Wanting to buy in the Northwest of England...
Hi and thanks for stopping by, due to the stupidity I'm witnessing on ebay I thought it worth a chance here on steemit.
My solar powered Bitcoin mining rig is in need of many more batteries, the 18650 variety which can be harvested from dead, scrap and just plain obsolete laptop battery packs.
On ebay they are going for up to £3 per battery pack, which is absolutely ludicrous when you consider the variables. I have personally harvested over 1000 cells from laptop battery packs, and I have been lucky to find an average of 2 good and usable cells from each battery pack. Based on ebay prices that is £1.50 per cell and this does not include the cost of time involved in harvesting the cells.
Anybody can buy brand new 2000mAh cells for around £0.76 each, which is half of the average of the scrap laptop battery packs that seem to be being sold on ebay, I say seem as I have been trying to purchase many of these things for well over 12 months now, and have seen these joblots basically being traded like crypto, the same batteries that were for sale 12 months ago are still for sale today, albeit via different sellers at elevated prices.
Somebody seriously needs to educate these people, SCRAP lithium is valued at somewhere between £20 and £25 per kilo, and each 18650 cell contains an average of 1.5 gram of lithium and about 40 grams of steel. so in order to earn max £25 per kilo of lithium, you need 666x 18650 cells which all need to be broken down in order to extract the lithium from within. That equates to 111x laptop battery packs to get 1 kilo of lithium or max £25. Which means the scrap value of a complete and average 6 cell battery pack is only £0.03 each, 100x less than the average price on ebay.
Now I will gladly pay £0.30 per laptop battery pack containing 18650 cells, I will even take them 1000 pieces at a time, I will need about 3000 in total, obviously knowing I need around 3000 packs means a cost of £9000 if I was to join the ebay stupidity, where my price which is still over scrap value means a total of £900 which is far more tolerable than £9000 especially considering the amount of work involved in actually harvesting the cells.
I will need these things delivering to me in Bacup, Lancashire, England, but can pay you in cash or crypto without any messing around, no arguments on price, I pay £0.30 per unit for all packs containing 18650 cells, I do not take the slimline packs as they do not contain 18650 cells and are unusable by me.
Thank you for taking the time to read my little wanted ad, if you have some of these scrap, dead or obsolete laptop battery packs taking up space, then please feel free to contact me to arrange an exchange. Steem on guys...
great post
i will follow your account to see how are you doing;) please follow me
Thank you, have followed you also. :D
solar powered bitcoin mining! you're talking my language. will investigate your posts more for details! :)
Feel free my friend, its a bit old now and has evolved a little but here is my first post detailing my solar rig :)
https://steemit.com/solar/@lordtricky/my-solar-powered-bitcoin-mining-setup
wow. i'd love to know the progress of this because i could totally see myself building something integrating those batteries in the project. guess i better dig out the soldering station! :) - i'm guessing the miner really eats the power and if you're trying to run it 24/7 does it cope with it?
At the moment the system struggles. There is a lot of maths involved, but the gist of it is.
I have 3KWH of useable battery storage if I take the batteries all the way down to 21 volt (3volt per cell). I was running an antminer s3 which used 350 watts of AC power, then the inverter wasted about 100 watts in the DC to AC inversion so the miner was costing me 450 watt hours to run. I now run a GPU from the setup which uses less power and generates a better income. It could still be better but the system running the GPU at full power uses 225 watts and the inverter wastes about 75 watts in the conversion, so the GPU mines on 300watt hours.
Yesterday for example, my panels produced 3KWH which partly charged the battery bank, and partly drove the miners, they can produce 750 watts but the miner only uses 300 watts so i do have to monitor the voltages to stop the batteries from overcharging. I mined for exactly 12 hours yesterday using close to 4KWH.
My calculations tell me I need to triple my battery bank in order to be able to run my GPU 24 / 7. Once I have tripled my battery bank I'm stuck with a choice though, to continue mining, or to start powering the house as my house ticks over on 300watts (fridge, pc, lights and networking equipment that is never off). I have been working towards this for over 18 months though, it is no easy task when the batteries are currently way over priced. And lead acid is just not a viable option.
understand but i love the process. thank you for sharing this with me, i'm guessing it's gonna be a mission of optimizing bits as you go but the fact you got it working at all is awesome, mining from sunshine. gotta love that!
Yup, to me its free money while building towards a self sufficient power source, if it takes me another 12 months to get the batteries I need, I could eventually have a self funded power station that can be made easily mobile if needs be.
Powering a miner with the system was initially just a way to dump the power my panels produce with out using a grid tie inverter. I have a new digital electricity meter that charges you for power in both directions, meaning if im putting 1300 watts into the grid, and drawing 300 watts, im actually paying for 1000 watts, even though it is my electricity produced by my panels...
Hopefully this will lead to some kind of revolution, as this can not be allowed to continue. There is no incentive for anybody to get solar power that exports to the grid, and some people are paying for electricity that has already been paid for to be added to the grid, I knew I should have invested in the power companies when I was younger :(
ah the joys of hindsight eh? seems like you have a great plan moving forward thou, i love this idea.
Thanks mate I have even better idea's, unfortunately nobody is willing to collaborate though. I have managed to run a 2 stroke chainsaw engine from 70 watts worth of electricity feeding a hydrogen cell, I'm of the opinion that battery storage is soon to be a thing of the past once people get wise to the reality of hydrogen. I'm pretty sure nobody is willing to collaborate due to the explosive nature of hydrogen. But I suspect the reality is, that we could all have in house generators that run off hydrogen, produced by solar power, and stored in tanks.
Everybody i've spoke to about it say things like you will blow yourself up, or I get the age old "ohhh its free energy is it", its almost as if the masses have forgot that rules were made to be broken ;)