Re - purposing old battery packs.

[Nealh]

What do you do with yours ?
Recycle them at the tip, use the cells for torch's or re- purpose them for other uses?

In the past I have deconstructed them to make up smaller 12v packs for other uses.

My latest use is to leave my 7 year old 14.5ah Dolphin case batteries as they are and have utilised them as 36v power supplies to run a Steeper motor set up via a digital Stepper driver and a variable speed pulse generator.
I can now at leisure extract my honey harvest electrically rather then the tiresome manual hand cranking process with my centrifuge extractor.

The batteries in previous use have deteriorated to about 15 miles use in PAS 2/3 or still up to 30 odd miles in PAS one but with sag when higher power is needed, so they were withdrawn from ebike use.

Now after some good several years of good use they now have a second life and purpose, albeit only for a few weeks in the year.

 

[Emanresu]

I can now at leisure extract my honey harvest electrically

Does that not make the bees very dizzy? Wouldn't want bee puke in my honey.

 

[awol]

What do you do with yours ?
Recycle them at the tip, use the cells for torch's or re- purpose them for other uses?

I re-use the 18650 cells in portable powerbank USB chargers and torches but I still have an old 36v pouch style battery I'm looking for uses for.

 

[Nealh]

For my beekeeping I have re-utilised my old Oxydrive batteries which used the very mediocre Sam 22 & 26F cells. As 12v smaller packs now they power a diy bee vac for collecting swarms from awkward places and power some vaping pans to treat the bees with in the fight against the parasitic varroa mite.

 

[vfr400]

I've got an electric orthopedic Recaro car seat from when I used to work for Recaro. I converted it into an office chair by taking the swivel base off a deluxe office chair and bolted it to the car seat. it's powered by a LiFePO4 battery from a Kudos bike, which had 12 cells in it, so I put together the two best blocks of 4 in 4s2p cinfiguration and added a BMS to make easy charging and protect it from over discharging. I haven't needed to charge it yet because I only use the electric tilt occasionally and the three way electric lumbar adjust is set and forget. As it's summer, I haven't needed to use its heating yet. I wonder how long the heating will last. The original battery was 36v 10Ah, so now I have 12v 20Ah. Actually, my PC pumps out so much heat that in my little room, I don't think heated seats are going to be much of an advantage