Someone turned 35 disposable vapes into a fast charging power bank for their smartphone and laptop

We’ve all seen disposable vapes at this stage: you buy them, you use them, and then at the end of their life you throw them out. However, they’re terrible for the environment, and their lithium-ion batteries inside are usually rechargeable. In other words, when you throw out a disposable vape, you’re throwing out a perfectly good battery that could have been used to make a phone battery, a laptop battery, or even a car battery.

Because of that, YouTuber Chris Doel turned 35 disposable vapes that he found into a power bank that he could use to charge his devices, including his laptop. All he needed were the vapes, printed circuit boards for cell balancing and then charging, and a power bank module so that it could be recharged and then go on to charge other devices.

Turning disposable vapes into a power bank

It’s all science

Source: Chris Doel

Vapes come with lithium-ion batteries, and those batteries can be recharged and used again… in theory. However, instead, people tend to just throw them out, wasting an otherwise perfectly good battery. Doel’s idea was pretty simple: collect the vapes, remove their batteries, and place them in a 3D-printed shell with a power bank module used to charge them up and then disperse that power to devices that are plugged in for charging.

As it turns out, the process was pretty simple. and Doel ensured that the batteries were first connected carefully. In essence, he used a PCB balancing board with built-in resistors as the batteries would try to equalize voltage once connected, and the resistors slowed this down to prevent rapid balancing. The batteries were all charged to differing levels, hence why this was necessary. Once it was finished, he swapped the PCB to a regular one that he could then connect the batteries to his power bank module.

Source: Chris Doel

When it was fully built, the power bank itself, according to the module, was at 38% charge and could super-fast charge his Samsung smartphone and charge his laptop. He estimates that the power bank has a capacity of roughly 15,000 mAh because it can fully recharge his 5,000 mAh phone three or four times. However, considering the power lost to heat during conversion, the actual capacity could be closer to 20,000 mAh, which is very impressive for a power bank that he put together himself. He’s run it down completely and charged it back up without any problems.

To finish the project off, Doel made a housing for the entire power bank, with the wiring hidden and the device resembling a normal power bank… for the most part. As well, he can replace the cells himself easily, meaning that in a few years when the cells degrade on the inside, he can swap them out with new batteries that he has harvested from disposable vapes.

Doel has said that he will be publishing a guide on how to make your own portable power bank out of vapes on his YouTube channel in the future. It’s not exactly a starter project, but it’s a great idea for someone who wants to collect batteries that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill.