I can’t let go of the dream of building my own practical nickel-iron batteries.

A few years ago it was next to impossible to find any useful information on the internet. Today however, there is quite a bit available. Unfortunately, it’s often confusing, misleading, incomplete, and sometimes just downright wrong. The reason is fairly obvious when you realize there are so many materials, construction approaches and operational chemical reaction possibilities to consider. And no two authors seem to tackle the question in the same way.

An early experimenter put out a YouTube video showing how he made an experimental cell with simple plates of nickel and iron as the electrodes. It worked, kinda. Others then followed his lead and created webpages espousing the same or similar techniques. But he later acknowledged it was a lucky accident. The reason was that nickel-iron batteries (NiFe batteries) weren’t well understood by that experimenter. He didn’t have a deep appreciation of the principles behind their operation nor of the conditions required to make them function. His approach was not unlike that of a schoolboy inserting a strip of copper and a strip of zinc into a lemon and marveling that it would light a bulb.

The goal of this series of posts will be to explain what NiFe batteries are, how they work, and how you can produce your own functional NiFe batteries at home for much less than commercially produced units for use in off-grid power storage systems.

Join me as we try to sort the wheat from the chaff and gain a better understanding.