Cant believe iv just seen this.....

No wonder people get ripped off with batteries when people are showing exactly how to do it on utube :~

Yep… harvesting is a common practice. Finding good cells however is difficult, most of the cells I have pulled have been deficient and under-performing in some way. Well over half the cells I have extracted just ended up right back in the recycle bin. I would say 1 out of every 6-7 (if that) cells is worth keeping.

yup. i just cracked open two HP laptop battery packs and one had 6 and one had 9 18650’s. out of that i got 3 working ones and 1 of the 3 is kinda erratic. they usually have low capacity to begin with…

I’m not sure what’s wrong with this vid - it appeared that the gentleman gave good info and decent safety warnings.

It would be a different story, IMO, if he was offering up info on illicit labeling.

i think its the fact he is showing people how to do it…… then you see or hear of someone buying batteries off ebay and have been ripped off by someone selling these harvested batteries. plus if someone who doesnt realise how dangerous these types of battery can be does this and shorts one then causes a fire he has put the idea into their head to try it……. thats just my opinion though. i recently shorted an expensive battery by accident and iv disposed of it as i was so concerned id cause some sort of fire.

I think the OP mentions it more to show how easy it is to harvest cells. Anyone can re-shrink them and sell them off as new as we have seen. I speculate that the consumer electronic industry regulating bodies (UL, CE, ETL, RoHS…etc) have a requirement that the plastic casing on batteries NOT be permanently sealed, glued or heat-fused together. That way the volatile chemicals can easily be extracted and disposed of…. so I think thats why laptop packs are relatively easy to split open.

I just cracked one of those 6-cell Lenovo packs the other day and pulled out salmon colored Samsung cells. None of them were any good though, the best one could only muster up ~450 mah capacity at 1A, and none of them had good self-discharge performance so they had a high internal resistance. Lenovo almost always uses Sanyo cells. Every Lenovo I have popped contained Sanyo red cells, except this recent one.

IMHO he’s a little careless how he jams his screwdriver in there and just starts prying things apart. I have shorted cells doing it this way. I try to use my hands and muscle the cells out wherever possible. I also try not to bend / stretch the metal strips inside too much, they can cut into the cell heatshrink and you’ll have a +B to -B short across that point.

Thanks for the clarification. I was only aware of the ‘fakes’ with pseudo-OEM wrapping, not the recycled-passed-off-as-new variety.

Harvested cells with new wrapping is the main concern, because its concealable with a new +B cap or protection circuit on the -B end.

Its easy to tell a raw harvested unprotected cells because they have 2 or 4 weld spots on the +/- ends.

@kramer, quote: anyone can re-shrink them and sell them off as new as we have seen. Can you please show me or point me in the direction of where i might find out how to do this and where to got get the materials to do it? For just my own benefit ofcourse.

If you start with well used laptop battery packs then you’re taking the chance that the pack has or has not been abused before you open it up to harvest. I’ve been fortunate in that I was given a laptop that was bad and the previous owner had bought a new battery pack for it before giving it to me. The laptop ended up in the E-waste and the cells are in my Surefire and Solarforce lights. The original battery was also harvested and those cells didn’t last long afterwards.

I have never seen a www site that documents how its done, but the results of people doing it are well documented, for starters:

https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/2359

Anybody got a prefrence on say 2005 vs. 2008 laptops have better batteries?

now, that lad’s speaking a proper English!

As far as the quality of harvested cells is concerned - out of the four protected trustfires I ordered from Manafont, only two were protected - and one of that was DOA. My chances of getting good cells couldn’t have been any better if I just decided to break open my laptop#s battery pack. Even one of my 18700 Xtar cells was completely dead within two months of storage. 0.0 volts, infinite resitance - even the freezer trick and removing the protection circuit didn’t help.

None here, I have noticed though that the odds of me landing a serviceable cell decrease with the packs age.

I thought he was going to cut open one of his fingers.