Anyone ever see this before? It’s an 18650 from a laptop battery pack sold by Hagg1911 back in 2014 that I had stored at 3.8v (and tested at same last year).
Besides the damage to the cell it had dropped to 2.9v in the last year or so.
Yeah it looks like crap hahaha. I discharged it as much as I could with one of my chargers and then got it down to 0.05v’s using a 10w resister.
Wondering how long does it roughly take to repurpose a laptop battery pack? Never repurposed a laptop battery and wanting to try it out on an old laptop I have. Curious to see what battery’s in there. 
I took apart some 2.0ah ryobi 18v battery packs (4 or 5 of them) and about half of the 18650s were leaky. they would make tiny bubbles and you could hear a sizzling sound. It really scared me at first cause I thought they were about to blow! But no, they were already less than 1 volt and cold to the touch. Removing them from the 18650 pack holder just allowed the ends to expand some and allow the leak to open at the positive end…
So yes, I have seen some leaky and corroded 18650s lol…
older laptop batteries have 18650 cells in them. Newer laptops and ultrabooks have much larger pouch cells. They have better capacity, but are much more dangerous as they are easy to puncture and can expand forcefully causing your laptop to split wherever the battery is located.
Actually I just remembered I have 2 old Ryobi battery packs! I think they have 18650. Will try to open it up and replace them if possible. Is it quite easy to put new cells in?
Those are going to have either NIMH or NICD sub C cells in them, not 18650s… I would just toss it as its not even worth salvaging.
Or………… if you’re feeling pretty DIY you can gut it and fill it with 5 18650s with a BMS… Basically convert it to use Lithium.
Luckily of the 50 or so laptop pulls that I have this is the only 1 that’s physically gone bad on me. I check them yearly but perhaps I should check them more often. Now that I think about it I have a bunch stored with my earthquake supplies (checked semi-annually) so perhaps I should store new batteries instead. The reason I haven’t is that seems like a waste to store good batteries which will likely never be used. Then again none of my emergency supplies will probably ever be used :partying_face:
I would never buy brand new batteries to go directly to “emergency supplies”, that would be a waste in my eyes. I just get a ton of salvage/used ones. Waaaay lower cost per WH.
Batteryhookup.com is where I get mine… you can sometimes find decent, never cycled cells for $0.50 each in the Modem packs.
Yeah that’s why I haven’t done so. My earthquakes ones are from “new never used” laptop packs that I bought and disassembled back in 2015 or so. The one that went bad is from a buy I made from a BLF user selling hundreds of used laptop packs of unknown cycles back in 2014. He was selling them for as low as $2.25/pack which back then was a bargain.
My emergency batteries still measure at +2000mAh which for me is good enough for flashlights I’ll be handing out to those without.
Nice! That’s the way to do it!
Will check out the review.
Oh, being quite big and so thought it might be 18650. Okay well I’ll take it apart anyways and look around. I like taking things apart! 