Binning your laptop batteries.

CUDAcores89

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Dec 30, 2016
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I just got back from a computer recycling center and picked up 120lbs of laptop batteries. Now unlike before, I decided to do something interesting... I decided to bin my laptop batteries.

Here was the process. I would read the side of the laptop battery and run some calculations to make sure each cell in the laptop battery was at least 2500mah. For example, I got a dell 97wh 9 cell laptop battery and using some math, I determined it likely has 2800mah cells inside. Those laptop batteries I set into my "high grade" bin.

I then sorted the laptop batteries by the ones that likely had cells between 2000-2500mah. Those laptop batteries went into a second bin I will call the "mid grade" bin.

Then finally we get to the low grade bin. These laptop batteries were under 2000mah calculated cell capacity. Since my standard is 2000mah, I am not even going to usethese. I am going to throw them up on ebay and get some cash back.

The whole binning process took an hour to do 150 laptop batteries. but I think this was quite worth it. Now I can turn all my attention to the very best cells with only the best capacity, move to the mid grade bin when I run out of the good ones, then move to the "low grade" bin and sell those on ebay to get some money back.

What do you guys think of doing this? For me, it was absolutely worth doing. But what do you think?
 
I think you've wasted an entire hour of your life, you'll never get that back - just rip into them and get the cells out.

You could have had a few hundred cells to start testing after that hour, rather than some neat piles of packs.

Sorry, but you did ask :)
 
I just picked up 80 pounds from my recycler, the nice thing is though, they allowed me to cherry pick my packs so i did what you're describing and only took the high or mid grade packs :) I shouldn't have any crappy sanyo hots in this batch as i avoided packs known to contain them.
 
Great idea, love it - would never do it..lol it would save a lot of testing time messing with 'known' low ah cells. But it a bit of a robotic process shuck, clean, test repeat.
 
One issue doing it though. Some manufactures may state xx whr... But in real life it may be 20% more. This since they want to have the extra capacity after 1 year of usage. So before you just toss them out i would go ahead and take 1 from each manufacturer and place and also per version of the pack and check above.

Just because the outside states that the inside should have 2000mAh cells it may be 2400mAh. I have seen this several times on my packs.
 
You can never really tell whats inside without opening. because of this i think many people just grab every pack because they don't like the idea of potentially throwing out good cells. If you have a shortage of battery packs, yeah sure open every one. However you are recycling and they are still technically trash at this stage .I think what you are doing is a great idea, a quick sanity check, is to calculate how much time and money you will save.

How much time does it take you per pack to open, charge etc.../ do everything? . For me I probably spend about 15 min on each pack by the time the batteries are capacity checked and sitting in storage. If you were to get rid of the 4 crappiest packs it would be an hour well spent. Not all the packs you put in the low bin will be bad and not all the packs in the top quality bin will be high, but I would guess if you have more than 8 packs in your to throw away pile after an hour you are breaking even time wise 16 saving an hour 32 saving 3 hours .... etc....

I get to cherry pick my packs, It takes about five minutes to select ~20 packs. I grab about 40... 6,8,9 cell name branded packs and throw back the low mAh and oldest packs until I'm left with 20. I don't check too vigilantly so some older packs slip through. This halves the time i spend collecting cells and probably increases my average capacity recovered considerably.
 
To sean who was saying this was a waste of time, I beg to differ.

About 20lbs of the laptop batteries sorted in the "low" bin contained 17670 cells, or prismatic cells. I was able to resell all the laptop batteries I know I wouldn't be able to use anyway on ebay and make a tidy $40 profit.

Because what is the point of me opening up a laptop battery if I know I can't use the cells inside for anything in the first place?


Battery said:
You can never really tell whats inside without opening. because of this i think many people just grab every pack because they don't like the idea of potentially throwing out good cells. If you have a shortage of battery packs, yeah sure open every one. However you are recycling and they are still technically trash at this stage .I think what you are doing is a great idea, a quick sanity check, is to calculate how much time and money you will save.

How much time does it take you per pack to open, charge etc.../ do everything? . For me I probably spend about 15 min on each pack by the time the batteries are capacity checked and sitting in storage. If you were to get rid of the 4 crappiest packs it would be an hour well spent. Not all the packs you put in the low bin will be bad and not all the packs in the top quality bin will be high, but I would guess if you have more than 8 packs in your to throw away pile after an hour you are breaking even time wise 16 saving an hour 32 saving 3 hours .... etc....

I get to cherry pick my packs, It takes about five minutes to select ~20 packs. I grab about 40... 6,8,9 cell name branded packs and throw back the low mAh and oldest packs until I'm left with 20. I don't check too vigilantly so some older packs slip through. This halves the time i spend collecting cells and probably increases my average capacity recovered considerably.
For me, I can confirm this was worth my time...

To test my theory I cracked open some of the cells in the "low" grade bin.

After opening the packs that actually looked like they had 18650s in them (I am just going to resell the packs containing prismatics) I opened up two battery packs. One was a toshiba pack containing Samsung 20B cells and the other one was another pack containing very early versions of the Sony US18650GR with a capacity of 1500mah to start.

Testing the low grade bin:
Most of the Sony cells came out between 700-800mah
The samsung 20B cells came out to an abysmal 300-600mah

Since my standard is 2000mah, I would say this was worth my time. I just had to spend 30 minutes opening those packs and testing them in total time, cleaning the cells and testing them. If I had simply sold them off on ebay, I would've had to spend about 30 minutes listing and shipping them, but I was able get my money back and slightly more andI wouldn't have to just turn the cells into the scrapyard. This way i can at least turn a profit.
 
I still think it's a waste of time - if you've gone to the trouble of collecting packs, carting them into the house, unpacking, checking, looking up their age, stacking them into graded piles, listing them for sale, packing and posting - you've already sunk your time into them.

My attitude is that anything that crosses my door threshold gets opened - the real trick with salvaging is to not allow any low grade packs to cross your threshold.

Again it all boils down to how much you value your time.
 
Sean said:
I still think it's a waste of time - if you've gone to the trouble of collecting packs, carting them into the house, unpacking, checking, looking up their age, stacking them into graded piles, listing them for sale, packing and posting - you've already sunk your time into them.

My attitude is that anything that crosses my door threshold gets opened - the real trick with salvaging is to not allow any low grade packs to cross your threshold.

Again it all boils down to how much you value your time.

But that's the problem, my supplier doesn't let me cherry pick laptop batteries.

I buy them for $1.25 a pound at my local scrapyard which is very cheap. Because of this, I don't get to cherry pick them. I have to either take what they give me of not take it at all. Because the price is so low I would rather bin my laptop batteries like this, because I don't get to pick the good packs form the bad like many others of you guys do in the first place.
 
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