Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This is Germany. Here's a summary of the safety regulations.[1] Safety testing by an "accredited laboratory" is required.[2]

The New York City Fire Department reports that lithium-ion battery fires are a leading cause of fires and fire deaths in NYC.[3] NYFD got the city to require UL or equivalent testing for lithium battery fires.[4] This is working for sales within NYC but Amazon is still selling batteries with fake UL stickers.

NYC's big problem is e-bikes and scooters being charged in apartments and stores. Several hundred of those a year now, and they tend to be severe fires. Entire e-bike stores have blown up. Those things need to be lithium-iron phosphate until solid state batteries become affordable.

(A good political move would be to get the incoming administration to require UL or better certification for anything imported that has a lithium-ion battery or a wall plug.)

[1] https://www.batterietechnikum.kit.edu/downloads/Safety_Guide...

[2] https://www.tuvsud.com/en-us/resource-centre/blogs/mobility-...

[3] https://www.nyc.gov/site/fdny/news/Y40203/fdny-warns-lithium...

[4] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fdny-is-trying-to-curb-lit...

It's important to differentiate a "Battery Home Storage" system like a powerwall, an EV, or even a bunch of stackable ecoflow's sold at Costco from small-enough-to-be-hackable e-bikes and scooters. Asphalt and gasoline are both "petroleum products", but completely different worlds.

The NYC problems are caused largely by stores and race-to-the-bottom retailers doing DIY spot-welding, homebrew extending of battery packs with the cheapest cells found off aliexpress (and skipping the engineerey-bits like cell testing and cell balancing), and going for the cheapest chargers that skip things like a BMS or any regulator circuitry because it shaves a few bucks in power ICs.

You'll see these things in the $100-1000 battery market.

Your powerwalls and EV's are expensive enough that they probably didn't have to cut those corners. Plus the installation should be permitted and installed.

I'd love to have Amazon require UL certification for anything with burn-the-house-down risk, but this defeats the whole purpose of the cheap-off-the-boat business model of Amazon so that won't happen. "We're just a marketplace, sellers should be able to sell whatever they want." Besides the outright fraud on there, there's also subtle fakery like "UL Certified" electronics where if you take the time to lookup the certification number, you see all that's actually certified is the steel box meets UL "steel box" box standards, nothing about what's actually inside.

UL is also not the be all and end all. You can build a UL certified pack with pretty shit cells. The most important aspect of a good battery is just use good quality cells that don't blow up.

LG produced a bad batch a few years ago and caused a bunch of fires, while other batteries in the same circumstance were perfectly fine.

Cell quality is one thing, but it is also possible and necessary to ensure that cell failures do not cause a thermal cascade that causes adjacent cells to fail. The whole "pack caught fire because of one cell" thing is optional. Ideally a catastrophic cell failure results in some venting of gas and a bunch of blown fuses at the cell interconnect level.

The level of increased risk depends on how many cells are in the battery. A large battery will need to be well-protected against cascading thermal runaway, but a battery with 2 or 3 cells there isn't much difference.

The need for reigning in of cheap dangerous batteries really can’t be understated. There’s so much readily available houseburner junk out there.

I wonder what is going to happen to all the LiIon batteries in cheap gadgets that are being stored in garages and basements. What happens to them in 20-50 years?

They self discharge and become inert, unless Someone plugs them in. They won’t likely just catch fire, but there will be (is) a lot of dangerous to use junk out there.

I just decommissioned about a dozen Li-po batteries from old drone projects. This involves making them truly inert. There was a LOT (>50%) of energy in those batteries after 4 years.

There's an art collective around here that had a massive fire that started from a cell phone that had been held in a lost and found bucket for some years. Apparently it just caught fire one day.

Shit. I have old phones in boxes in boxes that I've forgotten about.

How worried should I be?

It's not likely to catch fire, but... try to get rid of them.

There are likely billions of abandoned devices with lithium batteries sitting the in the back of drawers all over the country, and fires from them randomly bursting into flames seems pretty rare.

But even if 1000 of these things burst into flames a day, that is still 0.04% chance of any given device burning up in a year.

If you are concerned about them, discharge the batteries completely. If you leave the battery discharged, it (very likely) won't start a fire. But it will also continue to self-discharge, which will ruin the battery over time. In which case, the device is likely junk anyway, so you might as well just take them in to be recycled now rather than later.

Just please do NOT throw them in the garbage.

The biggest danger is trying to recharge them after they have been stored for a long time. The anode and cathode might short-circuit and then a fire will likely start. If you want to check out an old gadget or battery make sure to watch it while charging and have a fire safe container or a plan to extinguish the fire at hand.

I've become pretty conservative with old phones, laptops, and the like. If I'm not going to use them/have them repaired I put them somewhere safe and recycle them.

Damn. Art is getting hardcore.

There is a difference between something that stores 5,000 joules (small battery) and 50,000,000 joules (tesla power wall).

Or overstated.

I'm surprised courts have not already held Amazon accountable. They typically won't accept arguments that someone is just a seller, particularly when someone has "deep pockets"

Is amazon the seller or the platform? I think it depends on the product.

The courts don't have to care. There is a good arguement that amazon (unlike ebay) is trying to hide the seller and so should be seller.

Mostly amazon has deep pockets and can be brought to court.

The incoming administration doesn't seem to really be pro upregulating anything. In fact core members of their team believe the firefighters have had way too much political power already in building requirements, etc.

They don't have to add regulations. They just have to suggest that Amazon actually enforce the regulations on the books, instead of allowing fake UL/ETL listings to be accepted as seems Amazon's common practice.

Just tell them that enforcing these regulations will hurt Bezos who owns the Washington Post.

There shouldn't have to be any political reasons at all to enforce safety testing listings, and I would actively discourage anyone from taking that path regardless of their views on any given administration.

Far too many Chinese vendors just treat the "UL circle" as a required marking to forge, along with everything else they're forging on the items. http://www.righto.com/2016/03/counterfeit-macbook-charger-te... is a good teardown that highlights the problems with the fakes.

Amazon has had more than enough chances to solve this problem somehow or another, and it's clear they do not care about it at this point. They cannot claim ignorance after a decade of people highlighting the problems to them. As much as I don't like Walmart, I'd go to Walmart over Amazon for anything electronic (realistically, I'll buy NewEgg or B&H Photo for most things), because I have somewhat more faith in Walmart's supply chains to actually get me the thing I'm buying, vs "binned product fraud" that seems to be Amazon's bread and butter these days.

"Fraudulent markings on poorly designed, unsafe electronics that lack all the safety systems that the markings indicate exist" isn't a political problem. It's a basic consumer safety problem.

Walmart has the same exact marketplace sellers and the same exact problems as Amazon (unless perhaps you go to their brick and mortar stores). The only solution is to shop for only brands that are known to be good and have a reputation to protect, which of course doesn't scale very well beyond our personal preferences.

While they make it a pain and constantly reset it, it is still possible to set the filter for Walmart only on their website. I'm not sure shopping for known good brands works since counterfeits are so prevalent and many third party sellers on walmart seem to just be running an Amazon reshipping service.

I'll go to one of their physical locations if I want something that plugs into the wall. It's likely to be actually what it says on the box, if I do that.

If you tell them that they'll go and ask him for a bribe to avoid tariffs and regulation enforcement.

Better to stick to basic racism and conspiracy thinking and say the China batteries are leaked from a lab to intentionally burn down American patriots homes.

It’s time to enforce these on state and state compact levels tbh.

Tariffs are regulations.

Depending on which requirement they mean, that case is actually interesting. There's a good video from Not Just Bikes about it https://youtu.be/j2dHFC31VtQ ("How American Fire Departments are Getting People Killed")

This is a great video.

The main point is that fire departments oppose bike lanes and safer street designs because of their unnecessarily giant fire trucks.

Indeed there's been a LOT of e-bike battery fires, so that's why with designers and engineers in France we've spent some time designing a battery casing that efficiently contains explosions and flames, to safeguard your home, you can check it here if interested! (it's also a repairable battery, so it saves CO2 compared to a standard battery over the long term. Oh, and we're in the process of doing the UL certification right now)

https://get.gouach.com

This looks great! User-swappable cells, fire-proof casing, convenient handle. Price is still competitive.

I'm currently charging my eBike battery at home in the oven, to contain thermal runaway should it ever happen. This thing would solve this.

Thanks so much!! Appreciated

I've got a tern e-bike with a Bosch motor, I love taking it on long rides. You've made a compelling case for replacing the existing battery, but what does the story look like for replacing cells in 5 years? Do I have to replace them all at once? One at a time as they fail?

Also, how swappable or parallel are the batteries? I'd love to be able to have two batteries for days when I want to ride 100 miles. My existing Bosch battery only has a ~60 mile range and I'd love to push that up.

Also, do they have a usb port on the battery for power? Running lights, charging my phone, or powering a GoPro from the bike battery would be so helpful.

Yes! It will work, and you can also combine it to have a dual battery setup

you can look at the Datex Battery Mixer that we sell as an option when checking out

The only way I could see this being regulated by the incoming admin is if tariffs make the batteries too expensive which would only decrease the scope. The cult claims to want to eliminate all government regulation.

I feel like tariffs may make the problem worse as the cheaper the battery, the smaller the tariff hit, and so people may be incentivised to go even further down the quality ladder

Thinking about it, this sounds spot on.

I'd like to see wider adoption of battery swaps. This would mostly solve the problems you describe.

https://www.gogoro.com/gogoro-network/

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