Oddly behaving battery

[Drozd]

Ok...little freaked out by a battery a moment ago...
Sitting here flipping through the forums and suddenly I hear a sizzling and smell a little something funky...look over at the coffee table and lo and behold a VK is vaping away on it's own and leaving a scorch mark on the coffee table..
Seems a regular manual just decided to start up on it's own just sitting there and untouched for a couple of hours..needless to say that carto is done...and all cartos have been unscrewed from batteries now...
In all honesty...how often/ likely do these batteries do this? really kinda worried about the other KR8 batteries now since this one is just under a month old now...is this common with this model?
More a warning that people might want to disconnect batteries from carts at night than anything else...
I'm super freaked out about these and fire now expecially after some idiot burned down the apartment complex we were living in a year and a half ago and I barely got us and our 2 kids out with just the clothes we were wearing...and we lost our 2 cats..

Edit: to include video Clip...I do push the button twice to show that it's not the button sticking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv5ddMbOQQ0&feature=player_embedded

 

[V4Lis4me]

i normally unscrew all my carts,

but that being said......on occasion, with only one batt in particular.... i have noticed it spontaneously "igniting" unintentionally....

that batt, is on its death bed though..... and has recieved some major abuse....

yours may just be going bad, and its relatively young age seems to suggest that it may have just been a bad one...

... they all cant be perfect, but 95% of the time.... they are!

so just keep an eye on that one, and you should be fine... overall, its a great product.

 

[Cody M]

Wow, that's really odd that it'd just turn on like that. Maybe it was a loose switch that was really sensitive?

 

[Drozd]

Wow, that's really odd that it'd just turn on like that. Maybe it was a loose switch that was really sensitive?

no doubt it's odd...but sensitive to what?..it was just sitting there..I've heard rumors of that with autos..first time I heard of it with a manual though..
I had to take it into the other room and shoot a video clip of it...it's uploading now...

 

[Taryn]

I've never heard of that one but it is always a good idea to keep the cartomizer or atomizer off your battery if you are not using them for a length of time. You had one on since 12/30/09 when you shelved your KR8?

 

[Adrenalynn]

>> leaving a scorch mark on the coffee table..

So the 13 second cut-off also failed? That's especially odd since the microcontroller is, per-force, an embedded application and the 13 second cut-off is being run from a hardware timer - meaning that if it fails there is no power applied to the device. The battery goes in to the microcontroller, power comes out of the micro controller and into the transistor that switches the higher current power requirement to the battery. The microcontroller reads the switch status to kick that off. The switch is not wired directly to the high-current atomizer... And regardless, running the atomizer all the time won't exceed 85-90deg C. There's something of a built-in "fuse" in the process - the nitonol wire in the atomizer is around 24g and designed to be consumable. The feed wires from the battery are probably 26 or 28g (looking at one sitting a few inches from my hand at the moment) [Pulls out the micrometer] With the casing, the wire is only 0.42mm, so probably 0.40mm. Checking the size chart, 0.40386mm (damn I'm good) is 26g according to the AWG. Which means it should burn up itself around 2.5-3A. 3A delivered at 3.7v isn't going to give you much heat. Not enough to boil water at 1atm, certainly, so setting something on fire is going to require some pretty extreme low-temp flammability.

Maybe if it were sitting on top of a bed of flammable very fine fibers, especially if they were soaked in an accelerant. If the battery's integrity was violated and the lithium exposed to high humidity air you could get a thermal runaway condition causing open flame and if that were exposed to something flammable - cheap curtains, for example, then yeah, you could burn the house down...

If the 13 second auto-cutoff is failing, then the device had to have rewired itself. That's beyond "odd". I guess I could see a whole chain of each incredibly unlikely electrical failures leading to the auto-cutoff failing.

Did you have it sitting on the (now scorched) table resting in a bed of lighter fluid supported over Vaseline?

 

[Drozd]

I've never heard of that one but it is always a good idea to keep the cartomizer or atomizer off your battery if you are not using them for a length of time. You had one on since 12/30/09 when you shelved your KR8?

I got it on the 23rd..shelved it on the 30th...picked it up again this week to give it another fair shot after steve finally fixed my screwed up order (got that stuff on the 9th)..

 

[Drozd]

>> leaving a scorch mark on the coffee table..

So the 13 second cut-off also failed? That's especially odd since the microcontroller is, per-force, an embedded application and the 13 second cut-off is being run from a hardware timer - meaning that if it fails there is no power applied to the device. The battery goes in to the microcontroller, power comes out of the micro controller and into the transistor that switches the higher current power requirement to the battery. The microcontroller reads the switch status to kick that off. The switch is not wired directly to the high-current atomizer... And regardless, running the atomizer all the time won't exceed 85-90deg C. There's something of a built-in "fuse" in the process - the nitonol wire in the atomizer is around 24g and designed to be consumable. The feed wires from the battery are probably 26 or 28g (looking at one sitting a few inches from my hand at the moment) [Pulls out the micrometer] With the casing, the wire is only 0.42mm, so probably 0.40mm. Checking the size chart, 0.40386mm (damn I'm good) is 26g according to the AWG. Which means it should burn up itself around 2.5-3A. 3A delivered at 3.7v isn't going to give you much heat. Not enough to boil water at 1atm, certainly, so setting something on fire is going to require some pretty extreme low-temp flammability.

Maybe if it were sitting on top of a bed of flammable very fine fibers, especially if they were soaked in an accelerant. If the battery's integrity was violated and the lithium exposed to high humidity air you could get a thermal runaway condition causing open flame and if that were exposed to something flammable - cheap curtains, for example, then yeah, you could burn the house down...

If the 13 second auto-cutoff is failing, then the device had to have rewired itself. That's beyond "odd". I guess I could see a whole chain of each incredibly unlikely electrical failures leading to the auto-cutoff failing.

Did you have it sitting on the (now scorched) table resting in a bed of lighter fluid supported over Vaseline?

ok maybe scorch is a little strong...it was sitting on the table next to a couple other batteries and 510s...heard sizzling...looked over and it was lit up ..then turned off,,,lit up again...repeat...picked it up took the way too hot carto off and tossed that in a cup of water...and theres a mark/discoloration on the table where it was sitting..presumeably from the all too hot carto....the battery kept acting the same so I took it into the other room and took a little vid clip of it before putting it in a metal box (and in the center of a sand bucket) til it runs down and can be disposed of properly

No lighter fluid..no vaseline (we're astroglide (it's made from PG after all) people here or pjur )

 

[Adrenalynn]

Drop the battery in a 5 gallon bucket of very high salt-content salt water.

Salt water kills Li, and is the recommended disposal method for draining a battery to true zero with no stored chemical energy. It's the method used by hazmat to make Li* batteries "safe" for final transport and reclaimation.

 

[Adrenalynn]

Our local hazmat says:

Submerse the battery into bucket or tub of salt water. This container should have a lid,
but it should not need to be air-tight. Prepare a plastic container (do not use metal) of cold water. And mix in 1/2 cup of salt per gallon of water. Drop the battery into the salt water.
Allow the battery to remain in the tub of salt water for at least 2 weeks.

Remove the Lithium battery from the salt water, wrap it in newspaper or paper towels and place it in the normal trash. They are landfill safe.

(Sorry - I can't provide a link, you have to use an account number to get to the hazmat pages...)

 

[Adrenalynn]

>> it was lit up ..then turned off,,,lit up again...repeat..

Just gets weirder and weirder. The switch has to cycle for the timer to reset. If you hold the switch down it won't repeatedly cycle, the switch has to be released (at least on the two I have, which makes sense looking at the code and it being a hardware timer)

>> picked it up took the way too hot carto off

[deleted... couldn't find a gentle way to broach it...]

 

[Drozd]

Our local hazmat says:

Submerse the battery into bucket or tub of salt water. This container should have a lid,
but it should not need to be air-tight. Prepare a plastic container (do not use metal) of cold water. And mix in 1/2 cup of salt per gallon of water. Drop the battery into the salt water.
Allow the battery to remain in the tub of salt water for at least 2 weeks.

Remove the Lithium battery from the salt water, wrap it in newspaper or paper towels and place it in the normal trash. They are landfill safe.

(Sorry - I can't provide a link, you have to use an account number to get to the hazmat pages...)

can they be neutralized and then taken to some sort of battery recycling thing...I hate to send it to a landfill if they can be recycled somehow.

 

[Drozd]

>> it was lit up ..then turned off,,,lit up again...repeat..

Just gets weirder and weirder. The switch has to cycle for the timer to reset. If you hold the switch down it won't repeatedly cycle, the switch has to be released (at least on the two I have, which makes sense looking at the code and it being a hardware timer)

>> picked it up took the way too hot carto off

[deleted... couldn't find a gentle way to broach it...]

just wait...you can see what it's doing in a little bit...the vid clip is still uploading to youtube...and I'll edit the OP to include the clip

if you're trying to find a gentle way to broach why would how could I touch it...I'm an ironworker I got welding gloves laying all over the place (well not all over the place but more than one pair in a couple of different places) cuz I also have a 2 year old who likes to take em and put em on all the way up to his sholders and act like a "robot" (and well given my trade..touching hot metal ain't new to me anyway)

 

[Adrenalynn]

Well, I believe that once the cell has been exposed to salt water it's "corrupted".

A quickie web-search says they're "environmentally friendly" and "pitch 'em in the landfill".

I'm by no means an expert on the reclaimed properties of the chemistry. I just know how to "make 'em safe", beyond that, I would follow our hazmat's recommendations because we have a super aggressive hazmat recycling program. (when I moved recently, I was really impressed. I had 27 old CRT monitors, a handful of televisions, and a bunch of consumer electronics/computer stuff (500+ lbs). I put it in the driveway, called the number, the guy showed up the next day with the hazmat trailer, loaded it all up and carted it off for recycling, no charge (outside the the mandatory tax we pay in the land of fruits and nuts for recycling hazmat and electronics)

I take my lead-acid (open cell and SLA) batteries out to the metal recycling place, they pay good money to reclaim the lead and other metals.

 

[Drozd]

ok video edited into OP...the frequency changes...that's just something shot real quick of generally what it's doing

 

[Adrenalynn]

There's a short in the switch. I was expecting from the description that it was continuously cycling, which doesn't appear to be happening. It appears the membrane in the switch is failing, at a guess. It doesn't seem to be happening even as frequently as I vape ( ), so I'm surprised it's scorching things, but it's definitely a failed switch.

 

[Drozd]

There's a short in the switch. I was expecting from the description that it was continuously cycling, which doesn't appear to be happening. It appears the membrane in the switch is failing, at a guess. It doesn't seem to be happening even as frequently as I vape ( ), so I'm surprised it's scorching things, but it's definitely a failed switch.

it does happen more frequently...that's just what I happened to shoot...
And here I thought manuals over autos would be less prone to this as long as the button wasn't sticking and because they are sealed...I was misguided in that thinking..
Again it was more a watch your batteries and disconnect your cartos when unattended thing than anything else...

 

[Adrenalynn]

Yeah - not going to set anything on fire though. And it'd be a race between the nitonol wire failing (thus rendering it harmless) and the battery discharging anyway.

Any consumer device can fail in an undesirable state, and those plugged into line voltage can do so catastrophically, even when properly fused. We're all sitting on massive bombs. I've seen CRT monitors go up in flames. I had a space heater go once and that was really ugly (I tossed it out of a second story window onto the driveway in the rain when it caught fire. ) But there's just not enough flammable fuel to sustain much combustion in modern fire ......ant construction without a LOT of heat/open-flame being added to the mix. All fires require three components: Heat (and a lot of it), an Oxidizer (oxygen), and fuel. Take any one away and you can't sustain combustion. In your example you didn't have enough heat or fuel. In an oxygen rich environment, that could change though. Probably wouldn't be good to leave it in an oxygen filled tent with grain dust (or artificial coffee creamer) circulating.

If we all want to be really safe, we should throw the breaker on our mains panels, and live in concrete construction in an empty shell... And that still assumes that spontaneous combustion is a load of malarkey.

We just happen to be talking about an ecigarette here, again, any consumer electronics are inherently dangerous to some extent. There's just not enough potential energy stored in an e-cigarette to get terribly excited about, imho. Especially if we go comparing it to a burning cigarette, or the butane in a lighter (shiver!). Now _there's_ some stored potential energy for you! Talk about a bomb waiting to happen!

 

[Drozd]

Yeah - not going to set anything on fire though. And it'd be a race between the nitonol wire failing (thus rendering it harmless) and the battery discharging anyway.

Any consumer device can fail in an undesirable state, and those plugged into line voltage can do so catastrophically, even when properly fused. We're all sitting on massive bombs. I've seen CRT monitors go up in flames. I had a space heater go once and that was really ugly (I tossed it out of a second story window onto the driveway in the rain when it caught fire. ) But there's just not enough flammable fuel to sustain much combustion in modern fire ......ant construction without a LOT of heat/open-flame being added to the mix. All fires require three components: Heat (and a lot of it), an Oxidizer (oxygen), and fuel. Take any one away and you can't sustain combustion. In your example you didn't have enough heat or fuel. In an oxygen rich environment, that could change though. Probably wouldn't be good to leave it in an oxygen filled tent with grain dust (or artificial coffee creamer) circulating.

If we all want to be really safe, we should throw the breaker on our mains panels, and live in concrete construction in an empty shell... And that still assumes that spontaneous combustion is a load of malarkey.This part amuses me because I'm looking at building a straw bale house that relies heavily on solar and wind

We just happen to be talking about an ecigarette here, again, any consumer electronics are inherently dangerous to some extent. There's just not enough potential energy stored in an e-cigarette to get terribly excited about, imho. Especially if we go comparing it to a burning cigarette, or the butane in a lighter (shiver!). Now _there's_ some stored potential energy for you! Talk about a bomb waiting to happen!

Aye, I'm just still very skittish about fires in general might have something to do with the apartment complex I was in burning down a year and a half ago cuz some kid was playing with fireworks..lol my landlord got mad because one of the first thing I did when I moved into this place was replace ALL her outlets with gfi plugs...all brewing supplies are kept locked in the basement..all dyes and woodstains and anything flamable liquid oriented is regulated to the seperate garage (even made the fiance give up on those gel based candles that she likes so much), power tools too...and once we switched to PVs the lighters wen't out there too (I did grant her a reprieve as far as her rubbing alcohol and nail polish remover go, but barely)...I suppose in the bach of my mind I know it wouldn't burn a table down...but if it somehow would have been between couch cushions or got knocked down onto the carpet i dunno, not looking to experiment with what will or wont start a fire

 

[Dkrom68]

Alot of times the button sticks on the battery and thats why the do that