Economists have this idea that we live in an efficient market, but it’s hard to fathom that when disposable vapes are equipped with rechargeable lithium cells. Still, just as market economists point out that if you leave a dollar on the sidewalk someone will pick it up, if you leave dollars worth of lithium batteries on the sidewalk, [Chris Doel] will pick them up and build a DIY home battery bank that we really hope won’t burn down his shop.
The Powerwall-like arrangement uses 500 batteries salvaged from disposable vapes. His personal quality control measure while pulling the cells from the vapes was to skip any that had been discharged past 3 V. On the other hand, we’d be conservative too if we had to live with this thing, solid brick construction or not.
That quality control was accomplished by a clever hack in and of itself: he built a device to blow through the found vapes and see if they lit up. (That starts at 3:20 in the vid.) No light? Not enough voltage. Easy. Even if you’re not building a hoe powerbank, you might take note of that hack if you’re interested in harvesting other people’s deathsticks for lithium cells. The secret ingredient was the pump from a CPAP machine. Actually, it was the only ingredient.)
In another nod to safety, he fuses every battery and the links between the 3D printed OSHA unapproved packs. The juxtoposition between janky build and careful design nods makes this hack delightful, and we really hope [Chris] doesn’t burn down his shed, because like the cut of his jib and hope to see more hacks from this lad. They likely won’t involve nicotine-soaked lithium, however, as the UK is finally banning disposable vapes.
In some ways, that’s a pity, since they’re apparently good for more than just batteries — you can host a website on some of these things. How’s that for market efficiency?
I hope the “hoe powerbank” typo won’t be fixed as it’s funny :~)
Youngsters around me really gotta up their smoking game if i wanna have any chance at getting free lithium cells.
Great project, really quite labour intensive but the results are also very good
Pretty sure we’ve already banned disposable vapes here in the UK and the ones I’ve seen with the ARM chip are usually refillable as well as rechargeable.
We have indeed, though apparently vape-junkies stockpiled them before the ban.
But the ban has basically just resulted in the disposable vapes gaining usb ports, and they’re still just as disposable, so I’d expect toxic-chemical-soaked c-grade lithium batteries from “reusable” vapes will be just as commonly discarded on our streets.
Saved a bundle on the dinky batteries, and spent a small fortune on the electronics to support each individual cell. Seems like false economy.
This is Hackaday, since when does something need to be practical to be featured here?
All of my robo-hoes use vape power banks.
It is an efficient market, but by what metric?
It’s called neoliberalism, which combines the idea of social justice and intervention by the state through economic policy alone, to the invisible hand of the market through defining value to be money and worth to be whatever anyone is willing to pay. A perfect mix of left and right wing idealism.
A vape is not an asset, it’s a consumable. So efficient markets do not apply.
A lithium ion battery is very much an asset, and in an efficient market wouldn’t find itself in a consumable.
Fortunately we’re not living in an autistic utopia and things don’t have to be 100% efficient like in Minecraft.
It is not an asset to a person who is counting just the money they make from buying and selling vape pens. Once used, they would rather see it discarded so they can sell you another vape pen.
There are some tools to find inefficiences in the markets, I use some smart money concepts and technical analisis everyday. But even if you find them,they not always translates into profit.
Some inefficiencies always exist in absolute terms, and they have to be contrasted by the counter-factual case and its inefficiency.
Recycling batteries is a good example: how much does it cost to make a new one versus recovering, sorting, and re-using old ones?
Presently, it costs more to recycle a battery than make a new one, and that additional cost demands more economic activity to pay for, which results in more energy demand than simply making a new battery – assuming you don’t give up on performing other activities to account for your effort to recycle batteries.
IMHO, right now we are (in the US) are stuck in the market that copied the worst of both worlds. State is no longer capable of good solid “interventions” in form of New Deals, whereas the invisible hand of the market had long (since early 1990s) reversed the trickle-down economy.
A perfect mix of what we don’t need, every sufficiently large corporations is no longer distinguished from mafia.