Your cost per kWh

It appears the costs are all over the place...

I paid for some batteries on ebay from alarmhookup and for about 99 batteries was just about 1 kWh, and that cost me $140 / kWh

On the flip side, with a little searching I found some others at about $1/lb and that works out to about $14 per kWh. Huge difference in cost... 10x less money.

None of this includes the cost of the other materials... solder, cell holders, fuses, bus bars...

Based on my cost analysis... if I have to pay alarmhookup prices, I think I am going to look for other options like EV cells as the cost per kWh actually works out cheaper, and with less labor and materials needed.

If you have a good source for 18650 cells, it literally makes all the difference and I think I am going to start being a lot stricter on what I pay people for cells, including some recycling companies who are cashing in on the craze.

I was just curious what your costs might be per kWh, finish or unfinished packs.

my 5.5kwh pack cost me about $200 in laptop batteries from my recycler. Granted i might have had a few that came from the $200 i spent previously to build my 2kwh pack. So i'd factor it out to $400 for 7.5kwh. If you can get from a recycler it's more of a gamble, but if the cells test good will be cheaper although more work then buying bare cells off ebay.

Around 53USD/kWh is what I have paid so far for LiFe cells

30-40USD at most for normal laptop cells. good batches even lower. I cant go above this because then it doesnt make sense compare to grid cost.

It depends. Alarmhookup has a reputation for selling good cells. If you buy cheap cells from scrap, you don't know what you are getting. There are a lot of factors that have to be considered. Say you buy cells of unknown quality for a tenth of the price, and only a third of them are useful. Ok, it's still cheaper, but the time spent to test and dismantle packs is significantly higher.

I get a lot of batteries for free, or close to it. However, a lot of these cells are not good at all.

However I have paid some relatively high prices for packs that I know will have higher yields.

Yes alarmhookup only sells genuine cells and you know what you get... untested cells cannot be compared...

I paid 1500 for 9.6kWh of Calb LiFePo4 - tested, charged.

I thought that compared well to the cost of a Mitsubishi Outlander pack which was the other option I was looking at, but not as cheap per kWh when compared to a Nissan Leaf pack.

Geek said:

It depends. Alarmhookup has a reputation for selling good cells. If you buy cheap cells from scrap, you don't know what you are getting. There are a lot of factors that have to be considered. Say you buy cells of unknown quality for a tenth of the price, and only a third of them are useful. Ok, it's still cheaper, but the time spent to test and dismantle packs is significantly higher.

I get a lot of batteries for free, or close to it. However, a lot of these cells are not good at all.

However I have paid some relatively high prices for packs that I know will have higher yields.

Click to expand...

This thread was about YOUR cost per kWh I wasn't complaining about Alarmhookup, but only used them as a comparison since many know about him.

I don't buy tested cells from them, but I did buy modem packs andhoverboardpacks. The time to test and dismantal are still a factor to be considered. I paid a premium for reputation, convenience, and to have morecells from the same manufacture but I still have to process and test. Its almost worth just buying new at that point from what I learned though my own experience.

That said, my laptop scrap cells yields are pretty good, better than 1/3rd for sure, PLUSI get the same rate on return for the cells that don't work. If i paid $1/lb buying, I am selling the bad ones back for $1/lb. So really, if you take that into account, for the price, its a 100%yield.

I was only curious as to peoples average cost per kWh, because at the end of the day, that's really what matters. After crunching the numbers there are better sources for cells if one is spending $100 or more per kWh. On the flip side, getting it done on the dirt cheap is also pretty fun. My target is to keep it under $50 per kWh complete (cell holders, bus bars, solder, fuses, terminals) otherwise the economics dont work for me unless we are talking about EV or LiFePO4.

My costs are all out of wack as i've used excess cell sales to fund my own making all mine free.

Cost per kWh of energy throghput is very different to cost per kWh capacity.

Cost per kWh of capacity can be misleading into thinking a battery is a bargain.

You can have a cost per kWh of capacity of $10 but it will not be much use if it only lasts 10 cycles as each 1kWh of energy you send through a pack works out to be $1 per kWh of used energy.

Cost per kWh of capacity (full pack build cost) for me is around $400 per kWh of capacity with LTO cells and my throughput cost per kWh I put through the cells is going to be less than $5c/kWh. (300/kWh and less than 5p/kWh).