Those are great points! My co worker had a beater prius he bought for 500 bucks a while ago, “dead battery”. He opened up the pack and found 1 or 2 bad cells, replaced them and had a sick commuter! (Granted it looked like previous owners slid cardboard boxes on every flat surface and paint was thrashed) He drove it for years before selling it. Goes to show how far a little elbow grease will go. Believe the previous owner was trading it in because of high cost of replacement pack since a lot of people couldn’t be bothered to open them up! I had not thought about using degraded packs as home storage, that’s an excellent idea. One of these days I want to set up some solar and a battery bank to reduce my grid dependency, and as a bonus have power if we loose grid in a storm. I actually just had a few days of no power due to a rare tornado around here …
I firmly believe home battery is going to become much more prevalent as more and more used EV batteries become available. Based on current driving patterns and what we know about modern EV battery chemistries, packs should still have a lot of good life in them once the rest of the EV has rusted away. Even a pair of 75kWh battery packs that have lost 25% of their capacity (which is quite a lot) is enough to run my home for 6 days. Assuming they’re relatively cheap re-purposing batteries in this way becomes a no brainer.
One thing I’m curious to see is what the market is going to be like for used EV motors. While they can be put to a ton of industrial uses as motors, as they are also configured for regen you could do things like re-use them for power generation. If you live on a property with a decently flowing stream, you could pretty easily wire up an EV motor to generate electricity. Or maybe with the right gearing use them in a windmill. I suspect they’ll find way more uses as motors, but I’m hoping we see enterprising hobbyists find cool ways to re-use them for generating electricity.
Exciting times are ahead — better EV adoption could have a very long tail in terms of how it changes our society (for the better).
Those are great points! My co worker had a beater prius he bought for 500 bucks a while ago, “dead battery”. He opened up the pack and found 1 or 2 bad cells, replaced them and had a sick commuter! (Granted it looked like previous owners slid cardboard boxes on every flat surface and paint was thrashed) He drove it for years before selling it. Goes to show how far a little elbow grease will go. Believe the previous owner was trading it in because of high cost of replacement pack since a lot of people couldn’t be bothered to open them up! I had not thought about using degraded packs as home storage, that’s an excellent idea. One of these days I want to set up some solar and a battery bank to reduce my grid dependency, and as a bonus have power if we loose grid in a storm. I actually just had a few days of no power due to a rare tornado around here …
I firmly believe home battery is going to become much more prevalent as more and more used EV batteries become available. Based on current driving patterns and what we know about modern EV battery chemistries, packs should still have a lot of good life in them once the rest of the EV has rusted away. Even a pair of 75kWh battery packs that have lost 25% of their capacity (which is quite a lot) is enough to run my home for 6 days. Assuming they’re relatively cheap re-purposing batteries in this way becomes a no brainer.
One thing I’m curious to see is what the market is going to be like for used EV motors. While they can be put to a ton of industrial uses as motors, as they are also configured for regen you could do things like re-use them for power generation. If you live on a property with a decently flowing stream, you could pretty easily wire up an EV motor to generate electricity. Or maybe with the right gearing use them in a windmill. I suspect they’ll find way more uses as motors, but I’m hoping we see enterprising hobbyists find cool ways to re-use them for generating electricity.
Exciting times are ahead — better EV adoption could have a very long tail in terms of how it changes our society (for the better).