperage or RMS Volts :)
@@Prash1c my thoughts exactly. I know predatory anti repair/replace measures exist but its unlikely that semi common camera batteries contain them.
My thoughts exactly. I've repacked old laptop batteries and some of them were as simple as a jumper between the positive terminal of the last series connection of cells (the one which will read about 12.6V when referenced to GND) and the positive rail of the battery pack which interfaces with the motherboard.
We are waiting for an Update about this
"if you as a manufacturer have done this, shame on you"
100% of manufacturers just shrugged.
These are crimes against humanity.
@@yuliangeorgiev And you think the manufacturers care? They only care about money, sadly.
@@yuliangeorgiev manufacturers: we're using slaves anyways, you thought we'd care?
@@nuno-cunha Well, it is hard to sell things. When humanity is dead. So. Yes, they kind of have to care.
@@nuno-cunha gypsy
I recently tried mounting new cells on an old asus laptop, i found out after the replacement that the bms ic is hardcoded to pop an internal fuse when it detects zero volts at one cell input. The whole operation resulted in a big waste of money and time. By the way, I'm writing a master's degree thesis on active cell balancing, I hope they get more popular over time :)
Hey can you share your paper i would really love to read it.
you need some tool from CN , they detect bms and 1 click everything is done , that simple so that why CN buying dead laptop battery for recyle
Thats why you dont replace cells.... You "build" a whole new battery, different mindset, even the case for it, 3d print. Also.... An entire thesis on just balancing... Hmm.. I feel like a more exciting subject would be the difference between the traditional lithium cell and teslas new ones, mainly the internal layout and path the electrons take to get from + to - because that shits fascinating
Omnomnom
@@traceparadox x2
@@TheAceTroubleshooter it's on balancing >circuits< and since they are not commercially available and still on study we designed and built a new type
great video! as an old navy trained EE and DIY EV builder, i am painfully familiar with the subject. Wish people would quit posting battery "fix" videos with no safety in mind. Clearly you knew what you were up against and were ready for it. Thanks for not hiding the failures, people need to see just how dangerous this can be!!!
forgot to ask, did you check the voltages of built pack? some BMS' cant handle low voltage so will have to charge cells before hooking to bms or not recognized...
As you commented, since almost everything we use these days has batteries, I would love to see how the old dead bricks do get recycled. The upside is that you would be raising the awareness of battery waste and encouraging your viewers to take it more seriously. Again you guys have made a great piece of content. Thank you.
Often the charge is first discharged with salty water to make them safe to handle to begin with. especially with potentially unstable / no terminals to discharge from.
would be interesting to see rest of the steps for sure.
even though it sounds like the first chip was already gone from disconnected the battery... the first thing i would do is hook up the battery and THEN disconnect the first to avoid any cut off protection
Check that camera pack again. Sometimes if it's a smart BMS with a microcontroller, it needs to be reset, and typically charging the pack will do that. You only need to charge it for a few seconds to initialise the BMS, then it should output the voltage from the batteries.
I've had this happen to me before when I've been using a battery pack in a project, and I've had to unsolder then resolder the BMS
Some packs will self reset when installed into a charger, others (provided they are not an 'evil' one) require pack voltage to be applied to specific pins on the BMS to turn it back on.
I believe the difference is if the charger can detect a failed pack and not charge it.
In either case power from the pack keeps the BMS enabled, when the voltage drops too low (lower then where the BMS cuts off output) the BMS itself enters a fail-safe mode because if cells are that run down they might be damaged thus becoming a fire risk if charging is attempted.
Happened to me too to some repacks. I thought the battery circuit was dead until I tried to recharge it thru the device's charger.
Linus can also lessen the number of cells he used. He really only needs one cell per series. The RED battery packs would've been way easier with just 4s1p. Better for novice repacking. Better a "lite" pack than a dead pack.
@@ayuchanayuko Those Red cameras are power hogs though. When they first came out, you couldn't even use most other V-mount batteries on them, you needed their special high-amp batteries. Nowadays I think all of the V-mount batteries are rated for high amperage because they are commonly used on LED lights as well, and they can draw a lot of power.
A big thing people miss is that a lot of bms's are essentially "off" when freshly hooked up. You have to supply a charge current to them let's say it's a 4s Lifepo4 pack you can hit it with something like 14volts and 1 amp for a couple seconds. After that the BMS Remains on.
so you're saying linus turned it off, but didn't turn it back on (assuming they weren't evil bms)?
Yep, exactly, many don't start on their own just by connecting to the battery. This is a safety feature. Most BMS controller chips are from a well known manufacturers, so you can find detailed docs about how they start and work.
Exactly! That Sony cell needed some voltage applied to its terminals to come back to life. A few of the packs Linus put in the sand because of sparks, just seemed to be some molten nickel flying away, not electrical shorting too.
It would be interesting if Linus were to have a look at the ICs on the BMS and look up the datasheets on them, they are readily accessible, and I have replaced a few.
@@davidstech1445 Yep def just some molten chunks and he tossed a good set of batteries. All BMS boards I've ever bought did also indeed require a charge voltage be applied to the pack after an overcurrent trip before the output mosfets would turn back on.
Would be cool if Linus revisited this topic with this information.
I know Linus is giving engineers fits with this one, but IMO this is a GREAT video, showing a novice running risks and tackling a valid issue. It's the sort of stuff we tinkerers can appreciate.
I would love to see how a battery recycling facility operates... as it is, it's just not something I hear about in my day to day life and I would love to learn more
There is loads of information on the topic. It's better to get someone to build the pack for you unless you are going to do it all the time. Still though it's a fascinating topic. Watch out for the scam sites. They are just lying to you about some new tech that doesn't exist.These Lion batteries are going to get so much better in the next year they have solved some defects in the tech in the last year.
**shows dump truck dumping e-waste into a landfill**
"wow, that was so educational"
th-cam.com/video/Qi8Y2lF7Luw/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=YOUCAR
I love that you use your platform to bring attention to these types of issues. Keep pushing for Right to Repair!
I'm looking forward to the battery recycling video.
The precut nickel strips has fuse on them. So whenever they short, the strips automatically melts then disconnects them to the pack. Lowering the amps on the spot wield would reduce the chances of you having a spark.
yes...he probably shot out while welding! its only a small cap between the posts on the top side of the battery!
@@Knebebelmeyer Due to the high current he is probably producing high temperatures which will melt the insulated cover of the battery which will expose the negative part of the battery. It would have been better if he lowered the current and cut those nickel strips to the appropriate length to prevent any contact from the negative part of the battery when you're wielding on the positive part, as the whole body of the battery is negative except from the small circle which is the positive side.
@@Nyte1997 yes...exactly this is the case!!
he use stips that are way to long and reach the negative side on the top of the battery!
i saw that in the video but im not so familar with english, so i cant find the right words to tell it proper...
i tryed^^...
You just need to apply proper voltage to the board right before you disconnect the batteries. You can also repurpose the batteries for things like Ryobi battery packs or portable phone chargers that aren't evil lol.
Did you try charging that Sony pack ? Could just be that it shut off due to undervoltage, and charging could have reset it
Put it on chaaarrrggggeeeee it's sleeping
My thoughts exactly! As far as I know, for many BMS boards a reset is required after a cell swap. Connecting a charger usually does the trick, if you are lucky.
But sometimes you may be not, like when battery board has a gas gauge chip - this is a whole another world of hassle))
@@CountParadox That's true. You need to wake up the BMS most of the time. This is normal behavior. Also you should charge the pack through the BMS as well.
A lot of BMS if disconnect from batteries go into a sleep mode, and to wake them up, you just need to provide charging voltage to them on the output.... Charge then test!
Most lithium battery protection circuits will remain disabled for safety until they are first charged (TI, OnSemi, ...). So the pack was probably perfectly fine, you just needed to connect it to a charger once, as mike pointed out.
The most important thing when sanding the tips of your spot welder is keeping them perfectly squared off in my experience. You’ll get sparks when welding if you don’t hold the contacts perfectly perpendicular to the tabs. I haven’t done lithium stuff, but I have a fair bit of experience building nicd and nimh battery packs and there’s a fair bit of sparks if you’re not perfectly square. Won’t hurt the battery but you won’t get a good spot weld and could blow a hole in your tab.
On a side note, we have a jig for spot welding that uses a pedal to bring the contacts down to the battery. It seems like a much better way to get a clean weld.
I was thinking they wasted all those batteries doing that
Batteries Plus?
I always remember one of the many electronics professor I had on my engineering college times, saying that one of the main problems of electric cars was the disposal of the batteries. I'd love to see that tour!
Excellent video. This is exactly the kind of thorough video instructional presentation that makes TH-cam worthwhile. Thank you so much.
I first learned about planned obselecense in my IT class. It blew my mind. I was thinking so many countries make big manufacturers adhere to certain emission regulations, but no one seems to carethat much about planned obsolescence except for the user? Just blows my mind.
yea since planned obsolescence gives them more money
@@TantalumPolytope you really think they don't make more off planned obsolescence?
planned obselecense has only been around for a hundred years or so...
Ehhh. Sometimes people are just buying and creating a demand for products with too many bells and whistles, that and too many people do not bother to fix or maintain their stuff well.
If you want a dryer and washer With 20 modes and smart functions to be affordable companies are just going to have to cut corners and the people that buy them don't bother to care about what it can handle or make sure its well maintained. It's no wonder stuff doesn't last long. My tip is to go simple but strong, don't cheap out too much and learn about what you're buying including basic maintenance.
@@irregulargamer1352 This is basically what I do, I will run all my gear to the ground and then fix it back up again. It just makes it a hell of a lot easier when there are manuals for stuff thats out of your comfort zone
15:58 Nah, Linus.
The "evil" BMS is in every single removable laptop battery out there.
In order to swap cells in such a battery, you would have to clamp an external voltage source onto the leads of the not yet dead but week cell, then cut out the cell and solder on a new one, all with the external voltage source still attached, which will mask the removal of the original cell and thus the BMS won't notice.
A difficult task imo.
"Difficult"? That's near death level difficult ! One mishap and you'll be seeing God.
@@carpetdm9635 I think a dead BMS is more likely than seeing god in this scenario
But even if you accomplished the cell swap, the BMS might shut down on you after 1 or 2 cycles when it has detected a rapid change in capacity. Had this happen to me before.
Linus did you try to recharge the pack after swapping the cells as some have safety not to discharge after the pack goes under a voltage's =P
I doubt the BMS firmware is encrypted. Question of dumping, editing and rewriting the ROM
I built a 4S pack from second hand 1865(0), 196 of them, it has been running my 4x4 fridge for around 2 years now via 350w solar with controller and BMS and temp module. Understanding resistance and cell type makes it possible to safely use 2nd-hand batteries which is beneficial to reduce land-fill. It really depends on your skill level. You took the right approach with this video to educate layman to use new batteries.
yea having something that is decently accurate to measure the internal resistance is key to doing it right.
You have taken the appropriate time to self educate and likely didn’t skimp out on necessary parts for a risky procedure. I would ask that you warn others to take due diligence or don’t do it at all. And yes, I’m a degrees and practicing electrical engineer. ABC extinguishers won’t cover this and we’re never meant to.
Lets talk about it... First, use only one run of nickel strip that matches the load rating of your pack, OR run a 1 amp load wire that matches the C rating of your 18650 (as the chemical composition can differ between manufacturers) to a copper bus-line so that you can avoid spot welding completely, and as well insulate to avoid shortages during installation. NEVER EVER overlap nickel strip - You will never see this done in production as this can result in arcing, excessive heat, spot detachment and shortages causing the batteries to literally explode !BOOM! Each 1 amp load wire acts as a fuse in case you do unknowingly have a defective cell (yes, even brand spanking new cells can be defective and NO taking a voltage reading at 4.2v is not the correct way to determine if they are good as you can push bad cells way past 4.2v) Additionally, the BMS lines need to be wired in a specific order, re-soldering the balancing lines ONLY after you connect B-/P- , otherwise, you will put a full load across the balance lines and pop the internal safety and maybe even the MCU and it will never turn back on. You can measure to see if you triggered this by reading the resistance across P- to B-. Far from lastly, these RED BMS circuits go into deep sleep when the battery is disconnected completely. You need to wake them up by signaling P- and B- using a controlled voltage source (iMAXB6) and overcoming the battery load. Which is why you do not weld 4.2v batteries into a BMS, when the nominal voltage is 3.7v with an even lower maintenance voltage. This can lead to signaling a source that is both damaging to the BMS and the batteries. Almost every BMS can be woken up easily if done correctly. These BMS circuits aren’t protecting a right to repair, they are trying to avoid serious injury when people who aren’t aware of how to operate them properly decide to pop them open. Also, proper testing of the 18650 with an mAh meter can tell you internal resistance and characteristics of the batteries so that you can pre “bottom or top balance” the batteries, then bring them down for maintenance before assembling them. On a side note, batteries that drain quickly or have a lower voltage coming out of a package might have internal discharge issues and should be tested with an 18650 cycle tester before determining their usability. These are highly volatile batteries that have the potential to take off like a rocket and/or explode like a grenade.
They need to have you on
I AM NOT READING THIS TAKE MY LIKE
This is the first video on this channel that I disliked, they don't know what they are doing.
based on your thorough analysis here, seems like LTT was completely in the dark on how to structure out this DIY experiment and in doing so have disparaged the RED battery manufacturer. Love LTT but this is pretty weak. I rarely comment on TH-cam at all but felt compelled to do so here. You guys should apologize to RED for being idiots.
I am so glad someone took the time to explain this. You sir are spot on! This video is how not to even think about re-celling, I was screaming when they checked the no load voltage and deemed two groups by open voltage...... What in the hell....
You already have a lot of safety advice here, but having worked with combat robots in the past, one thing I thought was really clever that the safety team always had on hand, back in the builder's pit, was a bucket of saltwater, rather than sand. Rather than trying to keep the oxygen away from the, as you said, almost inextinguishable fire, it provides another pathway for the battery's energy to deplete, so you have less 'fuel' for your fire. At that point, the whole thing is a lost cause anyway, so there's no real harm in damaging anything else attached to the batteries by getting it wet.
lol, i was literally just looking up a way to recell my Thinkpad T430s' battery when this showed up, it's a small world
Linus has been listening to your phone and spying on you lol....like Amazon and Google Adsense on phones
@@BattleOverride856 Linus?
More like Spynus.
Good luck, I think those also have fuses that blow if the voltage goes too low. Be prepared to use aa batteries or something to fool the ic :D
@@StrokeMahEgo spynus 🤣🤣
@@TheIdiotPlays Yes, you need to first match the new cells with the old cells and then have a power supply always provide the old cell voltage to the BMS when replacing the batteries...
I, and some people I knew, was into RC car racing at some point when I was younger, right around the time LiPo batteries became common use. I've seen my fair share of battery fires from shortages, so I just nod my head in agreement every time someone, like Linus, mentions how gnarly they can be when they short out. Shit's no joke people.
i stuck 2 screwdrivers into one and bridged both of em and put my tongue on it :)
@@SobboMonkeVR That is not something to be proud of
I had a battery powered desk fan blow up on me just a few months ago. Luckily I was able to quickly put out the fire and the only real casualty was the fan it's self.
I've seen a battery explosion, but not from an RC car. But from a Dry car battery. It's horrifying. I'm still thankful to God that I'm still alive.
Lipo batterys are way more dangerous then lithuim ion batterys. Huge reason why they are less likely to be used now a days.
Having worked and designed BMS systems (or PCM as their also referred to) I can add that these protection modules will almost always include an “under voltage protection” (UVP) in addition to over voltage, current and temperature protection. The UVP will lock out the battery from the system if it falls below a pre-determined value (either a specific cell or the entire pack). If you remove the BMS from the battery pack it will likely trigger the UVP and disconnect the cell. Usually this is resettable and only requires it to be armed by applying a voltage to the cell to system side of the BMS. This can be done by placing a power supply on the cell briefly to arm the BMS, the charger (depending on how it’s implemented) may also be able to arm the battery.
Having said this, some aspects of the BMS might be non-resettable, if for example they have a physical fuse or a thermal fuse on the main output to protect the battery. And, of course there do exist “evil” packs that have a microcontroller that disables the battery like Linus describes, but I doubt that the Sony battery is built like this.
I hope this helped
THNX M8 was going to say the same. He just had to apply some voltage to the copleted pack with BMS and end up with working battery pack
I had a battery pack for an ebike where you had to jump two pads on the BMS after the battery was reconnected, probably the same thing.
Appreciate the added info. Solid knowledge.
they’re**
Big Clive just released a video about this, sorta, smart battery chargers
Future Motion with the Onewheel are doing this now. :(
BMS shutdown is BS
I love that you sourced your cells from a vape shop. We're pretty particular in the industry about cell safety in e-cigarettes. Counterfeits are absolutely no joke and INCREDIBLE rampant. I also appreciate your overabundance of caution, even with some minor sparking (which, really, probably didn't do anything to the cell). Thank you for stressing the safety of how to handle them, because a lot of people treat Li-Ion cells the same as a set of AAs, and they're just... not at all the same.
Those minty green cells are actually the same ones I'm currently using in my e-cigarette right now. They're great, last ages, and are very reliable. It'd be nice to see you guys do something about the difference between ICR, IMR, and INR cells.
Not sure if they're still that color, but when I saw the green cells my mind screaming "25R's!"
btw if you want to save money on suppliers, you can buy overstock (brand new) 18650s from batteryhookup
My local vape shop sells Imren cells (chinese rewraps) so your milage may vary. I really wouldn't source cells from a vape shop for any purpose, including vapes, unless they had Molicel cells with proof it came from an authorized distributor (outside of some chinese brands I'm unaware of any cells that have authorized distributors other than Molicel).
@@ahayesm Most people are sourcing Samsung batteries these days. Sony also makes good cells, but they're harder to source, and more likely to be counterfeited. That said, vape shops are far less "wild west" than they were, and reliable genuine sources for batteries are far easier to find now than they used to be.
7:17 one thing can use is type of “clay” to hold electronics for soldering or if can’t find, the molded play sand that kids use….works great & doesn’t leave residue
You just have to make sure it's fully synthetic. Natural clay can have conductive impurities that will wreck your day.
Usually BMS need to initially go into "charge" state in order to turn output power back on (only needed if discharged to very low voltage or batteries disconnected)
was thinking the same thing... don't know if they tried to charge it
And if it went too low, it won’t accept a charge because charging a low lithium battery that went too low is unsafe.
My first thought as well. Every project I've done with a BMS requires an attempt at charging the pack before the BMS "kicks in".
transistor thing ? I don't think so
*just my knowledge over 8 years as an electronics technician ;)... Will try to answer additional questions
Late to the party again, but: TL;DR: TRY CHARGING FIRST!
Long story long: Some BMS are disabled by default until you apply charging voltage to the connector. This is a safety measure to allow the BMS to evaluate the cells before it allows to draw any current from them.
Background: I used to refurbish laptop batteries for a living. I also developed a product with 18650 battery pack on the inside and had to do some reading on BMS chips.
Of course there are some BMSes with a kill-switch. It's a kind of one-time fuse which can be tripped by the electronics if they detect a fault condition. One of the fault conditions detected by the BMS was "any voltage missing". So basically desoldering any wire would instantly kill the BMS PCB (there were workarounds for this tho).
I hope you LTT guys actually read those comments cause this video deserves a "Part Two: Success!"
PS: it wasn't clear from the video material provided but some of the sparks that made you panic could have just been your spot welder arcing.
Exactly!
I'd be interested in your comments on Panasonic Toughbook battery cell replacement DIY....specifically the CF-5x series. Thanks -
I'm glad that you have a good enough relationship with a vape shop to trust their batteries. I feel like that's an important part of any 18650 adventure.
lol
i don't suppose that's a nH code?
@@PrograError it's the name of the battery type for all the old fat vapes that no one uses anymore. I used to have one, not for too long though. I figured there's no point risking popcorn lungs when I don't even have a nicotine addiction.
@@cosmic_gate476 so you know nothing about vaping recently. 18650 is still very popular and they stopped using diacytl years ago. Popcorn lung is because the flavor is actually what popcorn butter is hence the name. Nobody has had to worry about that for years. Thanks for misinforming the masses with more anti vape nonsense.
@@Carebearlillian48203 not to mention cigarettes produce about 100x more diacetyl than vapes when they're combusted and no smoker has gotten popcorn lung. lol I've got an 18650 and a new 21700 box on my desk right now. but I guess he has a point, "old fat vapes" have been pretty much politically killed in favor of the pods sold by tobacco companies
Definitely wanna see the battery recycle process. As indicated here, this has to be one of the biggest recyclers out there with how much battery waste we go through as a society, and seeing behind the curtain on that might make some people more inclined to do so. That and more knowledge is something we should never decline.
Using volitile memory for program storage actually is a well known DRM and anti repair measure. A lot of the old capcom arcade game boards have their data on volatile to prevent piracy, and it was quite effective.
it doesn't sound like it'd be very effective. all you need to do is read the data from it while keeping it powered.
@@LiEnby if its integrated ram, how will you read it? Typically you would need to etch or mill away the epoxy and other work intensive stuff. Doing that while connected to power is guranteed to fail.
@@LiEnby That's not how any of this works.
@@Orochistorm thats not how the force works
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 can't have been streight xor since that's vulnerable to a known plaintext attack if you could guess the plaintext anywhere in the file you'd be able to get the key .. hmmm
Definitely on the tour. There’s so much misinformation about various kinds of recycling it would really help
Hasty reaction to sparks that happen from spot welding. You'll have heating/glowing thin metal and smoke usually in seconds if it's what you thought it was. Love the precautions though!
17:26 the footage shows sparks flying in a professional setting.
Also their batteries were nearly dead, even if the shorted the 18650 to itself they'd probably not get sparks.
@@gg-gn3re exactly what I said. At those voltages you would have to do something dramatic to cause them to spark or explode
Yeah, it was a little cringe... even if you shortly short those cells, nothing much will happen besides sparks.
If there actually is a dangerous currentflow through the cells, you'll notice.
@@aidanfarley9566 Yea, I didn't really watch the whole video but he was concerned about connecting a pos and neg terminal on the batteries while the other side wasn't even connected yet, right? Or did I miss where they connected the other side first?
So what is actually causing the sparking and why do they need/think they need to dispose of the batteries immediately upon it sparking??
Seemed like the pulse length was too long when you were spot welding. See how the were glowing, that's what spot welding is trying to avoid, excess heat... and it's quicker than soldering.
The 14 on your spot welder must have been 140 ms not 14 ms.
Either way... more power less time is what you needed, and those sparks were not the battery, it was because you weren't pushing down evenly across both probes of the welder and the side that sparked had less contact with the nickel, and it was vaporised from the bulk current.
Yeah it was kinda painful seeing him throw good batteries out like that
anyone know why the cables to the welder were jumping? The one on top was moving like a pressurised hose.
Yes, yes.
This and balancing batteries before spot welding them as it's possible and best practice to balance them before welding.
Despite they reputation, lithium batteries can take some heat,
Is just not great for battery life and more risky.
So they may have thrown away batteries in good condition.
@@heatshield because of the current going trough the cable. When a current is flowing through a conductor a magnetic field is emitted. And this is moving the cable.
@@t0k4m4k7 I was confused watching the video because the batteries did not seem to be shorted. If you permanently short an 18650, you're gonna see a different result than a short little spark. And how would they have been shorted anyways? The nickel strips were in the right place before the weld, where was that short supposed to be coming from?
I love these types of videos and would love a permanent "Watchmen" style content from LTT.
Nobody watches these manufacturers. We see it here with batteries. We saw it with the HDMI cables. Your new work space is perfect for buying, testing, and 'keeping them honest' videos for years to come.
It took me a second to figure that you meant "Watchmen" as oversight into corporate practices, and not Linus as a naked blue superhero.
@@0Aberration its linus so surely he'd be a pink superhero lol
@@0Aberration No, I meant giant naked blue man.
I've actually manufactured a wide range of the PCB's for ARRI. While they are an absolute pain from a manufacturing and assembly standpoint (IPC class 3, which is also the standard for some military and aviation applications), they got some really ingenious designs, I've never came across anywhere else. Also they seem to be a very nice company 👍
I'm so happy you're wearing safety glasses.
Those are always the number one safety gear when soldering
I just went through a similar process while trying to figure out how to refurb my power tool batteries!
It always bothered me how similar the insides of each are, while the connector and BMS is what makes each one proprietary to their own product lineup.
Batteries are often more expensive than the tools these days it seems.
"Buy a battery and charger for $300 and get the $200 tool for free!"
"why not just sell both the battery and the tool for $150 each all the time?"
"... Throw him in the cement mixer, boys."
yeah having a lithium battery exploding in your face is no bueno.
The evil BMS reminds me of the trick that Epson used to employ (maybe they still do?) in their laser printer photoconductor units. The unit had a fuse which would blow the instant you fitted the new unit into the printer. This would trigger a counter in the software which would count down until reaching zero. The printer would then reject the fitted unit and insist on a new one, even though the "old" unit was good for at least four times round the merry go rounds of counter life - something we discovered after investing in a bag of replacement glass fuses..
Love one trick on Xerox printers I had in my previous work, if you try to print a banknote (definetly USD and Euros) it will show an error and if you try to print it the second time it will brick your printer.
I got an OKI C511 that does the exact same thing from my old school. At least i could trick it with some software menus so it only complains after ~10 printjobs after wich you just turn it off and on again but who cares free color laser printer.
Yea lots of lasers still do this, madness it is
@@DarrenLewarne some day i will open it up and put in a small polyfuse to shut it up permanently by just resetting to 100% every boot
Remarkable stuff peeps!
When you got a spark, it must have been from the welder, not the batteries. To get a spark from unbalanced batteries, you would have had to weld the second side. Edit: On the first one anyways. Second one was way to much energy through that nickle.
Exactly what I was thinking. From the size of the sparks I saw and the location they came from... That was the welder. I've built a few packs as a hobby and trust me, relatively small welder sparks on occasion are normal, especially on the positive side due to its smaller size and the air-gap.
And hard to tell on camera but from the amount of light they were getting, I think their welder was also turned up too high, so no wonder they got sparks.
Batteries are probably fine and they just threw away a ton of 100% working batteries lol
Yeah, these guys are newbies and they're being overly cautious, but that's okay. The sparks are just the nickel strip vaporizing and nothing to do with the battery itself. It's a pretty normal part of spot welding batteries and it's fine as long as they're wearing safety glasses.
It looks like their welder settings are off by quite a bit. Usually battery spot welders do two very short and high powered pulses to fuse the nickle. The first pulse is shorter and does the initial join, and once the electrical connection is made, the second pulse completely melts them together, usually with a 10-20ms pulse.
Nothing should get noticeably red hot. Here they are doing a less intense but longer hit, for what looks like up to 1/4 of a second, which is far too long and heats everything up to red hot, which is not good for the batteries. Honestly, it appears that this spot welder is designed for more heavy duty applications which require penetrating welds, which isn't what you want for bonding nickel to lipos.
@@ryan.crosby well, during the short actual welding I have the tips of the welder as well as the spots go red hot. But that is for such a short amount of time that it may even be not noticeable.
I also thought it had to be the welder that caused the sparking. Either the tips not connected properly or having kind of an edge from scratching with the sandpaper (which should not be necessary either with a proper welding tip, but I guess Linus put a note on that in the subtitle already) or just the nickel being not completely clean or not laying completely flat.
I somewhat wondered what they panicked about, especially with the small battery pack when they still were on the first side and nothing could short out yet.
On the other hand, doesn't hurt to be more careful than necessary with those things.
Regarding their double welding technique, it's too much heat all at once doing the first and then immediately doing the second. The whole point of spot welding is to minimize internal cell heating that can cause damage. So do the first weld and wait for the metal to cool before doing the second weld. Probably should have a fan or compressed air blower nozzle to rapidly cool the first weld.
@@ryan.crosby My thoughts exactly. You can even see an example of it done properly in the B roll footage of a professional pack assembly near the end of the video (at 17:26). In that clip, the weld pulse is much faster than what Linus is using. It also sparks a fair bit, but it's not a big deal because it's just from the weld process and not the battery itself. With a shorter pulse, I bet their weld tips last much longer as well.
Years ago I was working at a golf course in Alton when a huge pile of lead acid batteries shorted, overheated and exploded. I was a few miles away and high up. The sight of the flames and amount of smoke was unimaginable. It took over a week to put out. Since then battery storage laws were introduced. You could still smell it months later...
I love how you didn’t just had planned the safety but also talked about it, it’s always important.
Especially love how they propped open the door with a massive label on it that says "KEEP CLOSED" lol
Damn this is crazy tbh, none of the circuits or batteries themselves look too hard to DIY/repair if you need too... You could even 3D print yourself a pack like that, order some reputable 18650 cells and boom, but nooo...
some 21700s
@@aeoteroa818 Interestingly the 21700s didn't take off as much as I thought they would a few years back, guessing just the economies of scale of how many 18650 were already being produced
isn't boom what you're trying to avoid?
@@morpheus636 Not if you want views
You also need to have a solid understanding of ohms law before attempting it too… wouldn’t want exploding battery packs
As someone who does this sort of repair and build at least daily, a couple of suggestions:
Don't use tape to bind your pack, use a quick-drying epoxy between each cell. You're not going to swap individuals out later, no need to pack loose.
When assembling batteries, gravity is your friend. Build a small ramp, kinda like a card dealer's shoe, with a back edge and an edge to hold the batteries in line. Use this to line up single sheets of batteries, then epoxy them together.
Always use the lowest tolerable schedule for tacking together nickel plating on lithium builds.
While generally switching individual cells can seriously unbalance a battery, switching out DoA or otherwise prematurely failing cells still makes sense, and gets blocked by epoxying everything together before even knowing if there are any bad cells in the batch.
"use the lowest tolerable schedule for tacking together nickel plating"
What do you mean by "lowest tolerable schedule"?
Do you mean we should use the thinnest nickel strips practical?
If so, why?
Thanks for all the great suggestions.
@@ddegn You want the thinnest nickel strips that will carry the load because they require the least heat to weld and therefore have the least chance of damaging the cell. You then want to use the lightest spot welds that will take the strain for similar reasons. Honestly, the amount of glow they were getting from their welder had me a bit concerned... Most other battery spot welding I've seen or done doesn't get anywhere near that bright. Maybe their tips were terrible, or maybe it was their camera, but it just looked like too much.
@@laurenceperkins7468 Thanks for your reply.
Why not use hot glue instead of epoxy. It's much much more convenient, and is plenty sufficient.
The battery safety info in this video is top notch, well done.
Love that LTT is shining light on this issue that has been running ramped and negatively impacting the general consumers mindset on repairing their devices. I owned and operated a Phone/Computer Repair shop before the pandemic hit. I got many requests if this service was something we offered.
Would be awesome to see more from the Recycling Facility 😎 and great vid! 👏
Easy, 95% of lithium batteries are just dumped in a landfill (2021). Only lead acid batteries are recycled (toxic site, you don't want to be there).
I WENT TO A BATTERY RECYCLING FACTORY ONCE !! WE ALL GOT ON A BUS AND WE WENT TO A LARGE STEEL BIN GETTING LOADED ONTO A SHIP TO INDIA !!
@@RS-ls7mm I WENT TO A BATTERY RECYCLING FACTORY ONCE !! WE ALL GOT ON A BUS AND WE WENT TO A LARGE STEEL BIN GETTING LOADED ONTO A SHIP TO INDIA !!
@@flatearth9140 I WENT TO A BATTERY RECYCLING FACTORY ONCE !! WE ALL GOT ON A BUS AND WE WENT TO A LARGE STEEL BIN GETTING LOADED ONTO A SHIP TO INDIA !!
@@Emiichoco I WENT TO A BATTERY RECYCLING FACTORY ONCE !! WE ALL GOT ON A BUS AND WE WENT TO A LARGE STEEL BIN GETTING LOADED ONTO A SHIP TO INDIA !!
it's really important that people learn how Li-Ion and Li-Po are recycled. This is one of the main issues people point out when talking about how useful to the environment electric cars are
& they're used in secondary applications, extending their usage life.
Almost nothign is recycled. 99% of Li batteries you'd throw in the "battery recycling" bin will end up in the landfill after pack disassembly or most likely before. There are some youtubers and a couple of enterprises that "upcycle" or resell cells from old devices on ebay, but that is literally a mouse's fart against the hurricane of millions of EVs and power grid devices being produced and scrapped today.
Or do you have any proof of thousands of metric tons of Li cells being actually recycled? I bet you don't.
Jmo, I've worked with many lithium cells, have my own spot welder, 3.2v to 3.4 volts is not a major voltage imbalance....if it were a half volt or more, yes, but even that can be evened out by the BMS....I've had no issues with a slight imbalance of 2 tenths of a volt.
Enjoy the safety precautions you take and good video.
protip: if you charge each cell individually in bulk, you can get their voltage to be the same when you put them together to avoid sparks just as long as you dont rupture.
I thought about this and wondered if that would work. I couldn't see why not. This should be common sense.
That's what I was thinking too like getting one of those chargers that does 4 at a time
This also looks like only the Nickel sparks and not the battery itself.
I made a battery pack and also got a few sparks because the current went through the nickel and not through the battery pad because I didn't press the nickel down with enough force.
One of these days somebody will design a battery that behaves like a regular battery instead of a computer dependant fusion reactor on steroids. Or maybe not. Probably not.
Pro tip: Don't get your cells as excited as humanly possible before doing surgery on them. The less angry pixies the better, moron. When you're a pro you can start giving pro tips.
Hey Linus, at this point I've watched to 6:58 in this video. I'm a professional battery tech. In our shop, we hot glue cells together with a jig that rest the cells at a 45 degree angle while we work. Hope this helps in the future to make things quick, easy, and professional.
I’m not a battery tech, but I do have a decent understanding of electronics, and plenty of experience with high power audio and high voltage tune amps...
I would have expected they would have graded the cells in a smart charger first, and then discharged the cells to say 5% prior to spot welding. Then bought the cells up to say 50% with a smart charger before connecting the BMS.
That said, I would expect all sorts of shenanigans from companies when it comes to locking people out of their “stuff”
@@MidlifeRenaissanceMan That was the way it was done on NiCad or Pb cells etc, but on Li-ion you have no memory effect, so you want them around 50% or nominal 3.5-3.6v is how they are shipped and used. I build ebike E-motorcycles batteries for a living that use 400 to 1000+ cell's 18560 or 21700 cells, and we need to test every one, so they are all matched before spot welding. And to charge Li-ion cells from laptops to EVs you use CC-CV power and the BMS does the cell level sorting and protection.
@@hardergamer cheers for that.
the energy density of these Lithium cells is nuts when you think about it.
While you could trigger a petrol explosion with a static discharge, in theory, something going wrong, when it comes to electronics, is an inevitability, rather than an outside chance,
Everyone who owns a Tesla, I ask them to show me how the electric doors work. Then I ask them. “If you’re in an accident and the battery shorts, catches fire, how are you going to get out of your car ?”
@@MidlifeRenaissanceMan “If you’re in an accident and the battery shorts, catches fire, how are you going to get out of your car ?”
I don't know how Teslas are build, but I would expect that if they are going to use electric doors, that they should fail-open, which is that when the door is unpowered, the locking mechanism should unlock itself automatically (and the unlocking mechanism shouldn't require power). In other words, the door should be designed so that the locking state requires constant power.
That's how most electric door locks are usually designed, for fire safety reasons, and it's not uncommon for your local building fire code to require that electric locks are fail-open.
The simplest of this design is that the door or locking mechanism is held in place with electromagnets, so that when power fails, springs or gravity would release the door/locking bar. The thinking is that the security of whatever's behind the door is never worth the potential loss of live that can result from a fail-secure lock, and by failing open, it also allows entry by fire fighters in case of emergency power loss.
There are also lock designs that are direction, by allowing unpowered exit, but requires power to be available for entry. Again, this is used for fire safety, to always allow people to exit no matter the availability of power.
@@MidlifeRenaissanceMan Discharging a lithium cell that far causes a very unstable situation and can cause cell failure. Please, stay away from lithium cells.
About the "DON'T replace only the bad cells" thing: there's why battery testers exists, where it does a couple of charges and discharges to check the health of each cell, so you only mix the ones that the health matches.
Its better policy to replace the pack with new cells and then bin the old cells into like performance rather than just slapping one new cell into the pack. Generaly speaking proprietary BMSs for sealed packs won't be the best at handling just a couple of new cells
@@eskamobob8662 theoretically, yes. Real world situations its just fine.
I dont think it is recommended for people who dont do it professionally or regularly enough to be confident in their abilities. When doing risky repairs, always make sure you know what you are doing.
The reason that's not a good idea is the capacity will degrade disproportionately, even if they all match up at assembly.
Yeah, that part was kind of dumb. Yes, we're talking about preventing e-waste, but let's throw away perfectly good batteries!
This is the industry standard, the way it works is that there's a fault flag in the BMSs memory, if a cell string is disconnected (even just 1 cell string), the fault flag is set, and the BMS won't output any power (some can be revived by plugging into a charger, but that is rare)
This is comically easy to bypass, though it is a bit tedious
You need cells equal to the series number (3 cells for 3S, 4 for 4S and so on) you connect those "bridging cells" to the BMS (solder to the tabs on the PCB) you have to connect them fully, including the intermediate voltage tabs, then you can safely re-cell the pack and the bridging cells will keep the BMS powered up and happy
Then once the new cells are connected, you desolder the bridging cells, run the pack through a dozen or so charge cycles, and it should work fine thereafter
I've been doing this with laptop batteries for years
I have a thinkpad T420S with a 380wh battery, and a Dell latitude E5430 with a 160wh slice battery and 120wh primary battery
Neil Hamburger
Wish I'd have known that trick before I took apart 2 laptop battery packs to make 1 'better' one. Both BMS shut down and the end result is my having bought and used equipment without any gain. Thanks for confirming my idea on how to get around it should I ever try again. :)
16:40 This can probably be avoided by connecting the cell pads to a voltage source similar to the battery bank before actually disconnecting the cells. This way the BMS wouldn't have an idea whether or not the cells have been removed or replaced.
Probably right, assuming it is either NVRAM or voltage detection issue.
In the 1990's, OEM manufacturers for car radios had anti-theft systems which would disable the radio if you lost power, requiring an unlock code. As a car stereo installer, this was a huge pain as only dealers could access these codes, and they wanted to charge $$$ for that. So we figured out to solder a 9V battery to a cigarette lighter plug whenever we needed to disconnect the battery. Things got a little more hairy if we had to disconnect the radio for any reason, but normally if we did that it was because we were replacing the radio. For that, we had a collection of common harnessed wired to 12v battery packs. As long as you immediately plugged this in after removing the radio (typically
@@andrewakrause good idea with the 9 volt. When I was turning wrenches, we used a dedicated battery pack that was plugged into the OBD port that did the same thing (it also kept the computer from resetting). The radio thing was mostly Hondas and thankfully Honda has a website now that will let you retrieve the code.
It's like when I replace the battery in a car at the shop ,i use a jump box connected to a memory saver then installed into OBDII. keep alive memory stays ...well ,alive!... This is coming from someone who has limited electrial background. i ALWAYS SEEM to land on Linustechtips...so keeep up the good work~!
@@andrewakrause exactly! same thing with the idle control for toyotas & various vehicles . major PITA.....soldering the 9 Volt battery is pretty interesting . BUT I LOVE ITI think I'll stick with the schaumaker memory saver... BuTI'm always down for a good hack
@@tremorlok6659 Dd you KNOW about this BEFORE you bought the car? Sounds like a bait-and-switch scam, talk your yer local sleazoid attorney.
This is one of the reasons why I would love to see right to repair laws be passed in the U.S. and in Canada (if they are not already). So much of our e-waste could be dealt with in a different manner if we were just more responsible with it. I would also simply love it if companies took more of a cradle-to-grave approach to their products, and considered what will happen to their products when they truly reach end-of-life. Considering that would lead to much less waste in general, and perhaps lead to more advances all around.
Cradle to grave ewaste laws are often twisted by evil manufacturers to demand the used products back and then physically destroying them while pretending to recycle the parts. For products containing user or company data, even worse possibilities exist.
How much e-waste because ppl dont even think about repairing, because good reason to buy new better? How many devices could be fixed by replacing few capacitors costing pennies..
@@johndododoe1411 Sad reality is with android OS even if you recycled / refurbished tablets or phones even longer by sending them to 2nd or 3rd world getting security updates is fully dependent upon the device manufacturer to accommodate updated OS.
@@Cerberus984 Well, there is replacement firmware available from independent projects that supply their own OS updates. But driver updates are still dependent on manufacturers supplying updated files.
Things are designed to fail.
The design causes a safe failure rather than an unsafe failure.
A good example is a house fan
There is a small device in the motor winding. It will work for a relatively certain amount of time before it quits. If not for this the fan would work until the motor winding shorted out overheating and possibly causing a fire.
Love the long term planning talk about how the manufacturers should be liable on determining what happens to the end of the life-cycle of their products. The only big hurdle is now consumers to learn and be willing to spend proper amount of money on good products; instead of incentivizing bad and cheap manufacturers.
I don't think you can convince consumers to never buy bad products. Governmentd should just draw a line of minimum acceptable quality
Part of the problem are the drop shippers. You get two types - you get the "we make it, probably using slave labour, probably using cheap parts, and you can buy the cheap version or the up-spec version, stick your brand on it and you're good to go. We don't care what happens with it, how it affects the user, how it affects the environment" and these are what you get of Aliexpress and the like. Many wasted products, that took jobs away from reputable local sellers, so the jobless person takes the cheap option, which is these.
The other type is the "we are genuine _insert brand here_ battery packs, honest. Totally not shitty and questionable quality 18650s made in China that have caught fire before. What a bargain, right?" And again, taking sales away from reputably safe genuine brands, because the sellers don't care and trademarks won't be enforced.
So the solution has to be regulation on these kinds of sites. There really is no other way about it.
The problem is: sometimes you don't have a choice between "good products" and "bad products". Let's take professional cameras as an example. You can either buy Red, Arri, Sony, Panasonic or Canon. They all have the same battery policies, even trying to block third-party manufacturers like Swit or idx by blocking those batteries with detection chips whenever they can. Just a year ago, Sony sued Swit and some other manufacturers because they were bypassing their proprietary battery system for the Sony FS7 and FS7 Mk2 cameras. They had to take those batteries off the market.
There are literally no manufacturers on that market with better policies.
I've repaired dozens of battery packs now and I just soldered them together. Never had a problem.
I've been genuinely interested in how batteries get recycled so I'd love to see that tour!
They don't, just like how plastic doesn't get recycled. Like maybe a fraction of them do but the cost benefit doesn't add up with how dangerous it is dealing with lithium ion batteries.
From an engineering and manufacturing perspective, even though rivets are "one time use" they are actually fantastic in a variety of applications that allow us to fasten dissimilar materials, stacks of thinner materials without the need for welding (this is especially true with aluminum body panels), better fatigue resistance for the joint, as well as reducing the chance of the joint becoming loose over time (in the case of bolts or screws), and none of these things address how much more cheaply we can use some single sided fasteners. While I'm 100% behind the right to repair (I fix everything myself even if companies don't want me to be able to...) there are instances where single use fasteners and designs do make sense. Love the content and bringing awareness to these issues btw!
@Gareth Tucker Removing a rivet from plastic often destroys the plastic.
@@trogdorstrngbd I'm willing to bet some enterprising youtuber has a solution for even the most challenging rivet extraction scenario.
A tip as I rebuild batteries professionally:
Once completed rebuilding and reattaching the BMS to the new cells and everything is hooked up, short the actual cell pack's negative to the BMS output negative. This will wake up nearly all smart BMSs that aren't "evil'."
Won't this short the battery pack? Not saying you're wrong, just trying to understand....
@@1337GameDev shorting negative to negative, no
Similar to shorting out some PCMs on vehicles to clear capacitors and actually reset the system.
Hey, regarding the battery recycling tour: I would love to see a video covering this in-depth not just for my own curiosity, but so that I can have something informative and approachable to refer people to when attempting to discourage individuals from incorrectly disposing of batteries. This is such a widespread issue outside of the tech-space that I think we have a responsibility as a community to better inform and educate those who aren't exposed to the concept of E-waste on a day-to-day basis. I know that it's more of a GN-style tour, but I firmly believe that the LTT reach could be used to great effect here.
I recently encountered some of the "evil" variety in a dell laptop. It's extremely irritating because it won't even let you use the laptop with the battery connected if it's bad (fair enough), but you also cannot use it without a battery either! So not only can you not use it as a "docked" desktop, but you have to spend the $80 or so to buy a new one if you ever want the computer to turn back on.
About 6 months ago I re-celled a customer's Dell E6420 battery pack with 6 new 18650 cells. Worked beautifully. So I guess maybe the newer ones are the 'evil' ones?
They really took the M out of BMS!
WOW! thats pretty malicious.