I have several battery packs, various types, sat in a box here. I had not touched them for neatly 2 years. You know the sort of thing - battery with USB, so can be used to power/charge a phone, etc. Generally useful things. I had cause to use one, because something else (an endoscope) which had been in a box for 6 months, had a flat battery.
Obviously these various battery packs were now all flat. One of the reasons for a battery back is for when you suddenly find you need portable power for something like this.
All flat, except one!
I can only assume it was getting enough light from my office lights, even in a clear plastic box, to actually stay charged. It seems happy to charge from my office lights (LED panels). This is crazy!
It looks like Amazon still sell some like this, Blavor brand. They seem to have improved a bit.
The fact it was there for me, when I needed it, is worthy of a recommendation, I think.
But just think, right now, sunshine is charging a Tesla battery, that is powering the house, including my LED lighting panels, that are charging this.
P.S. Holy crap, I only just realised it does inductive charging as well, wow.
Letting battery packs go flat for two years does irreparable damage to the battery chemistry.
ReplyDeleteYes, however if you know what you're doing when recharging then you can "recover" the majority of the capacity loss usually at the expense of reduced charge cycles.
DeleteThe ambient temperature plays a big part too - a Lithium Ion cell which discharges to below 5% at 4C (fridge temp) will have significantly less capacity loss than one allowed to discharge to the same extent at 20C.
Plug it into a standard charger at those levels and things don't go well :)
Due to the possibility of power cuts this winter, and both of us working from home I was thinking of getting a power bank big enough to recharge a couple of laptops in an emergency.
ReplyDeleteSome of them come with a 240v low power outlet which would be enough to power our internet router and the fttp modem BT. I know that phone lines used to work during power outages as they had a battery backup but does anyone know if BT FTTP internet is still likely to if we power our end, or is that likely taken out by the same power outage?
Yes, it should - FTTP goes to an Exchange and that has power resilience by design.
DeleteWe had a power outage on the circuit that powers our local FTTC cabinet during the bad weather a while ago. The box stayed up for about 18 hours then died. The circuit wasn't restored for a couple more days ☹️
ReplyDeleteInteresting, so possibly worth it to be able to continue to work for a day or so (can likely go into the office if it lasts longer than that)
ReplyDeleteInability to properly cope with wide area power cuts which are going to be increasingly frequent is one of various reasons why BT (Openreach?) recently "suspended" the national rollout of BT Digital Voice. See e.g.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/03/isp-bt-pauses-uk-digital-voice-rollout-after-consumer-complaints.html
What happens at the moment when the power goes off across a city ? Read about what happened around Lancaster in December 2015:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/articles/2016/learning-from-lancasters-power-cuts/
"The loss of power affected services many take for granted. Mobile phone coverage was lost, as was the internet and television. Electronic payment systems could not work, and people could not access cash from ATMs. Petrol stations had to close as the pumps need electricity. Food retailers had to throw away large amounts of stock when the fridges and freezers went off, schools and universities had to close and care homes lost lights, heat and hot water.
The power cuts affected Lancaster from the 5th to the 9th December 2015."
Still, what could poss