You might reasonably wonder what this race car has to do with my HomeBox project. As it turns out, more than you might think.
Allow me to briefly introduce the EVSR, an all-electric race car. As you might imagine, electric race cars need batteries. They need to be small, light-weight, energy dense, and have outstanding performance and safety characteristics. You might also imagine that the demands of racing require the very best these batteries can offer. And if you know anything about rechargeable batteries, you also know that their performance decreases over time. If you are speeding around a track in competition, you have no use for batteries that are anything but at their peak, right?
So what’s a race car company to do with less-than-top-performing, but still got plenty of actual service life in them, batteries? Well, if people at the race car company happen to be friends with people who are not delighted with the very high price of new Lithium-Ferro-Phosphate batteries as he contemplates the off-grid power system for his tiny house, somebody might make a phone call and maybe those old racing batteries can be put out to pasture in a cushy life as tiny house energy stores.
Sure, the industrial-looking battery bank from the race car won’t win any beauty contests, rather unlike the very pretty units that cost $3,000 each..
… but who is going to be looking at my batteries other than me, rarely, to inspect them? Well, maybe if I had very pretty batteries, I might show them off, but really, who cares what they look like? Not this home builder.
I’m still in conversation with the racing company to see if we can make this a win-win for us both. They are keen to find useful life for their discards. I am keen to buy energy storage at much less than $1 per Watt-hour (for scale, consider that I want between 10,000 and 12,000 of those Watt-hours, so this adds up to serious money). Also, the astute observer will notice that the race car battery bank is actually made up of a bunch of smaller units with metal bars tying them together. Those smaller units allow me some flexibility in spatial layout, since as long as they are connected properly to each other, they can form long columns, blocks, towers, irregular shapes, whatever… making them especially convenient for stowage into otherwise difficult spaces in my tiny house.