and, as an engineer, im assuming a junior one by the mindset. you did not fully read or comprehend what was said. just jumped to a conclusion, so typical with these impatient kids nowadays.
here ill spell it out for you, ill even use crayons if that helps.
check the battery, why did it fail? many times the bms goes bad, you replace it. or a wire gets pinched, which eventually causes a low cell, fix-replace it. occasionally a cell itself is bad, replace that cell. The rest is fine. put it together, test it and if it's good, use it. They don't like to say they let a shitty battery out of the factory so will make up cute terms like oh it had 'infant mortality' etc, but basically, once in a while, a lemon gets by. now obviously this is not going to be every battery you get, but once you've done this a few times, you can spot the good ones and the boat anchors real fast. im getting 24v / 36v 48v 80 ah, 100 / 105 ah 200 ah batteries ..refurbishing them for maybe 100 dollars in time/effort and they are good. been running some of them going on 5 years now, not a hitch.
if it's swollen, liquid dripping out, damaged, looks like it tried to start on fire, then no you probably don't want that one.
This is not for everyone, in fact id not recommend anyone do it if they don't have a fully functioning brain and a solid knowledge of battery maintenance. Also, if you are working on hv packs, like out of cars, you'll kill yourself very easy when you come across a 400 volt rail the wrong way.
im wondering if there's a way to get hands on bad asic cards. where someone burnt up maybe a hand full of chips w/o physically scorching the mb. They'll replace a few chips for you, but if you need a hand full it's not worth the labor time, and you are better off just honking a new board. For someone with time, some 2m / 3m experience refurb the board. it may not be at full 130 percent, but if you can get say 90 percent out of it, and instead of paying 3000 for it, you payd 300, then you did ok.
Sometimes just doing things to be able to say, look what i did and it works too, is payback enough.
aaron
I have extensive experience as an engineer. You're describing a very rare case of failure where something can be repaired by replacing one component and it will last a long time. But in my experience, this is rare. We even experimented with buying decommissioned equipment from companies and trying to repair and resell it. Firstly, those companies also had engineers who had already taken all the best parts.
We ended up buying a lot of junk and then reselling it for a long time. Your idea works if you get first access to used hardware.
Maybe your engineers are lazy or don't have the time, but at our service center, for example, they'll even disassemble a dead laptop battery because it might still contain working parts. They'll only give you the junk that the engineers are too lazy to throw away for free.
