Making lithium batteries.?

Question

Has any one person successfully made a lithium battery at home? Is this possible, and if so , how?

Answer 1

Not a good idea. Lithium is a dangerous flammable metal. Just dropping a piece of lithium into water will cause it to explode in flames. Leave the lithium battery business to the professionals.

It is possible to buy a bunch of smaller lithium batteries and joint them together to make a bigger battery. I recommend strongly that you not do this though and I will explain why.

You need to be careful to link them together in the right way to get a bigger battery with the right voltage. If you do it wrong you can accidentally make a battery with very high voltage and it could be deadly high voltage, so be very careful. All batteries can put out very high currents so they are potentially very dangerous. You can easily kill yourself by electrocution with a large high voltage battery.

Fire is another thing to be careful with especially with lithium batteries. Because they can deliver higher power than other types of batteries they can get hotter than other batteries. Building bigger batteries out of smaller batteries will make that problem worse. The highest power lithium batteries normally used by consumers are those used in laptop computers. Those batteries are famous for catching on fire. Sony, who makes a lot of batteries and know what they are doing had to recall hundreds of thousands of laptop batteries because some of them were catching on fire. So that is a real problem if you try to make a bigger battery out of smaller lithium batteries. If you make a big enough battery out of smaller ones there is a very high likelihood that it will catch on fire when you try to charge it or if you discharge it rapidly.

I recommend that you do not mess with this. There are several different ways you can hurt yourself with this project.