Why jehu?s pcb model in demand ?

Why are people using jehu garcias pcb boards to make power walls and other various projects?
Is the old fasion of holders not that effective?
What are merits of jehus pcb if compared to typical way of building battery packs?

Different people have different goals in mind. It depends on the size of your build and how you're going to use it. If you're building large packs with thousands of cells, the traditional holders make sense and are more cost effective. If you're building a small pack, for an UPS, portable power, etc, the Jehu boards are clean, don't require soldering or spot-welding to the cells, and they're easier to swap out if needed.

He has a lot of videos out on his channel...
https://www.youtube.com/user/jehugarcia/videos

Personally, I don't think they scale to be called a powerwall. Also there are reports of PCB's catching fire or smoking due to poorly made boards or improper design. That said they look good for small projects

These are meant for small scale applications and for people with limited knowledge, that's why.

DarkRaven said:

These are meant for [...] people with limited knowledge

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And those are exactly the kinds of people who should not be building battery banks with cells that can cause fire and systems that can produce lethal voltages

I agree, but that's just how it is. Personally I also think that this is not necessarily the smartest thing to do to spread this stuff within a community where most people have little to no knowledge about the subject. It's a neat design obviously but I wonder if that does in fact raise certain expectations that can't be met.

The only problem with Jehu's design is that it uses generic battery holders with steel springs, flat or conical compression springs.

They tend to skimp on these, which makes them limited to low currents, and having high resistance means quite a bit of energy is lost.

I've been working for a while now with a spring manufacturer to produce my own BeCu springs, and I've actually spoken about them about this design, since they have some customers that actually make these holders. Most of the time, they are just steel leaf springs, not even plated. Their conductivity is fine, but contact resistance isn't, which creates hotspots in the holders, and can cause mayhem if there is a sudden current increase.

Jehu's design is nothing more than a large version of those powerbanks. It doesn't scale up and cost too much. Therefore it's not meant to be used as a powerwall, which is why even though Jehu talks about it, he isn't able to produce a working model. In fact, he doesn't even have a powerwall at home. So in fact, he's only doing this as content for his channel, as more content equals more revenue for him. Why do people talk about the pcb? That's because he's good at producing click bait content that seems to entice many users to watch his channel, but really amounts to little value after watching it and trying to determine if it is a viable project. The only thing I'm glad when watching Jehu's early vids was that pete's hbpowerwall channel came up in the related videos and there you got to see some real life execution of a powerwall!

In fairness it has to be said that Jehu initially didn't cover powerwalls as such as a topic and not even lithium batteries as a main topic for his channel. But the occasional video about lithium batteries or related topics, for example because of his bus, turned out to be very popular and people kept coming and asking about this topic. And then it became the usual scheme of you doing what the audience is asking for.

The problem is that it's a very special audience. You can clearly see that when scrolling through the comments and the questions asked. Not only are the people clueless about the whole lithium battery thing but they are also complete numpties in general. You can tell from what questions they ask and how they ask these questions. They are unable to find out stuff, even trivial stuff, on their own and this is BY FAR the worst of all problems (and easily the worst trait you can aquire as a human in fact). It's not that they don't know something or don't understand something but they're also having trouble to grasp the concepts or methods. You can't work with these people.

Obviously they aren't all like that but I get the impression that their number is exceptionally high. And even if Jehu was the most knowledgeable guy around I don't think that he stands any real chance of dealing with this mess, no matter what he would do.

DarkRaven said:

The problem is that it's a very special audience. You can clearly see that when scrolling through the comments and the questions asked. Not only are the people clueless about the whole lithium battery thing but they are also complete numpties in general. You can tell from what questions they ask and how they ask these questions. They are unable to find out stuff, even trivial stuff, on their own and this is BY FAR the worst of all problems (and easily the worst trait you can aquire as a human in fact). It's not that they don't know something or don't understand something but they're also having trouble to grasp the concepts or methods. You can't work with these people.

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The electronics community has the same problem, I've dubbed them the "please sir do my homework for me" comments.
Because quite often that is what they actually want, it's disturbing some of these will have engineering degrees one day.

BlueSwordM said:

The only problem with Jehu's design is that it uses generic battery holders with steel springs, flat or conical compression springs.

They tend to skimp on these, which makes them limited to low currents, and having high resistance means quite a bit of energy is lost.

Click to expand...

The design on the flat spring contacts is also an issue, it becomes a thin pin before it gets to the PCB, so for higher current/lower resistance you need to get an entire new contact.
So you have a high resistance area at the point the contact joins with the PCB, add someone shoddy soldering and it's no wonder there have been fires.
I have no doubt people have been using underrated soldering irons too.

There are tables for use with designing PCBs to carry high currents, who knows if Jehu's free helper used them. I wasn't impressed with the design, but there is little reason for me to help Jehu, and he probably wouldn't listen.