It’s just over a year since I took the first steps towards this project. After thinking and reading about battery reclamation for a while, I happened upon two laptop batteries in an e-waste bin at work. Finally I had an opportunity to get hands-on!

Gingerly opening the laptop batteries gave me 10 cells, and 9 of them were at about 3.7 V. This is the nominal LiPo voltage and is also a good long-term storage voltage, so I was optimistic that they could still be in decent condition. Frustratingly my electronics things were still in packing boxes from moving house, and so I couldn’t do serious testing on these cells straight away.

It took another 6 months for me to really bite into this as a serious project, and in that time I’d moved house again and misplaced these initial cells in one of the packing boxes. I only re-found them this week, and was delighted to find that they had dropped a mere 0.01 V in the intervening 12 months. That’s definitely a “pass” for the self-discharge test 🙂