Following the recent thread about the dangers of car battery (type) chargers see:
In message , Michael Chare writes
I bet he was well insured ...
prolly a basic transformer and rectifier type charger, lead acid battery, and one of the cells shorted out.
tho could have been a 'proper' charger that malfunctioned, i had that happen once, my last motorhome, had a proper 3 stage charger that was designed to be connected and left on permanantly,
went out for a walk one night, came back to the campsite and saw a puddle under the van, right under where the battery locker was, looked under and saw the battery vent tube emitting gasses and water violently,
shot into the van and found the charger was red hot, shut it off, and noticed the battery meter was showing over 19 volts off charge, the battery was almost as hot as the charger, luckily the battery survived, was one of those mega expensive elecsol carbon fiber jobbies, lasted another 7 years of abuse before i finaly killed it after it spent 2 years starting the engine in my current motorhome)
when i took the charger appart i found a single power transistor had blown, typicaly of these transistors it shorted when it blew, and allowed full voltage and current into a fully charged battery,
if we'd have gone into the cucco clock museum as we wanted to (we were in the town of titisee in the black forrest) the van would prolly have been a smouldering wreck when we got back.
I fly electric model airplanes, using lithium polymer batteries, now those buggers can be leathal if not handled properly, lots of horror stories of them being dropped and bursting into flames (they dont have a solid case, just the chemicals in a plaggy bag, hence they weigh a quarter of what the equivelent ni-cad pack weighs)
But charge a li-po wrong and they enter thermal runaway very fast, all you can do if that happens is chuck it outside and watch the fireworks.
In message , gazz writes
Do you do it competitively ? i.e. go in for competitions or just for fun ?
just for fun, got an electric glider with a camera on it at the moment, just gotta wait for the weather to get hotter season to take it up again and play the 'hunt the nude sunbathers' game :)
Have you got one of these:
Explosions in battery charging areas - and resulting fires used to be pretty common. But then so are other forms of electrical fires.
My trickle charger never exceeds about 2 amps. So would it be a good idea to put a 5 amp fuse in one of the leads to the battery?
In message , Michael Chare writes
of S E Asia
Safest thing is to put laptops and mobile phones in a bath full of water before charging - that should contain any battery explosion.
naahaa, li-po and li-ions can still burn under water,
the only way to put a burning li-po out is to bury it in sand, so you need to place the phone on the floor and tip a bucket of sand over it before charging if your worried about it :)
there are lots of companies making scare videos of li-po's catching fire, the most prominent is a company that sells a charging sack that can contain the fire, some people get so scared when they see the li-po shooting 3 foot flames in the vid they gove up and go back to ni-cads,
what they dont get is the company that made the video deliberately fired the battery by pumping about 20 amps at twice the rated charge voltage into it, even a ni-cad would protest at that abuse.
Nah, just make sure you only ever try to charge one when at the beach.
The fire may have started in the battery charger but the explosion could well have been through a poorly ventilated area and a gassing battery. Gassing batteries can cause pretty spectacular explosions, as several submarines found out to their cost, killed a few crew in the process. One was down to some 'erbert hanging his submarine sweater over one of the battery ventilation vents. Although boats were fitted with catalytic convertors, if the ventilation wasn't up to snuff, big boom.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "gazz" saying something like:
This would be at Titisee, yes?
In message , Grimly Curmudgeon writes
Anywhere Muff Cove ?
... also good for diving, I hear
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