Nov 26, 2025 15:00:00

A man has been powering his home with over 1,000 laptop batteries and solar panels for over eight years.

Glubux, a user of the online forum '

Second Life Storage ,' has reported on a project to build a home-based battery storage system using battery cells taken from collected laptop batteries. This project started around 2016 and is still in operation and expanding more than eight years later.

Glubux's Powerwall | Second Life Storage & Solar
https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powerwall.126/

Man uses 1,000 laptop batteries to power his home for eight years
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/recycled-laptop-batteries-power-home

Glubux's battery storage system consists of a 1.4kW solar panel mounted on the roof, a battery, a charge controller, a 24V to 12V transformer, and an inverter. The battery pack is made up of laptop battery cells, and as of 2016, it contained approximately 650 battery cells.

The battery pack, transformer, inverter, etc. are stored in a shed built 50 meters from the house. In the initial tests, a 24V, 460Ah battery from a forklift was also used.

However, because the laptop's battery cells had different ages, some cells were rapidly depleted. Glubux disassembled all the battery packs, tested each cell, and then selected only the best cells and reassembled them into 100Ah blocks. The forklift battery also acts as a load-leveling buffer.

The system has since been significantly expanded, with the addition of 24 solar panels rated at 440W each, allowing charging during the shorter daylight hours of winter.

The collection of battery cells also continued, eventually reaching 1,000.

All the collected battery cells were disassembled, sorted by capacity, and assembled into stable modules, which significantly increased the total storage capacity from the original 7kWh to 56kWh.

More than eight years after the project began, Glubux's system is still up and running. Lights and appliances continue to function without issue, and even during a local power outage, Glubux's home remained bright.