A bit of Solar

I got a message a few weeks back to see if I was still looking for old laptop batteries for 18650 harvesting, and of course I said yes. The next day, I got one or two batteries dropped off at my house:

A few crates. There were a couple of other ones too.

Wow. Its going to take some time to crack them all open, harvest the cells, and test them all properly. Of course, I’ve got two batteries for R2 now that seem to be in a good shape and last long enough for pretty much any event. So the question is, what do I do with all the cells I’m going to have once I’ve finally gone through all these crates.

I’ve a few projects in mind that will utilise a couple of cells each, including a standby battery for R2’s brain, but a rough calculation shows that once I’m through all these crates I’ll have approx 1200 cells of varying states. So far, I’m through about half a crate and the vast majority seem to be in a good condition and over 2000mAh capacity. That means I’ve got nearly 8kWh of energy storage! Even if I assume half the cells are dead (so far only about 2% seem dead), thats still 4kWh.

The first thing that jumps out for this amount of storage is a form of power wall. Now, I’m not going to do anything grid tied, that is just too much hassle, but doing something off grid for the garage is definitely doable. If I can perhaps do enough to run the computer and other electronics, plus indoor and outdoor lighting, then I will consider it a success.

25W solar panel for testing

To start the project, I got hold of a few small solar cells, one 25W, and a couple of 50W ones. The 25W one will be used for experimentation and testing theories out, and the two 50W panels will be mounted on the wall of the garage for a more permanent solution. I also purchased an EPSolar MPPT charge controller, to go with a couple of spare 12V SLA batteries I had spare from initial testing of R2. I went for this model as it has a serial out port on it that will allow me to tie it into my OpenHAB home automation system and graph things like battery charge, solar power production, and any load on the system.

Fabricated a couple of brackets to mount the panel

Being able to graph those details will allow me to make an estimate of how much energy I can generate on a typical day, and from that calculate how much I can actually run off my system for a given amount of solar panels, and also work out just how many kWh of energy storage I need.

The charge controller however will only work with standard lead acid batteries, whilst I want to make use of the 18650 cells. To this end, I did a lot of reading and it seems that there are very few hobby level solar charge controllers that will work properly with lithium technologies. Some charge controllers can be made to work with them, but it is more of a bodge.

After much searching, I did find one chinese charge controller that said it worked with lithium batteries, and actually seemed to back that up in the details. One of the main things to look for is that it supports the typical CC/CV (constant current/constant voltage) charge methods that are required for all lithium cells. A few clicks, and it was on its way on a slow boat from china.

Solar charge controller mounted

For now, I’ve got the EPSolar charge controller mounted on the wall of the garage, connected to the 100W of panels outside.

Next steps are to get some data logging from the serial port, probably using an ESP8266 based device, dumping the data into my MQTT server, which in turn will be monitored by OpenHAB to be dropped into an influxDB store for graphing with Grafana.

Along with this is the slow process of breaking open a lot of laptop batteries and harvesting the cells. Once I have enough for a decent sized test, I will be looking into various ways of mounting them and hopefully adding an individual fuse to each cell for safety. More research into BMS for making sure the battery is properly balanced is required too.