Salvaging Rechargeables for Projects

Lithium polymer and lithium ion batteries aren't extremely expensive, but if you use them in a lot of your projects it can run up quite a big bill. So in this tutorial, we are going to take a look at the different places you can find them for cheap or often free. You also must make sure the ones we find are reliably able to hold a charge, and are most importantly safe to use.

Step 1: What You'll Need

Luckily, taking apart cells and checking them isn't the hardest thing in the world to do, but there are some tools that make it a lot easier and less time consuming. These are:

• A multi-meter (will be using the voltage mode)

• Lithium Charger (Get it here)

• 18650 battery holder (Get it here)

• A box cutter

• A screw driver

• Electrical fire extinguisher (I've never had a battery get short, get hot, or cause a fire, but it is always safe to have one on hand just in case).

Step 2: Where to Find Them

Lithium is the most common type of rechargeable battery used in consumer electronics. There are two types of lithium batteries that are used, these are lithium ion and lithium polymer. Don't get these confused with no-rechargeable batteries like 9 volt, AA, AAA, and some coin cells, which are all made of alkaline if you attempted to charge these you'd not have a fun time. Tones of electronic devices use these batteries, but the cheapest places to find them is in old laptops. If you go to an E-waste facility and ask them for laptop batteries, you can get them for reeeeeally cheap. While you're there you might as well keep and eye out for any other electronics that look like they might have a battery inside, such as:

• Phones/Tablets

• GPS systems

• Power Banks

• Portable speakers

• Cars (Please don't take apart a Tesla,they are too pretty!)

• Cameras

• Walkie Talkies

While finding these other battery sources is easy, I would definitely recommend sticking to only looking for laptop batteries as they are the cheapest, have the highest quality brands, and the most cells within the battery.

Step 3: Getting Batteries Out

Laptops typically use 12 volts as an operating voltage, but a lithium cell can only provide an average of 3.7 volts, meaning that most laptop manufactures arrange 3 batteries in series to createsone battery with a total voltage of 11.1 volts. But most laptops have 6 cells (for a longer run time) and still have a voltage of 11.1 volts. This is because the cells are divided into couples of 3, these couples are connected in parallel, which keeps the voltages at 3.7 volts then the 3 couples are connected together in series to get a voltage of 11.1 volts.

Anyway, now that we know how they works, lets get them out. Most older laptops use a lithium ion cell called 18650, which is a very common battery type; some of the Tesla cars actually run on these batteries! The 18650 cells have a metal cylinder shape. They are pretty easy to get out of the battery case. All you have to do is pull the casing apart and cut all the cables you can see, you'll see that all the cell are connected together with a thick flat metal connector. We need to slowly and carefully pull this off the battery taking care not to let any pieces of metal touch. If the metal refuses to peel off, stop pulling and just cut the metal. Once this is done, you should have a nice collection of batteries. Just a heads up, most newer and thinner laptops don't use 18650 cells because they are too thick, so they use a lithium polymer cell. If you find these, you can use them in the same way as you would use the 18650, just be a bit more careful with them as they don't have any protection around them. Its pretty easy to puncture them and cause an internal short circuit.

Step 4: Which Ones Are Dead

So now we've got the cells out of their casing and separated them, this is where we are going to need a multi-meter. Over time some cells degrade, leak, or rust, which will result in a dead cell. Finding cells that have leaked or rusted are pretty easy, just keep an eye out for discussing oozing batteries or rust. However finding degraded cells isn't that easy. A cell may look perfectly healthy, but is just completely dead. These are the degraded cells. We find them by hooking them up to a multi-meter, and then put it on voltage mode. The positive probe goes to the positive terminal of the cell, and the negative probe goes to the negative terminal.

If the voltage is below 2.5 volts it means its kind of degraded, but can still hold a charge. We are going to want to avoid them if possible, however, anything below 1 volt is completely dead and should be deposed of at a battery recycling facility. The ideal voltage you are looking for is between 3 and 4.2 Volts.

Step 5: But Can They Hold a Charge?

Now we should end up with a group of cells that have a voltage between 3 and 4.2 volts, but this doesn't mean its completely healthy as the cells may lose charge over time at a fast rate. To make sure this isn't happening, charge the cells up to 4.2 volts. This can be done with a lithium charger. The one I'm using has over charge protection, meaning it will stop charging the cell when it gets to 4.2 volts. This is really nice, once they are charged all the way to 4.2 volts leave them somewhere safe and check the voltage every couple of hours for a few days. If the voltage drops significantly, it means the cells cannot hold a charge and shouldn't be used. One of the cells I was testing started at 4.1 volts and dropped all the way to 3.6 volts over 2 days which was very bad.

Step 6: Working Cells!

Lo and behold, we should now have a bunch of working lithium cells that can now be used for our projects! If you want to see a project where I used one of these salvaged cells to power a LED, photography, and video light, check out this tutorial: https://www.hackster.io/BuildItDR/portable-light-panel-47ff5a

All the cells that rusted, leaked, degraded or could hold a charge should not just be thrown in the trash. They need to be taken to a battery recycling facility and deposed of properly. Thanks so much for reading, if anything wasn't clear please feel for to leave a comment or send me a message and I'll try my best to get back to you!