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Comment by sxates | Hacker News Reader

I have 2 Tesla Powerwalls. I'm not too worried about the fire risk, as I haven't heard of any case of powerwall fire. The city seems worried about it though, my permits and inspections all have to go through the fire department which has slowed things down a lot.

Probably a good idea to install them somewhere that would be easy to flood with water if there was a problem though.

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If there is a fire indoors that you cannot extinguish very, very quickly, you need to immediately get out and call the emergency services. The longer you wait, the larger the fire gets and the less professionals can do about it.

Don't try to be a hero and flood batteries from your 10 litres/minute faucet. Just get out before you inhale too much smoke, faint, and die.

It might be a horrible idea to attempt to extinguish a lithium fire with water. [1]

[1] http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/290443/ddg#29...

Tesla's guidance for dealing with battery fires in their cars is to basically flood them. I think the idea is to keep the temperature down. The water won't extinguish it because it's a chemical fire, but you can use water to keep it from spiraling out of control.

Yes, it’s to keep the temperature down to not start secondary fires. You cannot stop thermal runway and must let it take its course.

However dumping water on mass amounts of stored electricity sounds scary.

This is something that I’ve wondered about. I’ve got a trio of Powerwalls in my unfinished basement. My town seemed cool with that - for the most part the inspector was totally geeking out over the setup and how clean the installation was.

I read about a lot of places that require Powerwalls to be outside or have additional fire suppression for inside. Anyone have suggestions for what I can do given that I’ve got these guys installed? I haven’t found much help on how to protect myself there.

> Probably a good idea to install them somewhere that would be easy to flood with water if there was a problem though.

I can see why the fire department was concerned with these batteries: https://youtu.be/cTJh_bzI0QQ?t=344

That's lithium metal though, lithium ion batteries don't behave like that. The flammable part is the electrolyte, and the high power density of lithium cells which produces a lot of heat when short-circuited.

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