Pot viure fora de xarxa amb 500 bateries de vapejador i plaques solars?

For the last 24 hours, I've been living completely off-rid in this workshop, powered entirely from a power wall made from 500 disposable vape batteries. And four of these cheap solar panels that I've installed on my workshop roof. So, how about we take a look at how we've actually got here? Very quick recap. So, these disposable vape recycling projects have escalated completely out of control. Previously, [music] we collected thousands of free littered disposable vapes, stripped them down, and extracted their batteries, which are fully rechargeable, by the way. We then tested them all and wired them all together to make these massive parallel groups of cells. We then connected these groups together again in series [music] to combine them all into an enormous battery pack. We were able to use this to temporarily power my entire house. And then I installed it into a 20-year-old road legal electric vehicle and made the world's first disposable vape powered car. And it's [music] got me wondering if I pair it with solar, could I live in this workshop completely off-rid? Now, I've got myself four of these massive 470 W panels, and they only cost about 70 quid each, which is insane. [music] insane. [music] insane. [music] I mean, it's unbelievable to think that for £70, this will generate me free electricity for 30 years. And if you hunt on Facebook Marketplace, you can pick up smaller ones for genuinely dirt cheap. So, if we get these panels hooked up to the workshop, then I'm convinced this will be the most eco-friendly setup in the world, given that we'll be powered completely from renewables and a battery made from actual e-waste that was destined for the landfill. Now, I have made a massive mistake since the last video. So, when we powered the G- Whiz and drove 18 mi off this battery pack, the 12th row was actually the weakest row of cells that we had. So this was the one that ended up dying first and it died because it dropped below 3 volts which is essentially when these cells have absolutely no energy left in them. And if the cells discharged much below 3 volts then this can actually completely write them off. Well stupidly after that video I left them in a super discharged state and they self- discharged even more over the last 2 months and now they're measuring like 1 and 1/2 V which basically means that this row is toast. [music] So, before we get cracking, we're going to have to strip this apart, dissect

another 40 disposable vapes and build ourselves a brand new row to replace this one. Fortunately, I seem to still have an infinite amount of these things from previously collecting them at festivals and local vape shops. Now, we use this CPAP pump to puff on the vapes so that we can see if it still blinks. If it does blink, then we know the battery is working fine and we can get ripping the good cells out. I just tear these things apart using a bench vice and pull out all the guts and then snip off the extra circuitry to give us the cells. Then I got three battery testers so I can give each cell a good charge and test its capacity. Now building this vape power wall in a modular way certainly turned out to be a big brain move in retrospect. If I hadn't built it to be serviceable like this, then this process would have definitely taken 10 years off my life. We can then get the connections and temperature sensors unplugged, unscrew and remove one half of our battery pack, and then extract the dead row. What I'm about to do can cause batteries to explode. So, seriously, do not try this or anything else in this video. In fact, given that we're going to replace every cell in this row, I think this could actually be a good opportunity to see how safe we've actually constructed these things. So, what I've done is I've trickle charged this and it's actually holding a voltage at the moment. And I've added these connectors so that we can just connect them together and short circuit the battery. So, when we built this last time, we added a fuse to every single cell, which means that if any cell works too hard, the fuse should pop and protect it. So, I guess this is the perfect way to test it out. Wow, that looked so cool. I really hope the camera picked that up, but we literally immediately saw a wave of all the fuses blowing, completely protecting this pack. Not the tiniest bit of heat. Well, that gives me a lot of peace of mind. So, I've got to get all these bad cells popped out of the 3D printed modules we made and swap them out of our beautiful new tested vape cells. We then add our bus bars and get the fuses soldered to each individual cells again. They reinstalled the row back into the removed half of the battery pack and finally get the battery pack fully reassembled. reassembled. reassembled. Right, thank god that is sorted. As we can see, row 12 has been completely reborn. The battery management system is happy. So, we're finally ready to get these panels put on the roof. But before I get ripping up a bunch of my roof tiles, I've had to do a bunch of planning, part hunting, and research for this build. And my virtual setup would be a complete state right now if it wasn't for the sponsor of this video, the Opera [music] browser. So, when you're deep in a build like this, you end up absolutely drowning in tabs. Solar mounting, BMS documentation, inverter research, general browsing. It completely fries my brain. Tab Island sorted this out for me immediately. I'm able to name and color code an island for each of these four groups, and then

can just collapse or expand the islands as I need them. But on some proper deep dive sessions, I can end up having a ton of near identical tabs in the island, which is where tab traces keep me sane by underlining the ones that I'd most recently used. Absolute lifesaver. I also had video pop out running while sorting out my parts. I just load up a guide from YouTube, switch to another tab, and it came along for the ride. I can move it anywhere, and even stays around when the browser's minimized. Dead useful. Choosing the solar charge controller meant comparing loads of options against my panel voltages. So, I split my screen four ways and compared every spec at once. So, for anyone that's permanently juggling six things at once like I am, absolute game changer. So, check all this out in the link in the description. So, as we can see here, that fusion reactor up there, aka the sun, hits the other side of the workshop. So, we'll be able to put the panels on the other side of the roof. So, what's this whole solar setup going to look like then? Well, I got four of these bloody enormous panels. And my workshop roof is only a measly 3x3 m. So, it's a proper squeeze to get these things to fit. In fact, given all the possibilities, it'll only fit in this one specific configuration. Now, if we peel up the roof tiles, then you got these wooden rafters underneath. And these are actually going to be our foundation for this. So, we'll screw down some solar roof hooks, put the tiles back on top of them, and then mount some extrusion rails. We need two of these rails per solar panel. So, I'll get eight of these things sorted, and then we can screw down the panels. Doesn't seem so bad on paper. Now, to be totally honest with you, I've never done this before, and I don't really know what I'm doing. But I've done lots of Googling, and that's what 90% of engineering boils down to. If my calculations are correct, the right under this roof tile should be one of the rafters. Yep, there we go. There's a layer of roofing felt under here. But there's the rafter. So, I'll screw down the roof hook with some spacers. And there, nice one. One of 16 done. One thing that's crazy to me is just how accessible and cheap this stuff can be. As I said, the panels are around 70 quid each, including delivery, which has got to be cheaper than glass. And the mounting kits, plus all the wiring, is all over mainstream sites, even Amazon, for really not that much money at all. I think the economies of scale have seriously slapped this industry over the last year. Well, this took absolutely ages in the end. But here we go. We've got all of our roof hooks mounted, and

all we need to do now is put our extrusion rails across all of them. And unfortunately, I did break a tile or two, but it was nothing that a bit of JB Weld couldn't fix. [music] I think it's going to be an intelligent idea to actually get the wiring down because obviously we're not going to be able to access underneath the solar panels once they're mounted. So, I [music] reckon if we lift up this tile, we should be able to poke the wires through and then that's what's going to let us wire it all up to the rest of the kit. There we go. That certainly wasn't hard to locate. Bloody lovely. It's finally time to get these things put on here. So, I've recruited these two handsome young gentlemen. We're going to get them put up in a pretty non-conventional way. It's going to be quite dodgy. We'll see how many we smash in the process. I'm thinking these guys just hoist it up, grab it to me. I drag it up and mount them down. I don't know if it's going to work, but fingers crossed. Safety is the number one priority. >> Exact. Safety first. [laughter] >> These panels are actually really deceivingly big at 1.7x 1.1 m, but luckily they only weigh like 20 kilos, so it's actually really easy to move about with a couple of you. >> Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's looking perfect, boys. boys. boys. >> Right now, if one of you comes up here and gives me a hand. So, how am I going to wire these up? Well, each solar panel puts out around 40 volts each. And in order to actually get some useful power out of it, we need a charge controller. Now, there's a couple ways you can connect these up. Some setups use a low voltage controller for each panel. Others connect the panels all together in series to add up all their voltages and then use a high voltage controller. But the most cost effective solution for me was to actually connect two panels in parallel, then connect these in series with another two parallel panels. This gives me an output of 80 vol. And I compare this with a single mid-voltage controller. But the current will be doubled, so I'll need some thicker wires. Fortunately, wiring this all up is as simple as just clipping the connectors together. Wow, look at that. I'm actually really chuffing myself. That looks great. So, now we need to sort out the rest of the kit. My main outlets are at the front of the workshop, so it makes sense to get everything hooked up over there. But, of course, this is going to involve dancing around in the roof space to get all the cables wired over. In case hits the fan, I need to add a circuit breaker to the end of the solar wires. Next, we [music] need to install something called an MPPPT charge controller. And this is actually a really cool piece of tech that lets us extract the absolute maximum amount of power out of our solar panels. And without something like this, the power we would get would actually be pretty abysmal. MPPPT [music]

stands for maximum powerpoint tracking. And basically, solar panels don't put out a fixed current and voltage. Instead, [music] it's a weird curve like this. And depending on the sunlight and temperature, this curve shifts around all day long. [music] We know that the power we get is the current times the voltage. So, we'll get the absolute maximum power from the panels at this peak point up here. But if the controller sets the operating voltage too high, the power falls off a cliff. So the MPPPT controller will constantly experiment with small adjustments to the operating voltage to find [music] and track this absolute sweet spot. Once it's extracting the maximum power, it'll convert the output to 50 volts, which will plug straight into our vape power wall and charge it up. Okay, so we're going to have our 50 volts DC from our disposable vape power wall and from our solar charge controller. But there's not actually a great deal that you can do with 50 volts, except from driving my 50 volt car, of course. What we're going to need is an inverter. And this basically takes our 50 volt DC and converts it into 230 volt AC and that's what UK household appliances run on. What we need now is some bus bars which will let us directly connect the [music] MPPPT charger to the inverter input. We then add our vape power wall to this as well. And it means that everything can share power as they need it. So the MPPPT charger could directly charge the battery or send power straight to the inverter for the workshop or the battery powers the inverter if there's no sun available. So the wiring is pretty straightforward. And of course, I'm going to be adding fuses between each part because we saw earlier how you should absolutely never sleep on fuses. Then I need a big fat isolation switch and also a plug socket so we can actually plug things into the inverter. The main reason I went for this specific kit is because their protocols are all open. So I can grab an old cheap Raspberry Pi and screen and plug it into each unit. This lets them talk to each other to figure out how best to share the power and also gives me some real-time data. So, we don't have a battery connected right now, but the sun's shining. I've booted it all up. And check this out. We can see that it's talking to the solar controller. We can see the 73 volts. There's no current at the moment because we're not actually powering anything or charging any batteries, but we know that everything is properly talking to each other now. So, we're basically in the perfect spot to get the vape power connected and actually go fully off grid now. So, I'm also going to be using the same chunky circuit breaker and connector that we used to power the G- Whiz. And I got this absolute gem from AliExpress which lets me link the battery management system that we use for this battery pack to our Raspberry Pi. There we go. Look at that. We've got all of the battery management system data in here now. So, this disposable vape power wall is now fully integrated into this system. So, it's a couple of days later and I've been doing some tinkering and getting this stuff ready and I've been kitting

out the workshop and I think I'm finally ready for us to go totally off grid and see if I can live in here for 2 days. Now, to be honest, I've not really chosen the best time to do this because as we can see up there, it is just complete cloud cover. There is not a single bit of blue sky up there at all. But if anything, that's just going to give us a pretty good indication of how this sort of setup could perform all year round with average crappy British weather. So, the battery's on. We have got pretty much 0%. So, we are starting totally from scratch. And if we flip this guy, this guy, this guy, just like that. There we go. Solar power is ramping up. Nice. So, we're getting about what? 274 W. Really not a crazy amount of power right now, but you know, we really have no sun out at the moment. Now, for the actual off-grid part. So, right now, I'm plugged into the grid. And this plug socket essentially powers everything in the workshop. So, if we unplug this, put it into our nice off grid plug socket and it just fits and turn on the inverter. inverter. inverter. Now, we give this a flip. And there we go. We are getting completely off-grid power. Now, let's let's see what's going on. So, we've got what 478 watt or so coming in from solar. [music] That means we end up charging the battery pack with Yeah. like 350 W and we've got 88 W going [music] out powering all this right now. So, this is working absolutely fantastically. fantastically. fantastically. So, we pretty much have all of the fundamentals that would need to survive the apocalypse. So, I've got my PC over here that I'm going to set up in a sec. Got my 3D printer. Over here, we've got the kitchen. So, all of the essentials like a coffee machine, microwave, fridge, drill press, and over here we have got my incredibly depressing sleeping setup. But, you know, we'll worry about that later. So, I think this setup is going to give us a pretty good idea that if the world does end, can you nip down to the local landfill and make yourself a little disposable vape power wall? And can that end up fully sustaining you? Chris from the future

here. So using the Raspberry Pi, I gathered all the logs from our equipment and I've whipped up a nice overlay which shows some stats and exactly where the power is flowing. Now occasionally some slightly wrong values are reported. So it may not always add up, but it gives us a pretty good idea of what's going on. All wired up. Let's see how it handles the extra load. Okay, so we're pulling over 200 W now, but at the moment that is including all of our lighting in here, the fridge, our Wi-Fi setup up here, and the computer. So it's not doing too bad. And yeah, we're still charging the battery pack at another 200 W. So, I think it's looking pretty promising for now. And it's mindboggling to think that all of this is being powered either by the sun or by disposable vapes that would have been in the landfill. That is bonkers. Now, if I'm going to be locked in here for 2 days, then I may as well put my time to good use. So, yeah, I'm just going to crack on with editing the video, which means about half of this video will have been edited off the power of the disposable vapes. But I'm also putting a hell of a lot of trust in this battery pack because if it fails, then it's going to shut off the PC and could very well corrupt my project. So, let's hope it's at least somewhat reliable. Okay, so a quick status update. So, we're charging at almost 800 W now, and the battery pack is almost a quarter full. Yeah, and our charge time has dropped really significantly. At this rate, we can have too much energy than we can actually store and do stuff with. I'd say it's about lunchtime. Think I'll get myself a pot noodle sorted. Now, I'm just going to microwave the water for this. Now, usually here in the UK, you would use a kettle, but to be honest, I'm worried I'll pop some fuses cuz they draw like 3 kW. Right, there we are. Flipping heck, that's that is drawing some serious power. Now, this microwave is now drawing more energy [music] than can be provided from the solar panels. So, it's also sucking the excess energy out of the battery pack. And yeah, that really is a lot of power. It really does show how much energy we need [music] just to heat up things. there. Oh, yep. That is piping hot. Not bad. Certainly does the job. So, the sun's come out, which is nice. And yeah, we're getting 1.4 kW of energy in. So, our battery is charging at 1 kow. It's going to be full in absolutely no time. I need to start figuring out a way to use this extra power. And I think I've got the perfect idea. So, over the last year or so, I've been spending every spare minute developing this thing. And this is essentially a USBC to ebike charger. And you can essentially just plug in any USBC fast charger, and it'll let you charge any high voltage lithium-ion battery pack. So, ebikes and e- scooters at 180 W. And in our last

video, we powered the G- Whiz using our disposable vape power wall. Well, now I've put two Tesla battery modules in it. And I've been using the G- Whiz as my daily driver for the last 2 months. And every single night, I've been charging it [music] with this thing. So, I think we should use this now to shove some of our extra spare sun energy into the G whiz and start getting some free [music] commutes out of it. So, we've got my Tesla batteries behind these black boxes here, and I've just put on a nice little XD60 charging cable onto the car. And just like that, I'm getting 180 W of fast charging. So, we now divert energy from the sun into this beautiful little machine. Pretty sick that I've got the world's only USBC charged car. I'm opening up pre-orders for a limited first batch of these chargers. They'll all be assembled by me in this workshop and will directly support the channel. So, if you're looking for an ebike charger that works with any USBC power delivery source, [music] gives real-time charging info and custom charge settings, then check it out in the description. description. description. Okay, so we finally reached 100% battery, and this means that the solar panels will be capable of generating more energy, but we've just got nowhere for it to go. So, at that point, it makes sense for me to pretty much max out all the appliances hooked up and try and load balance it to still extract the most power we can. So, I've actually got my laptop plugged in right now, and I've also been cadding up a new case for this. So, I may as well just get this 3D printed and, you know, put the energy to good use. good use. good use. [snorts] Huh. The 3D printer is making the light flicker. Absolutely no idea what that's about. I can hear some humming coming from the inverter. Hopefully, it's all right. Okay, it is dinner time. Now we have 96% battery, but the sun has dialed down a bunch. We're only getting [music] 200 W. We're, you know, barely breaking even. So, probably this is the best time to try and uh get this sorted, recuperate some energy before nighttime [music] in which we will be completely reliant on the vape power. So, so far this experiment is going pretty well to [music] be honest. So, because we've done a full charge from 0% to 100%, the battery management system has actually been logging the power that comes in. So, we know definitively that this

battery pack is 2.3 kwatt hours. [music] So, that means we can power something that draws 2.3 kW for an hour straight. So, that's like a kettle or something. Or it means we could power something [music] that draws 230 W for 10 hours. So once the sun goes down soon, I won't really get much sunlight again until the next 12 to 13 hours. [music] So that means I need to drop my power consumption down to like 100 W to make sure we get through the night. So I think soon I'm going to be going to low power mode, turn off some lights, switch into my laptop. But it's um it's looking pretty promising right now. Almost a full day in now and this thing has been working perfectly non-stop. I've been able to power literally anything I've thrown at it, including my scopes and other electronic stuff, my drill press, bench grinder, and I even managed to get a win in on Fortnite. Something that will certainly resonate with the kids who seem to be puffing on them stupid vapes. And of course, it would be rude not to round off the day with a bit of vape powered electronics reworking. reworking. reworking. Okay, it's quart 9 and the sun is doing absolutely nothing for us now. Still got 74% on the battery, but um big fluorescent light is off and the PC is on power saver mode. I mean, I'm not staying up too late tonight. And to be honest, I think we might be all right on the amount of energy we've got left because [music] realistically, we're only going to be running the fridge and, you know, some standby stuff such as all the inverter and the the Wi-Fi and all that. So, I think we're on a pretty good position right now. Okay, it's time for bed. We got 65% on the battery and from the looks of it, it should be able to keep going for at least 12 hours at it current load. So, I think we're still going to wake up with electricity, which is nice. Now, it is a bit spooky just having 500 disposable vape batteries there actively powering things all night long at the end of my bed. But, if it goes up in flames, at least my legs will be warm. But yeah, good night everyone. I guess we'll see if this e-waste will keep us powered till the morning. Good morning. Not going to lie, it got pretty cold in here last night, but I can see that the sun is already up outside. And check this out. The battery pack is still on 46%. I mean, because the sun's already up, we're getting 100 W of charging already. So, yeah, this thing barely broke a sweat. I was pretty convinced I was going to be rudely awakened to a low voltage alarm or something, but I kind of can't believe how well these free thrown away disposable vape cells have handled every single challenge I've thrown at it. powering a car and now providing me with continuous energy. But why are we chucking these things away? It is pretty darn chilly right now. So, I've treated myself to some nice heat, but I'm not going to do this for long because even just having one bar on

[music] draws like 500 W. So, this will drain the rest of the battery in like 2 hours. Heat does use a serious amount of energy. Okay, we're in the G whiz and I need to head to the shops. Fortunately, it's just down the road, so it's almost guaranteed that we are going to get there completely off the solar power we put in it for 1 or 2 hours yesterday. Well, it's a good thing this car is probably the world's most efficient vehicle. Now, the weather is particularly terrible today. This is pretty much worst case scenario, so I can't imagine much is being pumped into the battery right now. Just noticed this pretty significant leak in here. [laughter] quite nicely. This car tops itself up with its own light fluid. >> H yeah, not getting a great deal of energy now. energy now. energy now. >> So, while I cruise through day two, let's see how much actually set me back. So, most of the VA battery pack was free, obviously. So, let's say it cost 90 quid, which is the cost of the battery management system. The panels are around 300 quid for four of them. The mounting equipment came to about 150 quid. And bear with me here, but all my fancy equipment added on an extra £650. [music] But if you wanted to settle for something that gets the job done, well, I managed to pick up one of these bad boys from Facebook Marketplace for 200 quid. And this integrates both an inverter and the MPPPT charger. So realistically, [music] you could sort this entire setup for about 750 quid, which I don't think is too [music] bad when the workshop could maybe never require power from the grid ever again and would be 100% energy independent. Here we are. Hit 100% on the battery again while also rendering the graphics for this video. So, I tell you what, I think I'm going to call this experiment here because if [music] we're at 100%, we know I can survive the night again. And I feel like this could keep going almost indefinitely. We're not even really held back at all to be honest. I've been able to do absolutely everything that I would have done otherwise. I haven't even really known that I've been off-rid. So, there we have it. I'm going to class this as a monumental success. It's now been a month since I recorded this video and I've been using the offgrid vape pack almost daily with [music] absolutely no problems. So, if you want to see other cool builds like this, then please consider subscribing and give this video a like or comment just to give the algorithm a nudge. And hopefully that'll let some people reconsider adding to this unfathomable source of e-waste. [music] [music] [music] See you.