Comment by floatrock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by floatrock | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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