I mean i know that after a battery had vented it looks and smells weird but how do you get to know when it's happening to you while vaping?
I thought i should ask you guys about it.
Thanks in advance for any inputs and suggestions.
Edit- i use an 18650 lg hg2 with the al85 and baby beast on a .6 coil and vape at around 30 to 40w.
Well you'll know _when_ it's venting, and you probably won't have a great deal of time to think about what to do. If you're with other people and you have the heart of a lion you might think about throwing yourself on top of it to save your comrades (just kidding, don't do that.) Once a battery has started to vent it generally can't be stopped, and your best bet is to get as far away from it as you can while it does its thing, and prepare yourself to deal with the aftermath once it's done doing its thing.
Luckily, the first part is probably going to be what you instinctively do anyway. The second part means making sure nothing is on fire, putting anything on fire out, and then getting away from the smoke until it has a chance to settle, because you don't really want to breathe that. It could well be more hazardous than diacetyl.
About the video posted above- I don't know what the batteries in that video were, but my guess is that they were ICR batteries (batteries based on Cobalt, basically.) The batteries you're using are INR batteries (based on a combination of Manganese and Nickel,) and are sometimes called "safe chemistry" batteries. This is a bit of misnomer, as you don't want to be around any venting battery, but I wouldn't expect them to vent quite _that_ spectacularly. I don't spend enough time around venting batteries to be on a first-name basis with them though, so take that with a grain of salt. (This distinction is also one of many reasons you don't want to go fishing for vape batteries in old laptop battery packs, unless you really know what you're doing, and probably even then.)
About explosions- if I take a small heap of gunpowder and light it on top of, say, a metal plate, what I will wind up with is essentially a violent fire. If I take that same heap of gunpowder and put it in a strong sealed enclosure I will have a primitive hand grenade. I don't want to be very near either, but one is far more dangerous than the other. This is why batteries "vent". They are designed to do so. They don't, on their own, really explode, if they vent adequately (though in extreme cases this might be a fine distinction.)
When we put batteries in mods we are putting them in enclosures, and we want to be sure those enclosures can "vent." This is _very_ likely to be the case with any popular commercial mod you buy these days. When you hear about people blowing their faces off... well, there was one incident in particular I think gave rise to that phrase, and IIRC
1) The mod was homemade (and of course unregulated,) and lacked any venting to speak of, and
2) The batteries involved were a very bad choice for the application. The batteries were also stacked in series, which is not inherently dangerous, but does require some precautions that, given the rest of the story, I'm not sure he took.
In other words, his situation and yours are miles apart, and while I have nothing but sympathy for him he did quite a lot of inadvisable things.
Note that there are a _lot_ of people out there vaping:
Many of them have no real idea that the equipment they're handling can be dangerous, and do remarkably foolish things with it, day after day, for years. For a tiny percentage of them, every once in a great while, something goes spectacularly wrong. Then we hear about it not only on the news but endlessly from friends, neighbors, and busybodies (but I repeat myself,) convinced we will shoot our eye out. For all that, most of these incidents end with minor property damage.
As Opinionated so eloquently pointed out, life is full of risk. Bad things sometimes happen, sometimes even when we have taken more precautions than were actually justified to avoid them. As long as you are even moderately cautious your batteries are likely going to be a lot less risky than lots of areas of your life you take for granted.
Toward that end, here are a couple of tips I didn't see above (but might have missed due to skimming) and a repeat or two:
- Buy batteries suitable for your application from a reputable source.
- Given your usage the charger is the place your batteries are most likely to vent. Use a decent charger, stay close while charging, and don't store or transport your batteries in the charger.
- This isn't really battery specific, but you do have a fire extinguisher or two on hand, right? If not- well worrying about batteries in that case is like worrying about whether you get enough anti-oxidants when you smoke a pack a day.
- Store and transport your batteries in a battery case. Don't ever put a battery in your pocket, and don't ever put one in a container with any loose metal objects... like change, for instance.
- Your battery's wraps are not just cosmetic (and if they came with aesthetically appealing wraps they are more than likely not very good batteries.) Take care not to damage them, inspect them regularly, and don't use or charge a battery if its wraps are damaged. Wraps are cheap, and it's easy to rewrap batteries.
And most of all... keep calm and carry on.
