Someone powered their e-bike using disposable vape batteries, and the results are seriously impressive

If you’re not big on vaping, you may not know that disposable vapes can be tiny treasure troves for energy. Each one has a lithium-ion battery in them, which can be recharged and used for other purposes; however, given the nature of something that’s disposable, we often see these perfectly-good batteries hit the landfill. Fortuantly, people are finding ways to reclaim these little pockets of power; we’ve already seen someone make a fast-charging power bank with them, and now someone is running their e-bike using vape batteries.

130 vape batteries power this 1500W e-bike

Chris Doel showed off this cool project in a video on YouTube where he created a power bank for his e-bike. When he breaks down how the technology works, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched to use vape batteries to power an e-bike; the stock power bank uses an array of small lithium-ion batteries anyway. All this project does is use vape batteries instead of the stock model and it works pretty much the same way.

Chris created a 3D printed holder for ten batteries (which you can grab for yourself over on Printables) then created a bank consisting of 130 cells. He charged them up, then went on a ride using the batteries to see how far he could get before his bike ran out of juice. He managed to ride for 33.26 kilometers (20.6 miles) before the batteries ran dry and hitting a top speed of 32 miles per hour, which is super impressive for a bank made up of “disposed” cells.

It’s also worth noting that Chris didn’t pedal while riding, meaning the batteries were doing all of the heavy lifting for the entire ride. If he alternated between using the battery power and the pedals, he reckons it could last even longer. Either way, Chrs proves that we don’t need to waste the perfectly good lithium-ion cells in disposable vapes by throwing them away; we can just as easily recycle them into brand new products.