How To Build A Phone Power Bank Yourself From Damaged Laptop Batteries

Seriously am gonna give kudos to this dude on Nairaland. It never occurred to me that one can easily build a mighty home made mobile phone power bank from spoiled, old or damaged laptop batteries without assistance from a techy, technician of any sort.

What Is A Power Bank?

Power banks are external batteries which are built to a certain capacity, meant for storing power for later use. Probably when you'll far from home or when there is an outage (trust Nigeria here).

In this post, you will learn in details how to build a power bank from damaged laptop batteries that you can use to charge your mobile phones, tablets as well as other hand held gadgets for hours or even days of power outage. So you save some cash and still never go out of power again.

dismantled old laptop battery

weld-less 18,650mAh power bank case from Aliexpress.

Damaged Batteries? How Is That Possible?
I Know you maybe wondering how that is possible since the laptop battery is damaged already and can barely retain charge. It is possible because most times when your laptop battery gets bad or stops charging, it doesn't primarily mean the whole battery is dead. It maybe as a result of a broken circuit inside the battery or one or two of the cells inside is dead not all. Since we usually have 6 to 12 cells inside, you can pick out the damaged ones and reuse the rest for a power bank. Hope that was understandable?

Materials Needed/Requirements
==>1. Screw driver
==>2. Nose Pliers (optional for disassembling) 
==>3. Soldering Iron (optional for joining wires)
==>4. DIY Power bank Case from Aliexpress. Get it here (optional too)
==>5. Spoilt/worn out laptop batteries
==>6. Your Techy brain

Quick Note:
The power bank case you buy, depends on the number and size of the damaged laptop batteries or any other batteries you intend using. The one given above is 18,650mAh lion power bank case. feel free to search and choose the perfect size. Also you can chose to construct one yourself if you'd rather prefer not to import. Though you might need some technical know how to do so. The above is recommended, since it already contains a circuit housing the resistor, transistors, capacitors, etc that is meant to handle the current input and output voltage. A USB port to plug your phones to. So building that yourself could also result to you sacrificing portability.See photo of one a guy built below.

home made power bank case 1

home made power bank case 2

Procedure For Building

==>1. First, disassemble the laptop batteries you've got (see 1st image above). After which you separate the cells inside.

==2. Open the power bank case you bought and arrange the batteries inside accordingly.

==>3. If the laptop battery you have requires joining of wires, join them in a parallel connection (that is positive to positive and negative to negative). Then solder the wires together accordingly with soldering iron.

==>4. Couple and that's it. Charge and flex. But Pls Don't Sell without telling your buyer what's inside LOLs!

complete power bank

NOTE:
Power bank mAh/Capacity: Here we made use of parallel connection. Meaning the amount of the power bank mAh(milli Amp hour) is gotten by summing up the capacity (mAh) of the individual batteries you have. Thereby maintaining the same voltage. Lets assume in one laptop battery, like the one above: you have 6mini batteries of 4mAh each. Using parallel will give a total of 4+4+4+4+4+4=24mAh

To charge the power bank when low, you can make use of an original Android charger to recharge it

Finally, if you would rather prefer watching to reading the video below should teach you more.