From being Subscribed to the Amazon Deals thread —through Vipon I have so many Power Banks —A couple yrs ago they had these Baseus PB going around —a 10AH for $10 that takes most all cables for charging and rather small for convivence — A 30 AH for $16 that has 2 USB outputs —this one is kind of big and heavy but it’s Legit —- I have several types that use cells in but I rarely use those
Right now on Vipon they have a couple cheap ones
If those are cells you have around anyway, then ok that makes sense. I guess I’d get a few if I had that many cells around. A dozen 21700’s is still 60ah of cells tops, though. Equivalent to two of those 30ah ready made powerbanks with built-in chargers if your solar stuff can produce 5 volts.
I dunno how this would come into play in SHTF. If your phone works then the SHTF can’t be all that bad. If the phone doesn’t work then you don’t need to recharge it and you probably have much more urgent concerns (food, water, sanitation) than recharging flashlights :(. A 20 watt folding backpacking-type solar panel and 1 or 2 powerbanks should be plenty to sustain several flashlights and radios and a couple of phones, with a little bit of frugal use and good weather.
The next important electricity consumer for most people in a power outage is probably a fridge, which uses maybe 2kwh a day. A dozen 21700’s doesn’t really help with that. You need several square meters of solar and a beefy powerwall to handle the starting surge, if not a gas powered generator.
It annoys me a bit that the PB2S isn’t a few mm longer and able to recharge protected 21700’s. I know that some lights use those and come with them. I have a Fenix light that came with a protected 18650, that won’t recharge in the original PB2/PB2C and also won’t fit in my D4v2. The light itself has internal USB charging but I made sure when I bought an external charger, that it would handle it (and protected 21700’s) anyway,
Another idea I’ve had is to dismantle power banks to extract the raw cells, since it’s cheaper than buying them. They wouldn’t be the high current cells used in enthusiast flashlights or in power tools though. At best they’d be good for rebuilding laptop packs.
Nobody runs protected cells in a power bank, frankly, as that’s noob stuff.
You’re putting a lot of faith in a generic ChiCom power bank with ChiCom cells of unknown quality.
If you want to replace things in a couple/few years, knock yourself out.
Chris
What can I say, if I have protected cells I want to be able to recharge them. Power bank is a separate issue I would agree. Protected is supposed to be preferable if you are using the cells in series because of the possibility of a dud cell getting reverse charged and igniting. I’d expect a 2 cell power bank uses them in parallel.
The next thing after 8 cell would be the kind of powerbank that can produce 120 vac. That might be less efficient but it is useful for lots of things. I wonder if it is possible to get those with replaceable cells, short of getting DIY powerwall-type stuff. There are some nice portable non-removable ones with around 300wh of cells (= 16x 21700 maybe), USB PD input and output, and MPPT solar controller built in. They are pricey but I’ve felt tempted at times.
Woot has a 200 watt portable solar thing for $300 today if anyone cares:
That is way expensive compared to non-portable panels but it conveniently folds up, has some voltage conversion stuff, etc. It weighs 13.2 pounds apparently. I’d consider it if I had a legit use for it.
I’ve got 5 ready made powerbanks. ONE of them seems to have decent cells.
Of the half dozen (cheap) 1-cell PB I tried ALL were crap and died. I do have a more expensive one that is decent. I did my research on that one as it’s for hiking and needs to work reliably and still be small.
I MUCH prefer a good PB shell like the PB2S with replaceable cells. Better product, more personal control.
Yeah I had 2 decent ones I got about 7 years ago one went missing and the other still works pretty well, since then I have bought a few and they have all sucked. I bought one of the “BYOB” ones off ebay because I had gotten ahold of a laptop that was less than a year old and had a bunch of cells . I liked it so much I got a few more Tried some more random laptop pulls and was getting about 3AH out of them. Not really worth the hassle