When a laptop battery dies, often not all the elements that compose it are to be thrown away. The power management circuit or only few LiPo batteries can be broken. Commonly, a 18650 battery is quite expensive but is really simple to give those batteries a new life and enjoy not pollute the planet.

In this article I describe how to connect a positive and a negative wire to 18650 batteries without the need to buy a dedicated holder.

First thing to do is extract 18650 LiPo cells from the battery. The process is quite simple and requires just some patience to broke the battery’s plastic enclosure and remove elements. Since it depends a lot on the battery’s kind there are no images.

However, elements are similar to these:

The negative pole is the flat one (the upper one in the image) and the positive is shown at the bottom.

Now is important to check which elements are good to reuse and which are broken. With a multimeter just check the voltage: if it is from 2.9V and 4.2V they are in good state, otherwise they are ready to be thrown away.

The element’s plastic enclosure needs to be removed, use a cutter or a pair of scissors for this.

Solder a wire on the body is a dangerous (LiPo can explode at high temperatures) and a difficult procedure, so is better to use a saw or a pair scissors (if these can cut metal – aluminum) to open the positive pole (be careful to not short circuit with the negative body). Then bent the cutted part.

It’s time to take a wire and insert a part of the conductor in the gap. Choose a good conductive and externally isolated wire since these LiPo batteries can source a lot of current when needed.

Reclose the bent part over the wire being careful to not generate a shortcircuit.

It’s time to take some tape to secure the reclosed bent part.

For the negative pole, procedure is a lot simplier and requires only tape and a wire. Make a circle with the conductive part of the wire and block it with tape, attaching it at the negative pole (the whole body).

Final results should be like these. I have used these modified batteries to supply a very powerful bluetooth speaker and an Arduino rover.

!!! ATTENTION !!!

LiPo batteries usage requires some precautions:

• DO NOT LET these elements go under 2.9V otherwise they become permanently damaged.
• DO NOT expose on fire or high temperatures.
• DO NOT shortcircuit for long time.
• DO NOT recharge with a non specific battery charger.
• DISCONNECT the element suddenly if temperature during recharge became high,  otherwise they can explode.
• Browse internet to inform yourself how a LiPo battery should be used.

Every hi-tech device is currently powered with LiPo cells cause of high capacity per weigth ratio, so use these elements wisely but be always careful!

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