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Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

Be extremely careful about damaged batteries, they are a major fire risk indoors. Strongly recommend outdoors disassembly away from structures. Metal ammo boxes are a good idea to store the batteries in as a lot of RC hobbyists know

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You can also purchase heavy zippered containers or Velcro-ed pouches made of fire-retardant fabric that are intended for use as safe charging containers for lithium polymer batteries.

I personally wouldn't trust anything less than steel ammo boxes. I've exploded batteries before and they get seriously hot. It will completely burn through anything without a lot of thermal mass. There are videos on youtube showing how cheaper pouches are completely useless

What is a battery fire like in an ammo box? I imagine flames shooting up, catching the ceiling on fire, and the bottom getting so hot that it catches the shelf on fire.

I made a lithium battery pack for amateur radio once. I was scared of it for a while and charged it in my fireplace. If it catches on fire, well, that's the place, right? (They were A123 cells though. Not as firey as other chemistries.)

A damaged battery's trapped energy is very explosive. A decent steel ammo box will contain the blast. It seems likely that a discarded battery found on the street might have been crushed or punctured by a vehicle wheel or similar https://youtu.be/HCGtRgBUHX8

You'd likely see if it had been damaged. The battery is protected by the plastic casing of the vape device.

Also, while ammo cans aren't 100% air-tight, they're pretty close to it.

Definitely. My dad sells ebike batteries and there was recent electrical fire in my parents garage due to one of the "dead" batteries exploding. Beyond just the initial fire from the battery, it also resulted in molten metal shrapnel ricocheting off the ceiling and started other fires simultaneously.

Thankfully we all awake and our garden hose was enough to put it out, but it was pretty clear to us that safe/proper battery storage is needed asap.

> garden hose

Please find a different solution. Lithium + water = boom. Don’t put water on an electrical fire of any kind, to be honest.

There's not really enough Lithium in Li-ion or LiPo batteries to cause issues when putting out fires. The way the fire department here currently deals with electric car fires is to first douse the battery pack with large amounts of water to put out the fire and to then park the car in a container with water to keep the battery submerged as it cools[0]. No explosions as of yet.

[0] https://www.hvzeeland.nl/pictures/7/4/4/152447.jpg

US ntsb Lithium-Ion Battery Fires in Electric Vehicles - Safety Risks to Emergency Responders

very informative https://youtu.be/J6eS6JzBn0k

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