Who has First Hand experienced a LiPo fire ?

[KenC]

As , so far,  a purely IC flyer going back to my first trainer  for RC and Baby Bee for control line as a kid ,  this electric thing has made me a little nervous. 

 

There are stories all over and everyone says they know someone , yes I Googled this site , but what I want to know is WHO HAS FIRST HAND  experience of a lipo fire ?  

What do you believe was the cause , and what have you done or learned since that experience ?   I guess there must be quite a few members here that fly electric, so lets see just how prevalent this experience is.   PLEASE no " I knew a guy" stories , first hand only.  

Edited July 1, 2023 by KenC

[David Holland 2]

I did have a 6s pack catch fire after a crash but the aircraft, a Black Horse Chipmunk, went in very hard after a mid-air completely severed the fuselage just aft of the wing. Very spectacular but hardly relevant in the circumstances. The experience was, however, sufficiently impressive to make me very sure that I did not want a replay inside the house!!

[GrumpyGnome]

I've experienced 2.

 

I charged a pack in my Mini Ultrastick as 3S, when it was actually 2S. This was before the days of more intelligent balance chargers. Plane was destroyed from wing forwards - was being charged outside on some flagstones.

 

A 4S pack ignited following a less than controlled arrival.  The battery pack had been ejected, along with esc. Both totally destroyed.

 

Both scary events. But didn't put me off leccy flight.

 

 

[Dickw]

I was flying (practising F5B competition stuff) with a friend, and he said a battery (10s 1300) didn't seem to suit the setup in his model so did I want to try it in mine. Seeing the possibility of a cheap additional battery I said yes. Part way through the flight a smoke trail appeared from the model, so I landed quickly, took the wings off (3 bolts!) as fast as I could, and we shook the battery out of the model on to the grass.

In F5B we push batteries very hard for short durations, and it appears that this particular battery had a dodgy cell that was not up to the job.

 

The receiver was supplied by a separate battery rather than BEC, but even so I lost signal (telemetry) shortly after landing and before getting the wings off when the fire burnt through the Rx wiring.

 

Only a couple of cells actually burnt, and the model was flying again the next week after a check over and new Rx wiring.

 

Dick

[KenC]

Great stories guys, thanks for posting..... I shall refrain from drawing any conclusions until this post has stood for a while .

[J D 8]

       I have a old Phase 3 Ef16 which I still fly now and then. About ten years ago shortly after lift off it started to behave a bit odd, intermittent contact with it but still enough control to swing round and come in for a landing.

   When nearly back to touch down I could see smoke exiting the aircraft, at this point all control went at about five/ten foot alt and it crashed. The canopy came off and the lipo was ejected onto the grass where it lay sizzling and smoking for some time.

  No idea what went wrong, batt had not been crashed before.

[leccyflyer]

In the very early days of lipos I witnessed first hand a large Cap 232 being burned to ashes at the Blackpool Fly-in, 2004. The large battery pack made up of a large number of Kokam 1500mah cells was being charged in the model, the charger failed to terminate the charge correctly and the pack lit off.  Despite two fire extinguishers and multiple bottles of water nobody was able to extinguish the blaze and it just had to be left to burn out - with repeated venting with flames as each cell ruptured.

 

The club reacted by installing a charging bench, at which all on-field charging must take place, not permitting any charging in the model, or in the car parking area, due to the concern that the uncontrollable fire took place surrounded by vehicles, which then had to be moved to a safe distance. Those measures were all in place by the time of the next fly-in. It illustrated to me how serious a lipo fire could be, to never, ever, without exception to charge, or store, a lipo pack in the model and to take proper precautions when charging.

 

[Shaun Walsh]

 A fellow club member flew his Wot-4 foamy into a picket fence at high speed and converted it into foam packing chips. The battery (a 3s 2200 if memory serves) was retrieved but it was now shaped like a capital letter J. The general consensus was that it probably wasn't a good idea to use it again and the risk involved in taking it home in the car was too great. The question was how to dispose of it. Another cub member went to his car and came back with a hammer and a long nail. The Lipo was placed on a concrete flag and the nail driven through it with a single blow (don't try this at home). After a second or two we were treated to some impressive pyrotechnics at the end of which we dumped the remains into a large bucket of water and at the end of the flying session dumped the cold, burnt out remains in the bin. 

Edited July 1, 2023 by Shaun Walsh

[David Davis]

Who has had first hand experience of a LiPo fire? Me!

 

I was charging a 3S 2200 LiPo. I had noticed that one cell was down compared to the others but I thought that the balance facility of the charger would take care of that. I left it charging in the cellar and after a while I smelt burning plastic. I did not pay much attention to that because I was using the oven, the washing machine and the dish washer at the same time. When I thought that LiPo had been charged I opened the cellar door and was greeted by THICK BLACK SMOKE! There's an outside door to the cellar so I opened that and found two small fires on the floor and the fuselages of two models, a Big Guff and a WOT 4 XL totally destroyed by the fire!

 

Two bucketsful of water put out the fires and I rebuilt the Big Guff fuselage. A clubmate rebuilt the tailsurfaces for me. Maybe I'll rebuild the XL, I still have the wing and it was my favourite model.

 

Since then I have never left a charging LiPo unsupervised, or if I have I have charged it outside.

 

[Ron Gray]

2 experiences. A fellow flyer nosed in about 200m away from the flight line resulting in smoke. Bearing in mind this was in the middle of the farmer’s field of nearly ripe wheat a couple of us legged it to the scene of the crash where we found the smoking LiPo still in the (foam) fuse. I pulled it out by its wires (stupid thing to do but got away with it) then we doused the LiPo with a couple of bottles of water which calmed things down and certainly prevented a crop fire.

 

Second occasion, I returned home after a good day’s flying with the trailer full of ancillary flying equipment, chair, stand, toolbox, starter box. The trailer has a lid that hinges at the front and has a waterproof seal and when I popped the lid I was met with a cloud of acrid smoke. In loading the trailer I had forgotten to take out the 5s 5000 LiPo starter battery and the 4s 4000 LiPo compressor battery and at some point on the journey home (15mins) the starter’ had obviously bounced about and it’s metal frame cut through the compressor battery setting that off which in turn set off the starter battery! Starter box and chair were destroyed and I learnt a valuable lesson.

[Paul De Tourtoulon]

Me, also 2 one my own silly fault, it was the start of the first ones to arrive in France and I soldered 4mm male and female connectors on one, I charged it up put it in my glider while talking🤪and plugged the battery plugs into themselves instead of the esc,  instant noises and smoke, I threw it to the ground where it burnt out.

 

N° ,2 I put one on charge in the garage and mowed the lawn, halfway through the mowing I got thirsty ( French summer😇) went into the garage just in time to witness it bursting into flames I threw a wet towel on it, which by luck was in the washing basket to be hung out, result one burnt towel set of charging cables and a greasy type of black swarf / grease, all over my 40 planes, my tools, motorbike and my convertible car.

 

 

[Engine Doctor]

Yes . A club members EDF doing a low fast pass across the field . Sudden smoke trail  😮 followed by a short afted burn ( flames out the back) 🤑 then crashed and burnt to a cinder. Just a small patch of burnt grass as grass wasnt dry. 

That was a few years ago now and i think charging an batery construction and chemistry has improved considerably.

[Colin Carpenter]

Seen two crashes , neither that bad , when lipo went up in flames. One landed in long grass and I pulled lipo out onto grass while it burn out. Other was a Parkzone Visionaire when club mate landed short , other side of hedge. Lipo went up in fuz, dunno why, and I pulled it out quickly whilst gently alight ! It melted one side of the nose which I rebuilt for him. Colin

[John Lee]

I'm another with 2 experiences.

 

The first was in the early days of Lipos with a tiny (50mAh?) 1s cell for one of those indoor micro helicopters popular about 15 years ago. I used the USB charger intended for a larger (100mAh?) cell from another model. A minute or two after connecting there was a flash & puff of smoke but fortunately the energy content of the cell was so little everything was easily dealt with. It did teach me a valuable lesson though and was instrumental in me adopting a very disciplined charging and storing process as I moved to an all electric fleet.

 

The second was at the RCHotel when a guest brought his ammo box out of winter storage at the Hotel at the start of his holiday. I was a few feet away when he opened the box, when there was a fizzing, smoke & then flames. It was quite an impressive fire. The cause was not known but the balance of probabilities was that it was a set of leads being caught in the box hinge or rim & shorting out.

 

I've also witness a couple of lipos being deliberately destroyed with the hammer & nail process after being damaged in a crash, as described by @Shaun Walsh

[MattyB]

I’ve seen a couple of fires, but as both were caused by, well… let’s call them “sub-optimal” operating procedures 😉, I won’t go into them here!

 

Suffice to say that electric flight is very safe if you follow the well documented best practices (check cell voltages for even balance before charging, don’t charge damaged or out of balance packs, always charge in balance mode, don’t charge unattended, don’t store packs at full charge which increases the chance of an internal short which causes a fire, store packs in appropriate containers such as ammo boxes or lipo sacks etc). If you don’t and/or you do stupid stuff, they can be pretty dangerous.

 

Ps - This guide from the BMFA is a good starter if you are new to lithium batteries. Grab a brew and give it a good read, particularly the bit about the now totally discredited salt water bath method of disposal, which is dangerous, polluting and entirely unnecessary (just discharge over a load to <1V/cell instead, it’s far far safer).

 

Edited July 1, 2023 by MattyB

[Phil Green]

Mine was back in 2012, at the MAA Fly-In at Flamborough, it was a Wot4 Foam-E and mid-flight plumes of white smoke appeared - ditched it quickly, ran over and separated the Lipo, the aftermath was like you'd forgotten that you left your cheese-on-toast under the grill half an hour ago.  And what a stink!

However, post mortem, we concluded it could have been the ESC that started it, since there were several interweb stories of burning ESCs supplied with the Wot-4 Foam-E.  Its likely as this was a perfectly good pack, not overcharged, not overworked and well looked after. A Loong-Max 3S 2200.   That Ripmax replaced the Foam-E without question indicated to me that there was a known ESC problem.

I can also vouch for Wayne Giles having a lipo fire, yes its a 2nd-hand account but Wayne is more than "a guy I knew".  Wayne is a career power-electronics professional, together we did the first real Lipo ESR meter. later adopted by Hobbyking.  He doesnt post here but it happened.
Cheers

Phil

[KenC]

More great stories , is there a chance we can date these incidents so that a good perspective can be obtained. 

[David Davis]

When I lived in England, the club secretary was a lovely man called Tony Salisbury. He was a very keen builder and but a pretty inexperienced pilot. He was exclusively an electric flyer and had built a large Piper Cub. He gave the model to a Ken Davies, a more experienced pilot. Ken took off and the model flew perfectly for several minutes, then on landing approach smoke started pouring from the model. It was just like something out of a film! Ken managed to land it and Tony ran across to it and removed the LiPo burning his hands in the process. Fortunately he had built a door into the side of fuselage. The LiPo continued to burn out on the grass. We all thought that Tony's soldering was not up to par!

 

Tony's occupation? He was a senior officer in the fire brigade!

 

He died shortly afterwards from the after effects of an operation for a brain tumour. I still miss him.

[Learner]

I had a small 2s lipo go up in smoke during covid.

I went out to the field behind my house to fly, put down the small profile plane on the long wet grass and think maybe the exposed pins on the receiver shorted out, so I now tape these up if not used.

[Simon Chaddock]

I have only had one true LiPo "failure" about 12 years ago.

Charging a 2200mAh 3s with a cheap 2/3 cell charger I noticed one cell was getting warm. I immediately disconnected it from the charger and rapidly placed it onto a concrete slabs outside. It did not burst into flames but the failed cell rapidly got too hot to touch, ballooned right up and split releasing a considerable high velocity gas stream.

 

After that incident I always balance charge at 1c and do not leave LiPo unattended when charging and using the capability of a 4 button charger monitor the cell voltages during the charge.

No problems since with my now considerable collection of 57 LiPo of various sizes.       

[KenC]

Interestingly I have looked through these posts and many seem to be over a period of time, mostly out of the last few years.  Many point to either crashes , or failures with equipment .... quite often charging with less sophisticated chargers than we have today , or not checking the lipo for obvious imbalances prior to charging.  I don't recall a single poster saying " it just ignited "   with only one pointing to a possible ESC recall by a manufacturer.  Interestingly several incidents again point to electrical shorts in planes caused by inadequate insulation  or poor soldering.  Here I ask for one of the expert electrical modelers to perhaps offer a masterclass on soldering for aero modelers , so we can hopefully eliminate this cause. Yes I have soldered , would I put my hand up and say I can guarantee my work ..... no way ! Only yesterday a pic I posted was rightly pointed to by a member because the way the battery leads were produced were not safe...... ( note I inherited this connection and am in process of stripping and rebuilding.)  Do clubs keep fire extinguishers, gloves in the pits near the flight line , or any other equipment to aid in disasters ?

 

Please continue to add your first hand experiences , your errors and lessons can inform us all !

Edited July 1, 2023 by KenC

[Paul De Tourtoulon]

I suggested a fire extinguisher and was told that it wasn't necessary, (I have one for my turbine ) and what is hanging where I suggested it should go, two beer bottle openers and a corkscrew, welcome to France.😅

[john davidson 1]

One accidental, charged at the wrong voltage which the charger did not pick up on. I charge on a concrete slab so no harm was done.

One on purpose, to see the effect of water so put the battery in a bucket of water and pierced it. lots of bubbles and continued for a while. Proved that water will not put it out but limits it.

[Geoff S]

Someone deliberately tried to destroy an old LiPo by mischargeing it in a safe place - on an isolated part of the hard runway at Ashbourne.  IIRC it was an old 4S pack being charged on the NiCad setting of a charger at several amps with no balance connector.  It never really caught fire and it was left for well over an hour, though it did get quite hot - hardly surprisingly.  I was surprised so little happened.

 

It seems most (all?) LiPo incidents happen when either charging inappropriately (wrong cell count or wrong cell type - or faulty charger) or in crashes.   I'd be interested to hear if anyone has experienced a LiPo fire when an undamaged battery is in storage and wasn't damaged in some way whilst stored (inadvertent s/c say?).  Lithium batteries are now used as leisure batteries in motor homes and caravans and often left on a float charge (sometimes via solar panels) but there seems to be no publicity in the Caravan Club magazine, which you'd expect if there had been any fires. 

 

I keep my LiPos in LiPo sacks in a steel ammo box, lined with cardboard to reduce the chance of any escaping leads shorting out in contact with the box.  I leave the lid loosely on the top.  LiPos certainly need to be treated with respect but not with fear IMO.  Are they any more dangerous than canned gas or petrol, which people have stored in garages and workshops for years and probably have caused or exacerbated fires because of it?

 

I've recently disposed a number of worn-out LiPos at the local tip.  I discharged them all with a car headlight bulb load and cut off the power leads.

 

 

[KenC]

Can someone tell me where they get ammo boxes from . From my distant memories all our 7.62 was in wooden boxes with  sealed metal inners that were there more to keep things out.  I guess water might be a bit like it is when dealing with phosphorus , it stops it until the air is returned. 

Edited July 1, 2023 by KenC