battery explosion, what happened?

[aetherolea]

about a month ago my battery exploded and i'm still unsure of why it happened. I've searched the forums for explanation and come up empty.

I was using a mechanical mod and a verified authentic efest 2800mAh 35A battery. I had built dual vertical coils at 0.76ohm's. when i dry fired the coils to squish them together they didn't heat, the mod's button got warm and the battery shot out of the mod like a bullet. there are scorch marks on my ceiling from the atomizer, the battery casing and the metal inside the battery. the battery was still glowing red hot when it landed on my flood and caught the floor on fire. The pressure that built up was so great that it stripped the rather large thick threads of my mod. the kick from the battery firing caused me to punch my leg so hard that i broke the skin and had a bruise about 6in across. Other than that i'm fine, but if i had been hitting it i would have likely died.

Lets skip the obvious suggestion. I'm never using a mech mod again, and to those who do please use protected batteries.

the battery i used had several chips in the casing that i had repaired with nail polish. i had also over drained the battery several times. It was my first time using a mech mod and i hadn't gotten a rhythm with it yet

The mod was also suspect, it wold have a fully charged new battery in it an not fire all of the time. this is why earlier that day i had purchased an ipv d2 mod. I was only using the mech mod to bild new coils on the new chinese triple coil rampage dripper i had just gotten in the mail. the mod may also have been a clone, i'm not sure because it was given to me.

I am fairly certain that the legs of my coils were not touching each other to cause a short. I feel this way because i had deliberatly bent them out of the way so that they weren't.

I also feel that the atomizer wan't at fault because i had built coils on it once before but i didn't like them so after i dried the cotton once i discarded them.

I had given up on figuring out what exactly happened until i was talking with a physist at my new job. They told me that coils create an electromagnetic field that could have caused them to short even though they wern't touching. He said that i definitely did something very wrong when building them. That the over draining of the battery would actually make the amperage of the battery increase. He also said that if i had the coils positioned with the top going into the + on both of them, or wrapped in opposite directions it could have caused a short even if they weren't physically touching. (I think i'm remembering that correctly, point is there might be a wrong way to put them in). I've been building coils for a while and always wrap them the same way.

So any thoughts? I'm mostly curiose at this point because i'm getting another rampage in the mail and want to build vertical coils.

 

[Robert Cromwell]

Did you squish the coil windings together with a metal object while holding the fire button? If so it was a dead short on the battery.

 

[WillyZee]

the battery i used had several chips in the casing that i had repaired with nail polish. i had also over drained the battery several times. It was my first time using a mech mod and i hadn't gotten a rhythm with it yet

This likely helped ^^^

 

[Foggy Road]

Please excuse me

 

[Robert Cromwell]

Also was it a hybrid top mod and maybe the atty came loose or the center pin did not protrude enough?

 

[Elizabeth Baldwin]

Efest batteries are just rewrapped junk. I'd never trust one in any of my regulated mods with safety features, much less a mech mod. I can't believe people still buy Efest with Sony and samsung out there.

On top of that the battery had nicks in it and you just covered it with nail polish?

Battery safety is very important. Any time you find something "off" about your battery it's best to discard it and buy a new one... but never buy efest batteries. I don't care if they're on sale for $1 a piece... they couldn't pay me to use them!

I suggest you do some research about batteries. Do a search right here on ECF. Baditude has a great blog about batteries and safety.

 

[Elizabeth Baldwin]

The mod was also suspect, it wold have a fully charged new battery in it an not fire all of the time. this is why earlier that day i had purchased an ipv d2 mod. I was only using the mech mod to bild new coils on the new chinese triple coil rampage dripper i had just gotten in the mail. the mod may also have been a clone, i'm not sure because it was given to me.

It likely wouldn't fire because it's well known that efest's so called 35A batteries are not actually 35a! The battery couldn't handle it so it just wouldn't fire the mod... which is a miracle. Usually it will fire on a mech mod anyway and just vent the battery and explode. Which eventually did happen.

 

[Lessifer]

Some possibilities:

You say you bent the legs, why not clip them? Any chance they came into contact with the top cap or deck?

Over draining the batteries could have stressed them so much that they couldn't handle the 0.76ohm build.

Did you actually check the build in the atomizer to make sure it wasn't shorted?

Possibly bad insulator in the atomizer, dead short.

Possibly bad insulator in the mod, dead short.

Foreign object in the firing mechanism?

 

[Kevin littell]

More likely a hard short from the mod....You did say it sometimes wouldnt fire correctly.....

 

[aetherolea]

It likely wouldn't fire because it's well known that efest's so called 35A batteries are not actually 35a! The battery couldn't handle it so it just wouldn't fire the mod... which is a miracle. Usually it will fire on a mech mod anyway and just vent the battery and explode. Which eventually did happen.

I had the same problem with some brand new IRM 3600mAh 30A batteries

 

[aetherolea]

Some possibilities:

You say you bent the legs, why not clip them? Any chance they came into contact with the top cap or deck?
I leave the legs on while I'm adjusting the coils to make them fire evenly.

Over draining the batteries could have stressed them so much that they couldn't handle the 0.76ohm build.
That was my first thoght when it happened, I'm only questioning its status as lead hypothesis because of what the physicist said.

Did you actually check the build in the atomizer to make sure it wasn't shorted?
I didn't use or have any special equipment for that. The coils read 0.76ohms on my ohm reader so i assume that means they were fine. The coils were in live ohms wise for what steam engine said they should be.

Possibly bad insulator in the atomizer, dead short.
Something would have had to have damaged the atomizer between the time i removed the original working coils and put on the new one. I built some ribbon coils on it and decided the didn't heat up quick enough (I've never gotten ribbon to heat up faster than 26agw wire) so i removed them.

Possibly bad insulator in the mod, dead short.
mod had a copper screw that you could turn in and out to compensate for different atomizers stem heights and battery lengths. If it was being troublesome i would fiddle with that sometimes to make it work, and other times i would turn the bottom contact a few degrees until it worked. This also contributed to a few over-drains of my batteries because i had a hard time knowing if it was the mod or the battery.

Foreign object in the firing mechanism?
Possible, but i doubt it. I regularly clean the firing pin with vinegar and dry it out with a paper towel. Maybe some paper towel flakes got in there and acted as an insulator, but i don't think that's what caused the problem.

 

[Lessifer]

Some possibilities:
Over draining the batteries could have stressed them so much that they couldn't handle the 0.76ohm build.
That was my first thoght when it happened, I'm only questioning its status as lead hypothesis because of what the physicist said.
Possibly bad insulator in the mod, dead short.
mod had a copper screw that you could turn in and out to compensate for different atomizers stem heights and battery lengths. If it was being troublesome i would fiddle with that sometimes to make it work, and other times i would turn the bottom contact a few degrees until it worked. This also contributed to a few over-drains of my batteries because i had a hard time knowing if it was the mod or the battery.

These two seem like the most promising to me, but I'm not an expert.

It would be hard to try to diagnose a short in the mod, without having the actual mod, but if it was mis-firing at times, I'm guessing this was it. In the future, if you have a mod that won't fire, it would be best to figure out exactly why before using it. If something was loose, or making a bad contact, it could have shifted and then shorted.

Again, not an expert, but I believe batteries that have been repeatedly over stressed significantly lose their capacity to handle high amp draws.

I've never heard of a magnetic field shorting a circuit, so I really don't think that's what happened, but I'm definitely not a physicist.

 

[classwife]

For now moving this to Mechmods from Rebuildable Atomizer Systems

Will probably move it later to Batteries and Chargers...

 

[sofarsogood]

Is there a spot in the Guiness Book of World Records for most-mistakes-on-one-mech-mod?

I'm going to try a mech eventually but it will have a watt controled kick. Then I can just lie and say it's an unprotected mod with a .0000001 ohm coil blah blah blah.

 

[Mooch]

I had given up on figuring out what exactly happened until i was talking with a physist at my new job. They told me that coils create an electromagnetic field that could have caused them to short even though they wern't touching. He said that i definitely did something very wrong when building them. That the over draining of the battery would actually make the amperage of the battery increase. He also said that if i had the coils positioned with the top going into the + on both of them, or wrapped in opposite directions it could have caused a short even if they weren't physically touching. (I think i'm remembering that correctly, point is there might be a wrong way to put them in). I've been building coils for a while and always wrap them the same way.

So any thoughts? I'm mostly curiose at this point because i'm getting another rampage in the mail and want to build vertical coils.

No disrespect to that physicist, but...he's wrong. Completely.
With a high enough EM field you can get metal to move but that takes orders of magnitude more current then our mods use. And there's no way an EM field in a mod is going to conduct electrons through air. And no matter what you do to your batteries the current the battery delivers can't increase unless the load resistance goes down and/or the battery voltage goes up. When a battery is damaged the current it can deliver is actually reduced instead. The damage causes an increase in the internal resistance and a decrease in the capacity of the battery. This lowers the battery's voltage and shortens the time it can deliver the sane amount of current.

I thought @Robert Cromwell brought up a fantastic possible cause...using metal tweezers would short the coils. I didn't notice your response to his inquiry. Were you using metal tweezers when you pressed the fire button to dry fire and adjust the coils? Or did you not have the tweezers on the coils yet and noticed that they weren't getting hot without the tweezers being on the coils?

Even if the battery was badly damaged, in my opinion it was short-circuited somehow. A damaged battery drops in voltage very quickly and wouldn't heat up much at all with a 0.76 ohm build. Bringing a battery into thermal runaway is very, very hard to do without short-circuiting it. Not sure how this happened but keeping the wrap in perfect condition, meticulously checking and cleaning the mod, and not accepting the slightest malfunction without determining its cause before vaping again will help to prevent any more battery problems. Oh...and never overcharging, overheating, or overdischarging your batteries helps too.

 

[Bad Ninja]

Chipped wrapper + over drained/damaged battery seems the most obvious culprit.
Fingernail polish isn't a trustworthy insulator.
Quality undamaged batteries are a must with mechanical mods

 

[ElevenEleven]

OP, the same can happen with a regulated mod if you don't take care of your equipment. Just be safe.

P.S. Don't buy an off-brand battery ever again.

 

[mackman]

My opinion:"the battery i used had several chips in the casing that i had repaired with nail polish" = dead short with mod

 

[roxynoodle]

Yes, there were multiple possibilities.
1. That Efest is, at best, a 20A battery. Your other battery is not 30A either. Please buy some new batteries. Sony vtc4 for near 30A, or Samgsung or LG 20A batteries.
2. Do not use a battery with a torn wrapper in a mech. Rewrap batteries with damaged wrappers.
3. Check batteries periodically with a DMM so you don't over discharge them.
4. Do a second resistance check on your atty with the top cap on for an RDA and the chimney barrel on for an RTA before firing your build.
5. Make sure when you squeeze your coils you aren't pressing the switch, or buy ceramic tipped tweezers.
6. Investigate the reason if a mod isn't firing/working correctly before using it again. Make needed repairs or adjustments. Its not worth trying to use over your safety.

Good luck, and I'm very glad you weren't hurt.

 

[Froth]

I'm never using a mech mod again, and to those who do please use protected batteries.

the battery i used had several chips in the casing that i had repaired with nail polish. i had also over drained the battery several times. It was my first time using a mech mod and i hadn't gotten a rhythm with it yet.

Battery neglect was likely the culprit, if you're careless with batteries they'll vent without even being in a mod at all. Honestly though we'll never really know because the explosion likely destroyed any evidence of what truly happened.

One thing I have to ask is please don't give battery advice after telling a story about how you almost just blew your face off with an exploding battery. Realistically if you actually believe the use of protected batteries in a mechanical mod is what should be done I'm not surprised you had a battery related incident because that advice is outdated and wrong. That's one of just a few huge no-no's anyone who seriously uses a mechanical mod on a daily basis would be able to tell you about, DO NOT use a protected battery in a mechanical mod as it is simply unsafe, the protection circuits can fail and cause very violent venting and almost every protected 18650 battery is a low-discharge sub 10A ICR Lithium-Ion chemistry which will vent extremely violently, the protection circuits are not fool proof they can and do fail.

Mechanical mods, protected batteries and protection chips
IMR batteries are the recommended choice for mechanical mods.

Most users of mech mods who have issues they blame on the mod don't truly seem to understand just how dangerous the device can become if they become careless or lazy, you were subject to just how serious that can be with your explosion incident, you became careless when you decided to put nail polish on the battery wrapper and assumed blindly that it would insulate the current, it most likely did not which likely lead to your incident.