Battery Up!

My husband's brother Joe was a wondrous tinkerer, always cooking up some invention to save time, money, energy. A natural engineer, Joe joined the Marines after high school and never bothered with college. He spent his working life as a machinest at Pratt & Whitney, maker of aircraft and gas turbine engines. The shop floor was his playground, and whatever he learned there he used in his garage tinkering. And vice versa.

One thing he invented was something or other that let him get 60 - or was it 100? - miles per gallon. I have no idea what it was that he did, and it may not have been completely legal. Nonetheless, Joe didn't spend a lot on gasoline. My husband and his brother weren't close, but we saw him once in a very blue moon, and there were always stories about his tinkering exploits.

This month is the first anniversary of Joe's death. He outlived his younger brother by eleven years.

Because I didn't know Joe at all, I don't think of him all that often. But when I read about a tinkerer named Glubux, Joe Diggins came immediately to mind. 

Nine years ago, Glubux began posting on Second Life Storage, an internet forum dedicated to squeezing as much life as possible out of used batteries. 

If I had no idea what Joe Diggins was doing, I have perhaps less of an idea of what the Second Life Storage folks are up to. But I do know it's about sustainability and not filling our landfills with the toxic waste that comes from discarded batteries. So, in a world where the cretinous U.S. president is kvelling about clean, beautiful coal and rampaging through environmental regulations, it's good to know that someone out there is looking out for our fragile planet.

Anyway, here's the Glubux has been up to:

Nine years ago, he posted about his DIY project, one that involved connecting used laptop batteries to solar panels, with the aim of achieving self-reliance when it came to electricity.

Over time, he amassed more than 1,000 secondhand laptop batteries that he ended up installing in a separate warehouse, about 50 meters from his home. In the beginning, battery discharge rates were uneven due to differences in the cells, causing some to drain faster than others, so Glubux started taking apart the laptop batteries and arranging the cells into custom racks.

Scienceclock reports that Glubux’s ingenious setup has been running continuously for the last eight years, and not a single battery cell has failed since. That is a remarkable statistic, considering the DIY nature of the project. (Source: Oddity Central)

Glubux has greatly increased his energy-producing capacity and he fully self-supports his electricity needs. 

Naturally, we all don't have the physical or intellectual capacity to replicate this operation. Not to mention that there aren't 1,000 used laptop batteries per household out there. (Sure, there are plenty. I'm pretty certain that I've contributed a good dozen or so over the years to landfills - and that's just the personal laptops, not any corporate ones that were retired. I do hope that gleaners managed to glean something out of all those laptops before they got buried in a landfill in Upstate NY or wherever.)

But I laud that fact that someone's doing something about limiting e-waste. 

Battery up!