Speaking about batteries ... is it dangerous to keep old phones around?
Could their batteries start to burn at some point? I mean when not using the phone at all, just keeping it in a drawer, turned off.
Could their batteries start to burn at some point? I mean when not using the phone at all, just keeping it in a drawer, turned off.
We have billions and billions of old devices with ancient batteries laying around, pretty much every house in the developed world has at least one, more likely multiple, lithium batteries laying around dead for years.
There is no need to do research or dig into it, the experiment has already been running for years in every house in the nation, and random battery fires are still rare enough to be news worthy. If you find a forbidden pillow (swelled battery pouch), dispose of it, but even those almost never convert to fire/explosion.
Lithium batteries are just prime fear porn for the media to run with. New and scary technology. But the statistics paint a wildly different picture.
If they're not swelling, it's fine. If they're swelling, get them out of the house, preferaly into a metal bucket filled with sand.
Letting phone batteries drain naturally is pretty safe, because just leaving it in a low-power mode over time will cause it to self-drain at a pretty slow pace over several months. They should still be disposed of with electronics recycling so that the toxic stuff can be handled, but leaving a phone in a drawer is normally safe. Software bugs that try to turn the phone on into a high-power state right at the safety threshold are the biggest risks, or that you might try to turn it on yourself right at the safety threshold.
Phone fires are typically from software bugs that fail to cut power at the safety threshold, either while a user is trying to squeeze out the last few percent of battery, or if they are in luggage and presumably jostled and buttons keep getting pushed.
So an explosion is _less likely_ than for a battery actively in use, but not impossible. Lithium ion batteries aren’t collectibles.
That's basically just saying "you can burn anything" but in words that are attrativce to the audiences biases.
Yeah, there's a bit more to go wrong with a dead battery than the plastic and whatnot device it's in but if it can't ignite itself it can't ignite itself and that's more or less the end of the story.
1: pp.28. https://www.crepim.fr/DOCS_CLIENT/Aircraft-FAA-Energy%20Dens...
My attic and furnished top floor room adjacent to it can on a bad day get to 110 without the attic fan on. Very old NE colonial on a hill getting full sun from sunrise to sunset.
Items i cannot keep up there, as I have watched them explode or turn into puddles of goo: Aersol cans (oils, cleaners, sunscreen etc) Normal squeeze trigger bottles (IE, chemical cleaners, auto detailer) Tapes, adhesives Electronics
This single event made me a bit more cautious about batteries in general. There are decades of no accidents and then unexpectedly something like this happens.
[0] Yest I still think Kinect was ahead of its time and I'm very sorry it got discontinued
I won’t be storing such items in combustible containers anymore even though the risk is pretty low and they mostly just swell.