Technical Paranoid? Lithium ion batteries

See several comments about the electric bike shop fire in NYC a few days ago. The fatalities are the reason we're seeing this one on the news, plus the fact that NYC is really pissed about the HUNDREDS of battery fires in the city from bikes and scooters. Hundreds in the last 2 years. I know of 3 other bike shops that burned up in the last year or so, all from these batteries. This is common knowledge in the bike biz. I'm in the bicycle business, and I'm the only shop in my area refusing to sell e-bikes. A lot of these batteries are dangerous. Most will be fine, but... Fire suppression cabinets exist, shops were encouraged to buy them a while back to help "recycle" bad batteries.
I may break my neck tripping over all the extension cords laying on the garage floor, but these batteries aren't anywhere near my stuff. Just my .02.

 

Smart phones, e-cigs - all powered by these batteries, and we've all seen the videos or read the news stories when they blow up during charging or even usage. Cars are no better. Fire departments hate them because they use as much water as a 3 bedroom housefire to douse them. Many salvage yards won't take wrecked electric cars because they tend to catch on fire, sometimes several times in a week. The best way to extinguish a lithium battery fire is to dump the burning car in the nearest deep hole and flood it until completely underwater.

 

This is scary.


I've got a battery on charge now. I moved it from the usual location and put it in the middle of the garage floor with nothing around it.

Ignorance is bliss, but when you know something, I don't like to tempt Murphy's Law.

There's a reason why most apartment buildings won't allow EV charging inside the building. Insurance companies know why too.

 

I have never had an electric tool worth a bent*****, or a portable battery boost box that lasted more than a few months. 2 things in the grand scheme of life that left me out, so I've come to love a good ol plug in tool, battery charger and jumper cables.***** them batteries, just sayin...

 

Last year the local fire department had a tesla catch fire after flooding in the hurricane, their fix was to submerge the car in a nearby retention pond and retrieve it 3 days later

 

You can’t control all the possibilities, but you can limit them. I never charge any battery, automotive or power tool, unless I’m close by. Have had old style chargers boil batteries dry when left unattended. I sit my power tool charger on the concrete floor, away from any combustible materials so if it does burn, hopefully only it will burn and nothing surrounding it will catch. Same with my rechargeable lights, always away from anything else. When I leave, all chargers are unplugged. Not saying I won’t have one short and blaze up, but if it does, I should be close by and maybe nothing else catches from it.

 

It’s amazing to hear everyone tout electric vehicles being green but ignoring the fact that dousing them in a retention pond is not environmentally friendly.
Not being critical of the FD. They don’t have many choices with extinguishment and dealing with electric car fires was not something they chose to do.

 

My insurance company said a lot of shop fires are caused by faulty power tool batteries charging overnight. I now never charge them unless i am right there in the daytime.

 

yep, I do exactly the same as this !

 

There's a handful of E/V charging stations that have opened recently in the area, some in the out-lots of shopping centers or big-box stores. This would seem to explain why they are placed so far away from any stores, structures or other nearby parking.

If nothing else, I suppose I'll at least worry less about the big push toward autonomous driving vehicles.

 

Good thread. I wasn’t aware of the dangers of this type of battery used in power tools. I usually keep the batteries in the tools anyway but now I’ll be more vigilant when charging them.

 

Maybe @Lloyd's paint & glass will chime in with some real world FD experience. Or maybe them new fangled lectic cars are illegal in Kentucky?

 

Never been on an electric car fire, worked a couple of wrecks on those early hybrids but nothing out of the ordinary. I will say that we're having issues with the lithium ion Milwaukee 28v batteries being junk. Our rescue tools use these batteries, and they're going bad at a ridiculous rate, replacement batteries are over $500 each. We've tried a couple of the generic knockoff batteries, but they aren't any better. Next option is to have each tool retrofitted for Dewalt 18v at a cost of $1800 per tool. Multiply that by 10 tools and it's kinda expensive, they could just make the 28v Milwaukee better

 

On news tonite, someone had fire in house charging Li-ion batt with "aftermarket" solar charger. Charging a batt in sun, seemed like a good idea at the time. Pittsburgh FD put it out.

 

Got a good friend who's a Captain in a large Fire Department. Fire guys around the country apparently send links to each other with pics and details of fires they've fought. He forwards the electric car, electric bike videos to me, since he knows I'm against them. Bad stuff. He tells me they're afraid of electric car fires, and study different scenarios. Their town just bought electric buses. They are terrified of them. When he explained how those buses are designed, and where and how they carry the battery weight, I decided I don't want to be anywhere near them.
I know this isn't HAMB related, but maybe one of us will avoid a garage fire by what's being discussed here.

 

There have been several stories about race cars inside trailers going up in flames as a result of litium batteries. While I don't anticipate putting one in any of my cars, I do worry about the ones for the couple rechargeable tools I have along with a jump box. I was thinking about just storing them in an old metal tool box, but say the worst happens and they do malfunction, I don't know if a metal box is going to slow down something that supposedly burns at 3,632 degrees. Where the hell and how do you store these things safely?

 

Now we are talking tools a subject I know a little about.
Personally I am very torn on using lithium in most things. It is 6 one way and a ½ a dozen the other way. What I mean is some of the modern power tools are pretty amazing and the proof is almost all professional mechanics have switched over to them (Snap-on and Milwaukee are the big players for crazy capacity tools but even cheap Black & Decker items aren't really bad generally speaking). If you need proof pay attention to your local mechanic shop and you'll notice it's very rare you will hear an air tool these days as they've all been replaced with cordless tools that make crazy amounts of torque.
But then there is the bad side and there are two problems that keep me from switching over to lithium power tools number one is And this is the most important for me is I buy a tool once I spend good money on it and I expect it to last the rest of my life or I will buy a quality tool that is vintage that already outlived It's original owner and it will probably outlive me if I take care of it but it too should theoretically last the rest of my life. A lithium battery is not much different than any other battery in the history of batteries as it has a life cycle and no matter how well you take care of it, it will eventually die and need replacing, obviously buying quality batteries and following the manufacturers recommendations on how to charge and discharge them definitely helps extended battery life but no matter what you do it is guaranteed it will die at some point and You will either have to replace the battery or you will replace the tool If you bought some of the lesser brands or store brands there's a good chance you won't be able to get the battery 10 or 12 years from now so you will be buying new tools. I can't speak for anyone else reading my way to long comment but I have power tools that are older than I am that I still use on a relatively regular basis, (as an example) I bought an aluminum case Stanley jigsaw probably 25 years ago that was probably 30 years old then for $5 at a swap meet and other than replacing the grease a few years back it works like It was just made yesterday and realistically will probably last another 30 to 50 years.
The second problem isn't necessarily a serious problem But it is the one that everyone is discussing on the site currently and that is 99.9999% of the time it will never be a problem and that is fire. If we are being honest about it the risk is extremely low but there is still an inherent risk and it should also be mentioned and The reality is even if it is a low risk it is still a risk and if your luck is like mine you will be that .00001% that has a battery that's self ignites...
Lithium definitely makes its own oxygen so when it burns it's called a "thermal runaway" event. A sheet metal cabinet or even a cabinet designed to hold chemicals will more than likely be burned up if enough of the lithium ion batteries have a thermal runaway event (This is highly possible because when one goes up it gets the next one hot and then it goes up and so on and so forth It only takes about 900° F to get a thermal runaway event started with a lithium battery). In all honesty as others have mentioned you would need either to store the stuff in a kiln or you would need a fire brick storage unit if you are worried about fires. I would think lining the inside of a metal cabinet with some fire bricks would probably make it relatively fire resistant but don't quote me on that I'm no expert on fire prevention or proper fire storage techniques.
To those of you that are still reading my ramblings.
What thermal runaway is, it is high levels of heat energy that vaporize the electrolyte "fluid", creating additional heat and combustible gases. If the ignition temperature for a gas is exceeded, it will ignite and set fire to the battery. The thermal propagation will create a chain reaction and once set in motion, it only takes a few minutes until the battery will burn and explode. Once lithium is on fire the temperature is about 3632 degrees Fahrenheit (I think that I read it's 2,000° c but don't quote me on that I use freedom units not the metric system).
For me personally I will stick to corded power tools And I will unplug them when I'm done using them (especially the cheap Harbor freight stuff like the Drill Master brand angle grinder That can catch on fire when it's turned off (ask me how I know lol absolute garbage after that I bought Milwaukee but that being said the Milwaukee grinder is also made in China). I guess at the end of the day it's all about common sense and using caution when storing lithium ion tools. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have lithium ion power tools in their garage in the United States alone and probably a few hundred million around the world not to mention probably half the world's population now owns a cellular phone that has a lithium battery considering the amount of devices that use lithium batteries I would say a thermal runaway event is extremely rare but it definitely can happen. For me other than the extension cords I will stick to AC power tools in my home/shop use. When I am working my construction job I got to admit that 20 volt DeWalt drill is pretty awesome So is the quarter inch drive impact driver And I definitely do not take care of them the way you're supposed to they've gotten rained on They get left in the work truck, They get completely discharged and they may get left in the sun Just literal abuse and they take it, Just like others on this site I am paranoid about fire with lithium ion battery packs.

 

There is an article in one of the N.Y. papers this morning about Lithium-ion batteries. The mayor's office reported that there have been 110 fires caused by Lithium-ion batteries with 13 deaths and 71 injuries. One of the bike shop owners said he was "working on a bicycle and glanced over at an electric scooter and it literally exploded like a hundred road flares".

 

Paranoid??? YES. Not to mention what it does to the environment--


Today, a typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.

It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just one battery.

 

Eye opener.
This is not only car fires. Very interesting lab tests.

 

I'll never buy a battery powered car.

 

the video didn't mention battery operated tools did it?

I recently saw where replacing a Tesla ev battery is around 13,000 bucks, it also said that most company's guarantee there battery's for 5 to 7 years where is the savings? HRP

 

"Look up , bike shop fire N.Y.C. again Lithium Ion battery."

An ebike burnt down an apartment building in N.Y.C. too last year and another bike store in Ca. at Venice Beach had a fire right next to that Muscle Beach building caused by an ebike again. That was probably 4-6 months ago maybe? I have been hearing about these ebike fires but never hear what brands they were or if they were all the same style ebike/battery.

there was another battery storage facility on fire this morning. Don't remember what state though.

 

Same here.
I am ready to go backwards when it comes to technology. I am thinking I am going to build a 35 to 47ish pickup as a daily driver So it works like a mini truck (4 cylinder, 5 speed, AC and fair brakes), I don't need it to be fast I need it to actually be a light truck that gets decent fuel mileage where I can trust it to always start so I can get rid of my late model feel mileage car that not only has to go through California's stringent smog but has some expensive maintenance that I don't like messing with... You figure the interior the paint and the wheels/tires can look traditional But put an easy to work on but extremely reliable modern drivetrain under the hood something that other than oil changes and routine maintenance pretty much don't have to touch it.

I couldn't imagine having an electric vehicle that takes hours to charge has limited range and has a built-in depth sentence because of the life cycle of the battery...
I am the guy that generally only sells a car when I get board of it or somebody offers way too much money for it, vehicles never really wear out as long as I own them because I personally repair them and an electric vehicle seems like It would actually achieve the opposite of what people would****ume, forcing you to throw the car away because it is mechanically totaled due to a bad battery pack.

 

We deal with large ( 2000 lbs of lithium) forklift traction batteries at work on a regular basis .

they are safe , have multiple failsafes to avoid thermal runaway.

we did have a small walkie battery go off about a year ago ( 12”x3”x8” ) in size so bigger then a tool battery but still small compared to what we deal with .

it shorted out somehow and went into thermal runaway .

5 5lbs extinguishers did pretty much nothing to put it out .

call the fire dept . They put it in a box and brought it outside and doused it with water for about an hour to smother it snd extinguished the flames .


Fire dept recommends class D extinguisher

but it’s still a***** ton of water to put out a lithium fire .


No reason to be scared of lithium, but treat it with respect and you will be ok . Keeping the batteries separate from everything else is a great idea .

 

Me neither. If anything I'm headed in the opposite direction. I'd like to reduce the electrical system in a car to the absolute bare minimum.

I remember when the real environmentalists were aging hippies who actually believed in "do your own thing." In the old off-grid/alternative energy movement, the wisdom was to treat electricity as the premium energy form reserved for only that which you can't run in other ways, i.e. lighting and communications. You'd try to run everything else on something other than electricity: heating functions by biogas or passive photothermal solar, mechanical rotating functions directly by wind or water, etc. etc. etc. I reckon that that is still sound thinking.

"I am ready to go backwards when it comes to technology." Marxism and Madison Avenue both push technological determinism, with a simplistic linear model with a clear "forwards" and a clear "backwards": a picture of proud Technology marching where it would, pursued by breathless Capital. But it's quite wrong.

There is no backwards, because there is no forwards; it's all a random-looking squiggly line. Every innovation is a turning, one among an infinite number of other possible turnings which might have happened at that juncture — and could happen right now. Which one becomes the dominant paradigm is less a matter of technology than of good reasons and real reasons, i.e. politics in the most basic sense.