like many of you we've spent a lot of money on batteries over the years these
red bricks for our cameras for example cost a whopping
350 dollars a pop but that isn't even the biggest problem
with them you see even rechargeable lithium batteries are consumable in a
sense after a few years of regular use this guy right here gets us a whopping 20
minutes of battery life that's on a good day which got us
thinking the housing's still fine the battery
management system or bms which handles charging and safety that's fine too so
would anything prevent us from just swapping out the tired cells inside
saving us some money and keeping needless e-waste out of the landfill
well you've already seen the title of the video so i think you know the answer
to that but what you don't know is just how deep this twisted rabbit hole goes
or who our sponsor is i fix it though in fairness you might
have seen that one coming is the battery in your device not lasting as long as it
used to looking for a new project ifixit has you covered stay tuned to the end of
this video to learn about their battery replacement kits
let's get this out of the way while we have dabbled in it before diy battery
repair can be very sketchy especially with lithium cells and we would strongly
recommend leaving this sort of work to a professional but the difficulty of the
work is only part of the problem let me show you what i mean
most lithium-based packs have three basic components a case to protect the
sparky bits the pack itself made up of individual cells they are 18650s in this
case and a battery management system or
bms the bms is the brains of the whole
operation monitoring and controlling the charge and discharge rates of the
connected cells now good ones will contain a host of
safety features like overcharge protection over current protection short
circuit protection and the like meaning that they act as your main line of
defense against catastrophic failure but they aren't the only one the second
safety is built right into the cell itself in the form of a pressure relief
vent that it's right here on the positive terminal it's designed to vent
the waste gas that's generated by internal short circuits that naturally
occur as the cell ages this prevents the cell from pressurizing creating an
explosion hazard you've probably experienced cell bulging or expansion
before if you've got a really old laptop or phone it's a similar idea except that
18650s have a rigid outer housing which
won't just puff up so with all that out of the way
this doesn't look so hard let's head to the shop
since our original intention was to replace the cells inside many of our
aging battery packs not just make a video about it we snapped up this beast
of a 30 kilogram spot welder off of craigslist for about 150
seemed like a good investment but it didn't have the correct leads on it for
battery spot welding so 70 dollars worth of amazon shopping later and we've got a
pretty solid spot welder at our disposal we'll have a link down below to the
leads that we used here and compared to our diy lead acid battery spot welder um
so far this is working a lot better before we begin let's talk safety
precautions we've got our fire extinguisher though that's unlikely to
do much of anything with a lithium fire so we've also got our fire safe
workstation here with a fire brick that we'll be doing our actual welding on
gloves and tongs in case we actually need to handle a ruptured cell a sand
bucket with additional sand to dump over top of it our fume hood as well as
a pre-propped door for us to take that sand bucket and rip it outside in the
event that we need to get rid of it next up let's talk about preparation for our
pack because we have multiples of these red battery packs we actually
pre-disassembled one for you guys so that we can get going right away but the
process is simple you just want to desolder the leads that run between the
bms and the battery pack itself which includes the power leads the balance
charging leads which are these guys right here as well as this thermistor
which is going to monitor the temperature of our pack assuming that we
are able to actually reassemble it with the new bms one other critical safety
measure is disposal of our old cells we're going to go ahead and cover up all
of the contacts with something non-conductive like electrical tape and
put it into our sand and you might be thinking to yourself well gee Linus that
pack probably only has one or two bad cells in it why don't you just swap
those out with good ones no we don't do that we never ever do that there's lots
of electrical engineering reasons not to do it don't
do it all new cells of course getting your hands on new
cells is not always the simplest thing ever and you need to make sure that you
do your due diligence to ensure that you're getting genuine cells rather than
counterfeit ones which can have issues with reliability capacity and safety we
picked these up from a local vape shop that we have enough of a relationship with to trust and what collin's doing is
he's checking them not to make sure that they're genuine but rather to make sure
that they are all at a similar enough voltage that when we go and
spot weld them together they're not going to suddenly
equalize yeah and as good we did that because i
found five cells that are low so these are 3.2 volts where everything else is
3.491 depending on how long it's been sitting
in inventory it might have drained more or less
and we don't want that our next order of business is to arrange
the cells in exactly the same orientation before we spot weld them
together and there are a number of ways to do this you can get these little
spacer kits off of amazon but unfortunately for us if we compare to
our assembled pack these leave a space as advertised and
the original pack does not so we might have to improvise a little bit if we
want to try to fit our battery into the old housing uh one idea we had was to
sacrifice one of our batteries and use it as a kind of holder
here we go for our new cells and then
pop it out when we're done maybe cut it away while we while we spot weld it i
don't know another complication that we have to overcome is that we are using
generic nickel strips there we are make sure you're using
genuine nickel by the way while red is using obviously some pre-cut ones that
look a little bit different what do you lean towards colin
using this boy as a as a holder i think
we should snip it in half yeah that way we can solder the top side flip it over
and solder the bottom side while still having support on both sides i really like it let's run it through the bandsaw
so these are all positive terminal up
boop boop oh this is gonna work okay
i think what we're gonna do is more tape we're gonna put them on and then yeah
and then we'll wrap them and then i think we're in really great shape column
was like i don't think we're gonna fit this back in the original housing and
i'm like i wanna try my life's in your hands colin actually all of our lives
are in your hands Linus all right
that's not good i'm kind of imagining that i hold this and you wrap the tape
there we go i have seen dumber things now at this
point we could start laying down our nickel strips and spot welding everything together but if we make even
one mistake we are a evacuating this room and b starting our project
completely from scratch so we want to go ahead and do some test welds now we got
this all dialed in for a single layer of nickel strip over a
test cell by the way shout out to the vape shop again for
giving us a bunch of testers here but what we haven't tried is two layers so
i'm gonna play around with this a little bit and see if we can get a nice clean
spot weld on some of our test cells here for spot weld there's a little
bit of spring tension in this see we want that spring to go down then we're
gonna go ahead and
it's definitely on there let's grab another one and let's try two layers you
should usually do two hits i oh oh i will i will i will don't worry so we're
doing a weld heat of 690 a ramp speed of three and we think this means 14
milliseconds let's see how it handles two layers at our current setting i
think it will be fine you know what i don't think we have to
change anything colin oh no it popped
okay try again just uh clean up the tip
okay now do that 32 more times
okay this is pretty sweet i'm having fun now this is where things
get a little bit interesting we're about to do our second layer
uh colin you want to have a look at this and see how it's going i need a clipboard so i can grade you yeah thanks
it looks like a battery pack this is the part i'm most nervous about because we
need to do four cells in a row and this is where we're first going to connect
positive and negative terminals so this is where we find out how collins uh
measurements went hoping for no sparks no sparks colin yay you sound
less enthusiastic than me were you hoping for some sparks the thing about
super high current is that it doesn't just melt your nickel and your cell
together it also melts your tips if they're not great tips you know what
maybe we won't have the link to where to buy these down below they're really not that great okay great i'd also like to
take a moment to point out that i'm a total amateur at this so if you're
looking to actually build your own battery packs there are lots of other
better resources out there
yep sounds a matter of time ah fudge
well we popped one oh
i think i didn't clean the tip often enough well that was a bummer but the
good news is the video is not over we had a backup plan because we knew going
into this that lithium batteries are much much more volatile than the nickel
metal hydride batteries that you might find in your parents old power tools not
only are the cases much thinner which improves power density but makes them
more susceptible to rupturing but the lithium inside them is
chemically much more reactive you guys have probably seen the handful videos on
the news of electric vehicles bursting into flames that's a lithium battery
fire and it is no joke not only are they essentially unextinguishable but the
smoke they emit is toxic too we actually dumped more sand on that and moved it
away from the door next to the concrete wall there will be no fire there
so here is what our backup plan is rather
than trying to tackle a 16 cell pack we're gonna take one of our smaller sony
style batteries which has just four cells and uh try to rebuild this one the
silver lining in all this is that now you guys get to see the entire process
so there you go we've pulled the housing off of the bms here i'm sure all of the
like diy ebike battery folks are
have already left their comments wow they're using
really pin or nickel strips on look at this the minimum possible amount of
nickel was used backup sand bins right here yeah we got it all right thanks
colin anger level it's
so high right now
well we're down to four matching cells so this will be our last attempt are you
guys ready to go again yeah i've got a good feeling about these batteries
what we need to check now is if
my leads are going to line up with the bms though this guy is going to go here
and this guy is going to go here so i'm just going to trim those down here we go
and then i'm going to double check again to make sure i snip off the right part
i'm okay i'm okay boys you know what now's a good time to throw it into the
housing then tell me something david yep would you put this pack in a camera do i
own the camera is it your camera it's my camera uh maybe
and this is where we bunged it up last time
do you believe i believe
sandpaper between yeah you better believe it
two more strips and then this one this last one here
actually needs to be quite a bit longer do we got this guys
theoretically that's it where's the multimeter we should all see seven volts
here we go boys better have seven folds 6.98 we're short
kidding kidding kidding i just want to cut away this little square here wraps i
cut away more of it than i had meant to there let's solder a wire to it
we had a mishap with our first bms and the snips
and unfortunately when i saw the spark i
kind of jerked and moved fast and i'm not sure
whether the spark was from shorting the battery or shorting the bms so we might
have killed the bms which means that
we had to go find another sacrificial battery which was also on its last legs
anyway and we're going to use that bms so i'm
just going to go ahead and solder that guy what do you think guys
much higher chance
nothing this time i'm surprised that's as good as you can get like yeah there's
nothing we didn't do anything wrong this time check the pack voltage the battery
7 volts all that means is that these pads are definitely connected please
tell me this is a cheap light it's a monitor it's not cheap oh it's
that's it this time i'm sure we did everything
right the pack is assembled correctly the bms was it went straight out of a
working one onto ours i'm
really surprised this didn't work actually point of clarification i'm
furious but not surprised let's talk about that we discovered in
our initial research for this project that even if we had successfully welded
together a battery for this red brick it wouldn't have come back to life and
the reason for that is because battery manufacturers are us
there are multiple tiers of anti-right to repair behavior one of the simplest
is mechanical obstruction where manufacturers use brittle plastic glue
single-use fasteners and other similar strategies to make repairing their
devices impractical sometimes this is just plain not caring about the user of
the environment while other times this happens for malicious reasons like
planned obsolescence either way i promise neither of them will ever happen
with our merch from lttstore.com get yours today the next tier of anti-right
to repair behavior is soft obstruction
this is almost always on purpose and exists solely to prevent end users and
third parties from repairing or rejuvenating their devices with
manufacturers often citing safety as a justification
that is what we ran into with well would have run into with our red pack and
appears to be what we ran into with our other pack
but how are they doing that well there are
four different types of bms dumb basic
smart and evil dumb is no bms at all like these rc lipo
batteries each cell's voltage is maintained at the time of recharging by
a much more sophisticated battery charger using the balance lead
a basic bms allows you to safely use and charge the battery pack with a simple
charger while protecting against under and over current situations so a lot
better than nothing a smart bms will include cell balancing and some level of
capacity learning along with self resetting for faults and
ideally the ability to resell no not like this on facebook marketplace
to replace the cells like we attempted
today finally there's evil bmss which
thankfully we don't see that much of these days what makes them evil is that
after a set number of charge cycles they will switch off permanently even if they
could still work and if you as a manufacturer ever built this sort of
intentional e-waste shame on you all of which raises some questions then
what exactly did we see today
according to tyler from thtbattery.com red batteries at least these older red
bricks are extremely challenging to resell because there's a good chance the
bms will simply not wake up after the operation he hasn't put the r d into
solving the problem because there just haven't been enough requests but there
are a couple possible explanations for this the malicious one is that red's
contract manufacturer could be using software to detect either cell
disconnection or a change in capacity that will shut down the bms on purpose
in which case it's basically an evil one for all
intents and purposes the good news is that replacing the bms
with a generic one for about 17 could get you back up and running if you don't
need the original indicator lights or anything like that
the careless possibility is that they used volatile storage for the bms's
programming that wipes itself if it loses power given the cost difference
this honestly could also be considered a malicious design decision
now something that i want to make clear at this stage is that i am not advocating for user serviceable battery
packs considering the precision required for safe assembly and the volatility of
the chemistry that's just not realistic as we observed today
but there's a middle ground here ah yes this pack is made by a company
called bebop a german battery manufacturer that just so happens to
supply one of the largest cinema camera makers in the world ari they advertise
their cells to be replaceable and they even have an indicator that tells you
when you've reached 80 and 60 percent of the original capacity when that happens
you can send it to them and they will replace the cells at a discount other
cinema brands take notes we're not even asking you to
be as awesome as bebop but the least you can do is not put up roadblocks on
purpose so then the safest way that you can help right now is just returning
your batteries to be recycled when you're done with them but in an increasingly electrified world producers
of battery-powered devices have a responsibility to plan ahead and to
extend the lifespan of their products and figure out what's supposed to happen
to them when they reach the end of their life on that note as it turns out one of the
largest battery recycling facilities in north america retrieve technologies is
just a few hours away from us so let us know in the comments if you want us to
go check out how it's done in person and get subscribed so you don't miss it and
don't miss our sponsor ifixit ifixit wants to help you keep your new devices
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LTT if you guys enjoyed this video maybe you'll enjoy our other this should be
illegal video where manufacturers were caught swapping components on ssds
effectively advertising one thing and delivering another