Everything is reusable if you're determined enough.

Actual enforcement of this is non-existent. If you see a "disposable" vape discarded in the street, look for the crossed out bin logo.

Many people building home storage batteries use a shed a few meters away from their home.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259017452...

Proper Home Storage systems are pretty safe:

https://www.bves.de/en/2024/12/17/study-home-batteries-fire-...

There are special containers for transport of (even damaged) lithium batteries, which don't look overly bulky:

https://www.zarges.com/en/solutions/transport-and-storage-of...

The right answer is LifePO4 for home storage, does not combust and has good enough density.

(There are pictures of such buildings online. Search is returning awful LLM-generated garbage landing pages, so I don't have a link.)

I've had one of my DIY ebike batteries short and fail spectacularly at near full charge and was able to push it with a broom out of the garage into the driveway before any damage was done. Now I have a bench with wheels that I can take into the driveway for initial testing.

We worked on a very sturdy casing, with some specific features to release pressure and limit the fire event propagating cell to cell, you can check it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0NXXfCA2CY

-get a high quality BMS from a reputable source, it should supports current limits and thermal probes - configure current limits with as much overhead as possible, the less you drive them, the cooler they'll stay - make sure you have sufficient thermal probes inside key points in the pack(s) and that they're configured in the BMS to cut draw - add thermal fuses as well, knowing where to put these is important, too - house the packs so to minimize fire risk and cascading issues, especially if space is not a concern

Unless you're a hacker, and you like hacking on stuff, then by all means, read through all the warnings and please do consider doing similar to what OP did, it's a lot of fun and you'll learn a lot!

But I assume for way more energy costs? And the manual labour to sort out the different mainboards and make everything interoperable is not free either. But I guess it means lots of opportunity for unconventional low costs projects to scramble things together. Win 10 got another year of support, but I assume next year, even more computers will be avaiable quite cheap or for free.