Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Lithiun-ion batteries fire

Yesterday my best friend, had the controller fail, solar to battery setup! The result was a very interesting fire! Luckly no one was hurt, and he only lost one out building. The most interesting part to me, was the batteries melting down like white phosphorus, bubbling and burning. Interesting stuff, I had heard about lithium-ion causing fires, never observed one until yesterday. The cause is what the fire department and my friend assumed!! Should know for certin in a couple days.

Mice

Flied Mice

🥢

No bad controller

Mice, squirrels, rabbits are all amateur electricians. Never let them near the stuff.

Every single lithium battery fire that I know about is caused by something else. The concern certainly is once a lithium fire starts, it is difficult to extinguish. Realize too that there are many different chemical make up of different batteries and any with lithium get lumped into "lithium batteries" even though some are very safe.

I agree 100%! My friend is a sparky, has been an electrician for 50 years. I believe cheap components, without any redundant safeties caused it, as does the Fire Marshall. Just passing info not debating reasons. After all it's 100% guessing, without investigation, done yesterday by the fire department. I kept thinking of a ghost ship, full of electric cars, melting down at sea. Being ignorant about lithium-ion and solar charging, njust thought I would share.

And here I am in the process of acquiring, installing, and programming a new charger for a 200-amp hr battery.

I assume yours is Lifepo4? That's different from the Li ion and they're supposed to be safer.

BTW, how many times have you seen lithium ion spelled 'iron'? Many, many

No idea if it's still in effect but back before I retired you couldn't ship lithium batteries via air at all through UPS or FedEx -- only allowed via their ground service. Reason given was they had a known potential to catch fire.

There are several videos of parked EV vehicles catching on fire. All makes and models. Once they catch on fire, they are much harder to extinguish. There are cases where wrecked EV vehicles have caught fire days after being parked in wrecking yards. Some countries in Europe put EV cars in tanks of water for days in wrecking yards, before attempting to demolish them.

Toyota, for example, uses all lithium ion batteries in it's hybrids. That's not the newer Lifepo4 that's now used extensively in RV's.

Lithium plus water yields hydrogen. Ad a spark or enough heat and one has excitement. Add more water, and one has more excitement.

I have been thinking of doing the same, for our camper! I'll have it installed, buy a professional, for insurance pourposes, if I follow through!

Heym06:

A swap out to lithium may not be a plug and play process. Have the pros determine if your AC converter and solar panel controller are suitably functional. The Lithium units need some higher voltages (like in the realm of 14.4-14.6 V) and slightly different charging patterns to maximize their potential. Replacing both in my 2-year old Winnebago pull trailer, with a new programmable solar controller still on the way. Good luck,

I’m not sure exactly what happened, but a family member had a total building loss from a detached garage fire. Source was the Dewalt charger and battery. I’m pretty sure it was the older 14.4V or 18V stuff.

Unless the converter is programmable, you'll need to change it out for a lithium compatible charger. I just disconnected the converter and wired in a lithium charger going around it. There are lots of chargers on the market for under $50 that will do it but most don't put out enough amps and recharging takes a long time. I put in a 20amp charger and might wish I'd gone bigger yet. My solar controller puts out 40 amps.

Smart Alec here to advise : Lithium Iron is a thang; supposed to be better than Ion.

It's usually abbreviated Lifepo4, lithium ferrophosphate. The problem is that many people talking about Li ion are adding an 'r' which makes it something different.