A man has built a rechargeable battery pack big enough to power his whole home using just the batteries from discarded vapes.
British engineer Chris Doel thinks it’s “absolutely insane” that people use disposable vaping pens, as they come with a lithium-ion battery that can be recharged again and again; they’re literally powered with a technology that’s advertised as the alternative to disposable batteries.
The 26-year-old ended up stripping the lithium batteries from 500 thrown away vapes, some of which he collected, and some of which were given to him by a local shop, to create a single battery bank large enough to run his entire house for 8 hours, or his workshop for multiple days.
He kept wiring the batteries together until they totaled 2.5 kWh of capacity, before a test saw him run all electrical components entirely off-grid for eight hours, including the microwave, kettle, and all the lighting.
Doel, who works for Jaguar Land Rover, got the idea after watching friends just toss out the depleted vapes despite them all containing rechargeable batteries.
“Some of my mates were puffing on them. But as soon as they were empty, they’d have a little blinking light, and they’d throw it straight in the bin,” he told SWNS. “The engineer in me was thinking ‘that is just absolutely ridiculous.'”
“None of these components are disposable. They should never really be thrown just straight in the bin, so them being marketed as ‘disposable’ just seemed insane to me.”
Chris picked up several discarded vapes while volunteering at a festival in the city of Leeds, and opened them up. Inside, rather than a disposable battery, they all had fully rechargeable batteries, despite them being marketed as a single-use product.
Doel set up a YouTube channel and began building power banks with these vape cells.
In September 2024, he turned 35 recovered batteries into a portable charger capable of charging up phones and laptops. He then built a battery pack for his electric bike.
“People just wanted to see bigger and better stuff, so I thought ‘surely as big as I can physically get is powering my entire house?’ There’s no argument we are throwing away super valuable stuff if I can literally power my entire house for eight hours with it.”
Doel went to his local vape shop in May 2025 and asked if they would donate some of their returns for his project and walked away with bags containing 2,000 vapes.
Doel explained it was really awkward for them—they still have to pay for them to be recycled, “they were extremely happy for me to just load up thousands of them in a big bag and walk away with them.”
In order to quickly sort them, he used a pump from a C-PAC machine to mechanically vape the vapes and determine whether their batteries were damaged or not.
It took him 6 months to extract the rechargeable lithium batteries from the devices before he used a 3D printed case to combine 500 cells wired in parallel into groups, connected in series, to make a massive battery pack.
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He soldered a fuse between each of the former vape batteries to prevent his creation from short circuiting, and is now working on converting it to solar power so he can recharge and run it constantly, or recharge overnight when electricity is cheaper.
His YouTube video documenting the process from creation to powering his house has already racked up over 4 million views.
Fortunately, it became illegal for businesses in the UK to sell or supply single-use vapes In June.
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“I think the ban on disposable vapes, even though it’s not the best implementation, has definitely made an impact. There has certainly been a reduction in the waste. But I still think the devices themselves are built to be mass-consumed, and they’re still incredibly cheap,” Doel explained.
“These things last for years and years,” he said, suggesting that refillable vapes just seem to make so much more sense.
WATCH him power his home with batteries below…
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