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0_____004/01/20252 repliesview on HN

There's a lot that goes into manufacturing battery packs beyond the cells. How's your thermal path to ambient in your home wall battery? How is the inter-cell thermal isolation? Is there a path for gas discharge in the event of a cell failure? Is the pack appropriately fused at the cell or module level? When a cell fails, does it take the whole pack with it, catch someone's apartment building on fire and kill a family of 5, or merely become stinky with a hotspot visible on IR?

How good is your cell acceptance testing? Do you do X-ray inspection for defects, do ESR vs cycle and potentially destructive testing on a sample of each lot? When a module fails health checks in the field, will you know which customers to proactively contact, and which vendor to reassess?

Yeah lots of batteries are 18650/26650 in a trenchcoat. The trenchcoats run the gamut from "good, fine" to "you will die of smoke inhalation and have a closed casket" in quality and I think that bears mentioning.


Replies

ericd04/01/2025

Where would you put this battery in that trenchcoat gamut? Inside a server rack, fwiw. https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-lifepower4-v2-lithium-battery...

Was definitely one of the harder parts of our solar install to get comfortable with.

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lifeisstillgood04/01/2025

I get that the trenchcoat needs to be well designed and tested, but I am still flat out amazed that you both agree with “meh, most battery packs are made up of rechargeable domestic batteries you find in a kids toy”

I just assumed there was … special stuff in there

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