He has powered his house for 8 years using laptop batteries
3dvf.com
3dvf.com
[0] https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...
People, if y'all ever build your own battery pack, please think about safety. Or if you don't, place a giant bucket of dry sand above the pack, with the bottom layer being made of acrylic or other plastic that melts. That's about the only thing that can stop a battery fire.
Honest question: is this a real hack that people do in these situations or did you just come up with it?
In any case, dry sand is one of the methods firefighters use to put out battery fires, the other being dumping it in a giant vat of water (that's what's done for electric cars) or class D fire extinguishers which are extremely fine powdered salt.
Please only use properly designed and tested fire suppression systems, as hack jobs might not help at all and do harm from the false sense of security leading to lack of actually effective mitigations.
Shoddy knockoffs and cheap Chinesium garbage however, that's a different thing.
The odds get much worse when you have tens or hundreds of kWh comprised of hundreds or thousands of cells, especially in OPs jank setup with improper battery management and cells that are all already at the end of their life and likely have significant internal damage already.
Just curious.
Why is this bottom layer important?
And dangerous for any moving parts?
But a home installation might be done in a way that it is managable though.
This is a questionable setup though. You'd need massive amounts of sand dumped evenly, which requires more design and verification. Acrylic is also itself flammable.
A basic water based fire suppressor would not extinguish a battery fire but it will cool it and the room, limiting spread.
Let the experts design this kind of thing.
Water can and is used to cool batteries during battery fires, and more importantly, to cool the surroundings so that the fire cannot spread to, say, neighboring banks/cells or construction materials. Modern EV fire suppression systems for parking garages use high-pressure water mists to avoid the fire spreading to neighboring vehicles for example.
The recommendation about oil and water focuses on a larger container of liquid fuel that is on fire at the surface and heated far past the boiling point of water, such that dumping a large volume of water onto it all at once causes it to immediately boil and explode, spreading large amounts of oil as a mist in the air, which both spreads the fire and causes a much more violent combustion. A water-based fire suppression system (not a guy with a bucket of water), or a firefighter with a water hose, can absolutely extinguish such a fire.
Hacking together a sand container of acrylic may well do nothing to limit the fire while simultanously giving it more fuel (acrylic) and pathways to spread to (whatever the acrylic is near).
The point is: Don't hack together a fire suppression system, leave that to an expert please.
That's the thing: it will not, quite the contrary - unless it's many tons of water at once that quench the fire, the burning lithium will just go and create hydrogen gas that in turn recombines and leads to an even larger fire.
Modern EV fire suppression systems for parking garages use high pressure water mists to contain the fire to a single vechicle for example. This keeps neighboring cars cool and avoids them catching fire, and cooling down the burning vehicle may avoid spread to more battery banks or other flammable materials.
Indeed but look at the size of the pipes and the pressure they're operating at. Far above the typical residential, what, three bars that come from the utility. The volume of water is the key.
Those pipes are dimensioned to be able to suppress fire in every parking booth of an entire parking garage full of EVs, each of which packing more of a punch than most residential battery installations. While it cannot handle every car being on fire, it needs to handle any car being on fire when it goes off.
This is orders of magnitude more powerful than what you need for a small residential setup. Have a professional evaluate what system is best - if they suggest a sprinkler system, which they might, I am sure they would understand the capacity of your residential water supply and suggest upgrades (new piping to mains or buffer tanks) as needed.
Worst case, you might also have existing recommendations or fire code/regulations for battery energy storage systems in your area, and while those specifically may be overkill they give an idea of what is considered necessary. Maybe you could consult your local fire department, depending on how things work in your area.
There is no fire safety there. Let's just hope the shed is very far from a house, fences, trees, bushes, or anything else that could catch fire and close any "air gaps" and cause harm.
https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...
"Behind the success of this project lies an unwavering determination to overcome technical challenges. Glubux had to solve several problems over the years: cell balancing, electrical safety, and storage management. But his system keeps improving. For example, his energy production capacity has increased from 7 kWh to 56 kWh."
External monitoring is made by Victron, who initially did electrical solutions for boats. Their inverters are also very popular and pretty great.
Also, brick walls are kinda nice I have to admit, along with an exhaust for any fumes.
I guess another possibility is to have the battery pack outside, attached to the brick wall, and ideally away of direct sunlight... but then no wooden roofs. It looks like no DYI is really feasible except maybe a concrete bunker as others have suggested. And even then it's probably uninsurable which is considered a no-no where I live.
Their solutions need to comply to safety standards.
You've described the worst possible place to locate them.
"This is nonsense and dangerous"
"Wow look how thoughtful this design is, the cells are individually fused!"
The problem is that it doesn't scale; unless you have quality and reliability guarantees on the batteries, you won't be able to sell it in anything but unregulated markets, meaning that demand will always be low and investments in "smart AI robotics" will never earn themselves back.