Does Ars Technica regularly publish things like this? It's the first time I've seen a non-tech-related article from them.
(I'm not complaining, mind you - I did find it very interesting to read. It just doesn't strike me as typical AT content, or at least not the kind that people typically share for it. Thank you to OP for doing so!)
The poor regulation around this is pretty bad for startups. Personally I've taken to only buying rechargeable battery powered devices from big brands. Anything else and I look for a power cord, single-use batteries, or mechanical operation.
It's not an ideal solution and not just because of examples like the Samsung Galaxy Note7. It's because I love rooting for the startups, the disruptors, the innovators. But in the world of battery powered products I'm inclined to think (or hope!) that the bigger players have more to lose by cheaping out on cheap batteries.
I have the same policy. It's not worth risking your life just to save a bit of money or try some gadget that is only made by a no-name brand. Often you keep these devices very close to your body or head (e.g. earphones) where they can do a lot of damage if they suddenly explode.
I learned this lesson over 10 years ago when I was visiting a night market in China with someone. He was so delighted with how cheap the portable chargers were that he bought a bunch to give to his friends/family back home. When we returned to the hotel one of them started emitting smoke. From that day I've only ever bought reputable brands, and even then I worry about it.
(Not disagreeing that this is a dupe), but this is The Verge's coverage of Lumafield's findings.
Not sure if there is any additional value in the re-coverage, though it does feel like the message is important enough to be spread, and I suspect there is more readers of The Verge than the original source.
It's been quite a while since i did CE, UL and CSA testing and conformities, but CE even back then was pretty worthless. It's just a self declaration. Only when the proverbial fan has been tainted with figurative feces, they will maybe act upon it.
And back then there was also this weird "China Export" logo that resembled the CE logo specifications for about 95%. The average consumer could not know the difference.
It also gives me a chuckle when i see this weird 'QC passed' stickers on components. Completely worthless.
Because retailers take the legal responsibility for what they sell to the public. In the same way statutory returns go to the retailer, not the manufacturer (unless the manufacturer has volunteered an extra warranty to use on top). They can take it up with the manufacturers if they want.
The customer doesn't enter into a contract with the manufacturer when they buy an item from a retailer. They do so with the retailer.
Which is not to say the agencies shouldn't also ban the product from the market. But that doesn't absolve the retailer of their duties.
This feels gross. If the manufacturers are not held accountable, then they will never stop making shite products. If the retailers are knowingly selling shite products, then sure. But most of the time, retailers are just selling products they think customers will want to buy. Lots of shite products get returned to the manufacturer when the retailers cannot move them, or other issues arise from the products.
The retailers are the front line for returns as that's the point of contact for the customer. That's just the nature of the beast. If a company establishes itself as a maker of decent products that retailers can trust suddenly gets lazy/cheap/profit focused to the point they cheapen their products, it is not the retailer's fault.
How does a customer of a retailer hold a manufacturer accountable when they have no relationship with said manufacturer?
> But most of the time, retailers are just selling products they think customers will want to buy.
I don't think retailers are nearly as helpless or unwitting as that. Amazon definitely know they have unsafe products on the shelves no matter how dumb they may play.
> The retailers are the front line for returns as that's the point of contact for the customer
They're also the front line for consumer safety reporting, by law. All companies (not only retailers, actually) have a statutory duty to report unsafe consumer goods, even in the US, and not only for CPC/GCC certified goods. When a customer reports an unsafe product to their retailer, the retailer should forward this information, along with batch codes, origins, sourcing information etc (which the customer obviously will not know). This is the early-warning system that leads to things like recalls, withdrawals and so on, before something causes widespread harm.
> This feels gross. If the manufacturers are not held accountable, then they will never stop making shite products. If the retailers are knowingly selling shite products, then sure. But most of the time, retailers are just selling products they think customers will want to buy. Lots of shite products get returned to the manufacturer when the retailers cannot move them, or other issues arise from the products.
Retailers shrugging their shoulders is what I would call gross. You shouldn't sell a product to the public that you're not willing to stand behind. Retailers have a lot more ways to protect themselves from from shoddy manufacturers - and, fundamentally, operate at the kind of scale where they can do so - than customers have to protect themselves from shoddy anything.
I take it you're not in the US? Retailers here generally must warrant against DOA, but almost anything beyond that can absolutely be shoved off onto the manufacturer.
Those who wonder why Americans can get so many things so cheaply - yes, we have lower tariffs (or at least did), but also we don't have those minimum-duration warranties that allow the consumer to return to the place of purchase as much as a year or more after purchase and demand satisfaction from the retailer. Those are expensive to provide.
Do not assume that the only reason people return items while claiming a defect is that there is, in fact, a defect.
Yes, if a technically-savvy person tells me "I've done X, Y, and Z, and it still doesn't work", I will believe them. A member of the general public? Even if they aren't scammers, it is entirely possible that they will eat up hours of effort at the store trying to do this.
It's obviously not free. I've seen a low-staff store - I was in a pharmacy (erm, if you're not in the US or Canada, our pharmacies carry a lot more than just health products, though in this case I was there to buy a product you would find in one in the UK or Europe) last week in Canada where they didn't have a cashier at the front. Only the pharmacist and a couple of techs at the back. If you needed assistance rather than self-checkout, you had to ring a bell to summon someone.
Our company is building batteries that are easy to repair, and therefore you can remove and put back the cells easily. This allows you to fly with them :)
I actually had a battery for a drill meltdown on me earlier this year. If I hadn't been home (and it hadn't been on my stone counter when it happened), I probably wouldn't have a home.
Was it a brand name battery, or a discount battery? When you look at the price of the price of replacement Ryobi/Milwaukee/Dewalt etc batteries, and then see third-party knockoffs on Amazon for 1/3 or less of the price, it's tempting to save money.
I really scaled back when I started going back and looking at old purchases, only to find out 8 of my last purchases were all counterfeit stuff. These were not just random electronic resellers. They were Lucky jeans, a Microsoft keyboard, a JBL bluetooth speaker, Under Armour shorts, Adidas work out tshirts and some other stuff. But altogether, I thought I was buying brand name, safe stuff that was priced in the same range as stuff you'd buy retail and I still got burned.
Just made me distrust everything I was seeing on Amazon.
The problem is that Amazon will sell things on your behalf and just puts all identical items in the same bin, since on paper they are fungible.
In reality, scum bags are going out and buying cheap counterfeit junk, sending it to Amazon, which just throws it in the bin with every other item. Then someone buys it and gets a counterfeit one.
If you understand that the battery management controller is built into the battery pack and not the tool itself, the temptation to save money is replaced entirely by the fear of burning down a building. Not worth it.
Nah, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Fundamental attribution error and all that. Plus, the 'Boots Theory' is a reality for a lot of people.
Ultimately, society only works on a foundation of trust. We trust that our food is safe, our medicine is effective, and our products won't explode. When folks have that trust broken, I view it as a systemic failure, not a personal one.
~15 years ago I was visiting New Orleans, and I had an old Canon 1D DSLR with me. I was a little nervous about leaving my camera batteries charging in the small b&b where I was staying, fearing I'd unintentionally destroy a historic house.
This is why I keep lithium batteries in a steel box when they aren't being used. I think you can but purpose built ones, but I use steel ammo boxes from military surplus stores. Its a bit of a pain, and won't stop the toxic clouds of smoke from filling my house, but it could very well prevent my house from being burnt down.
Some day I might make a dedicated battery box corner with a vent to outdoors though because batteries only seem to be getting bigger and more powerful.
Reading the original report in the dupe from 14 days ago, it seems pretty clear that the conclusion is that counterfeit/low-cost lithium batteries are a safety hazard, and we should probably have stricter import regulations for batteries to shutdown the counterfeit/gray-market operations, as they are a serious fire hazard.
I once watched a video of a man holding what looked to be a bicycle battery walking into an elevator. After the doors closed, it seemed to have exploded and burst into flame in his hands, and the aftermath was charred remains.
After seeing this I refuse to sleep near my 20,000 mAh power bank. I saw this Jackery power station for sale for an ultra discounted price and noticed it was not lithium iron phosphate and I noped so fast.
The main risk factor is cells, you have to source them from reputable manufacturers. After having monitored a few battery fires, we went on to design a casing with multiple features to contain fires, you can check it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0NXXfCA2CY
One question though: it seems like the contact between the PCB side panels and the cells relies on flexing the (FR4?) PCB material of the small per-cell "fingers" that are surrounded by cutouts, on the side panels. I wonder if once it's in this "flexed state", it will eventually fatigue, or settle into the bent state, after some time (years?), and no longer press on the cell ends strongly enough?
A bit like if you were to leave a rubber band in stretched state for a while, it won't fully go back to the diameter it was before.
How much is this mitigated by well-behaved charging circuitry?
I.e. my understanding is most devices are not like the 3s lipos I put in my hobby robots, but instead have integrated charging circuitry that you just give an appropriate voltage to... and that proper charging behavior avoids a lot of the dangerous scenarios with lipos?
I ask because, loosely, the # of battery fires seems like a function in part of: (1) use of good charging logic; (2) cell manufacturing quality; (3) # of cells in the wild. While the growth of 3 probably dominates the improvements to 1 and 2, I'm guessing the number of battery fires has grown but not "exponentially".
> I.e. my understanding is most devices are not like the 3s lipos I put in my hobby robots, but instead have integrated charging circuitry that you just give an appropriate voltage to... and that proper charging behavior avoids a lot of the dangerous scenarios with lipos?
I'm not sure your understanding is correct. There are assembled packs with a BMS on them, laptop batteries this is usually the case. The cells themselves can be lipol, prismatic, or cylindrical (like 18650's). The cells almost never have active BMS built-in. It's always external (either on a board on the pack or on the device itself charging it).
I really think the battery fires are mainly qc issues and running bad qc cells beyond limits (either fast charging or discharging). If capacity is staggered a ton between cells then even charge balancing the cells isn't going to do much good. Pouch cell fires probably more related to physical damage due to expansion in places they aren't designed well to expand (so it pushes the jellyroll down and causes a short/thermal runaway).
There will always be a realy fucking bad failure mode attached to any energy dense storage medium.
This is basic physics. The diffrence between a roaring fire in the wood stove, your car engine, an ultra high tech rocket motor and a bomb, is only the speed of the "flame front"
A battery has the same issues, in that the higher the energy density and the greater the expected rate of energy transfer, the greater the chance of
finding a way to detonate all the energy at once, which is actualy possible ,with a wood stove, if things go exactly wrong.Exceptionaly large explosions have happened with nothing more than dust, or flour.
4 things, you can pick 3.
fast, powerfull, cheap, safe.
A Lithium iron phosphate battery is significantly more stable and less likely to go thermal runaway in a fireshow-like fashion. The battery chemistry is important for this.
There are lithium ion chemistries that are less likely to thermal runaway, LMO (Lithium Manganese Oxide) is used in power tools and they don't seem to go up. Tradeoff is lower capacity.
Yes, but this article is mostly talking about TEMU or Amazon fly-by-night brand batteries, so you have to take their word that they are using Lipo4 cells and not just blatantly lying like they do for every other aspect of the product.
(I'm not complaining, mind you - I did find it very interesting to read. It just doesn't strike me as typical AT content, or at least not the kind that people typically share for it. Thank you to OP for doing so!)
It's not an ideal solution and not just because of examples like the Samsung Galaxy Note7. It's because I love rooting for the startups, the disruptors, the innovators. But in the world of battery powered products I'm inclined to think (or hope!) that the bigger players have more to lose by cheaping out on cheap batteries.
I learned this lesson over 10 years ago when I was visiting a night market in China with someone. He was so delighted with how cheap the portable chargers were that he bought a bunch to give to his friends/family back home. When we returned to the hotel one of them started emitting smoke. From that day I've only ever bought reputable brands, and even then I worry about it.
I've personally commented on lots of dupes lately.
Makes me wonder if HN dupe detector is broken/changed recently.
Not sure if there is any additional value in the re-coverage, though it does feel like the message is important enough to be spread, and I suspect there is more readers of The Verge than the original source.
It's called a CE mark or equivalent, there is already a system, penalties and tests.
And back then there was also this weird "China Export" logo that resembled the CE logo specifications for about 95%. The average consumer could not know the difference.
It also gives me a chuckle when i see this weird 'QC passed' stickers on components. Completely worthless.
The customer doesn't enter into a contract with the manufacturer when they buy an item from a retailer. They do so with the retailer.
Which is not to say the agencies shouldn't also ban the product from the market. But that doesn't absolve the retailer of their duties.
The retailers are the front line for returns as that's the point of contact for the customer. That's just the nature of the beast. If a company establishes itself as a maker of decent products that retailers can trust suddenly gets lazy/cheap/profit focused to the point they cheapen their products, it is not the retailer's fault.
How does a customer of a retailer hold a manufacturer accountable when they have no relationship with said manufacturer?
> But most of the time, retailers are just selling products they think customers will want to buy.
I don't think retailers are nearly as helpless or unwitting as that. Amazon definitely know they have unsafe products on the shelves no matter how dumb they may play.
> The retailers are the front line for returns as that's the point of contact for the customer
They're also the front line for consumer safety reporting, by law. All companies (not only retailers, actually) have a statutory duty to report unsafe consumer goods, even in the US, and not only for CPC/GCC certified goods. When a customer reports an unsafe product to their retailer, the retailer should forward this information, along with batch codes, origins, sourcing information etc (which the customer obviously will not know). This is the early-warning system that leads to things like recalls, withdrawals and so on, before something causes widespread harm.
Retailers shrugging their shoulders is what I would call gross. You shouldn't sell a product to the public that you're not willing to stand behind. Retailers have a lot more ways to protect themselves from from shoddy manufacturers - and, fundamentally, operate at the kind of scale where they can do so - than customers have to protect themselves from shoddy anything.
Those who wonder why Americans can get so many things so cheaply - yes, we have lower tariffs (or at least did), but also we don't have those minimum-duration warranties that allow the consumer to return to the place of purchase as much as a year or more after purchase and demand satisfaction from the retailer. Those are expensive to provide.
Yes, if a technically-savvy person tells me "I've done X, Y, and Z, and it still doesn't work", I will believe them. A member of the general public? Even if they aren't scammers, it is entirely possible that they will eat up hours of effort at the store trying to do this.
It's obviously not free. I've seen a low-staff store - I was in a pharmacy (erm, if you're not in the US or Canada, our pharmacies carry a lot more than just health products, though in this case I was there to buy a product you would find in one in the UK or Europe) last week in Canada where they didn't have a cashier at the front. Only the pharmacist and a couple of techs at the back. If you needed assistance rather than self-checkout, you had to ring a bell to summon someone.
https://infinite-battery.com
Did you get auto-incorrected?
Joiry
Yep, big mistake.
I really scaled back when I started going back and looking at old purchases, only to find out 8 of my last purchases were all counterfeit stuff. These were not just random electronic resellers. They were Lucky jeans, a Microsoft keyboard, a JBL bluetooth speaker, Under Armour shorts, Adidas work out tshirts and some other stuff. But altogether, I thought I was buying brand name, safe stuff that was priced in the same range as stuff you'd buy retail and I still got burned.
Just made me distrust everything I was seeing on Amazon.
In reality, scum bags are going out and buying cheap counterfeit junk, sending it to Amazon, which just throws it in the bin with every other item. Then someone buys it and gets a counterfeit one.
or the plot line to an arson investigation procedural
Joiry
As a sidenote, Amazon is truly a dumpster.
Ultimately, society only works on a foundation of trust. We trust that our food is safe, our medicine is effective, and our products won't explode. When folks have that trust broken, I view it as a systemic failure, not a personal one.
Some day I might make a dedicated battery box corner with a vent to outdoors though because batteries only seem to be getting bigger and more powerful.
After seeing this I refuse to sleep near my 20,000 mAh power bank. I saw this Jackery power station for sale for an ultra discounted price and noticed it was not lithium iron phosphate and I noped so fast.
If you're interested, you can order them here https://infinite-battery.com
One question though: it seems like the contact between the PCB side panels and the cells relies on flexing the (FR4?) PCB material of the small per-cell "fingers" that are surrounded by cutouts, on the side panels. I wonder if once it's in this "flexed state", it will eventually fatigue, or settle into the bent state, after some time (years?), and no longer press on the cell ends strongly enough?
A bit like if you were to leave a rubber band in stretched state for a while, it won't fully go back to the diameter it was before.
I.e. my understanding is most devices are not like the 3s lipos I put in my hobby robots, but instead have integrated charging circuitry that you just give an appropriate voltage to... and that proper charging behavior avoids a lot of the dangerous scenarios with lipos?
I ask because, loosely, the # of battery fires seems like a function in part of: (1) use of good charging logic; (2) cell manufacturing quality; (3) # of cells in the wild. While the growth of 3 probably dominates the improvements to 1 and 2, I'm guessing the number of battery fires has grown but not "exponentially".
I'm not sure your understanding is correct. There are assembled packs with a BMS on them, laptop batteries this is usually the case. The cells themselves can be lipol, prismatic, or cylindrical (like 18650's). The cells almost never have active BMS built-in. It's always external (either on a board on the pack or on the device itself charging it).
I really think the battery fires are mainly qc issues and running bad qc cells beyond limits (either fast charging or discharging). If capacity is staggered a ton between cells then even charge balancing the cells isn't going to do much good. Pouch cell fires probably more related to physical damage due to expansion in places they aren't designed well to expand (so it pushes the jellyroll down and causes a short/thermal runaway).