They run out of juice – or burst into flames – at exactly the wrong time. Can't anyone make a battery that doesn't suck? By John Hockenberry ON A HOT JULY DAY AT A FOOD PACKAGING COMPANY in Vernon Hills, Illinois, Henrik Gustavsson sat at his workstation tweaking electrical drawings for an industrial juice-making machine. He looked up and noticed an odd haze at the far end of the office. A coworker shouted, "Hey, there's a fire!" Gustavsson rushed over to join the crowd gathering around a Dell Latitude laptop sitting on a desk in its docking station. "There was smoke coming out of the sides," the 26-year-old engineer recalls. "As I got close it actually started popping, and a flame shot straight up into the air." To Gustavsson, the closed, burning laptop looked like an overheated George Foreman grill. It smelled horrible – not surprising, since it was cooking up an LCD-keyboard-melt sandwich. http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/battery.html
The funny thing about this article, is everyone was just watching it burn & did not try to unplug it (if it was plugged in) or try to put it out. And worst of all leave the building & call 9-1-1. And people wonder why they get hurt or killed by fires.
And if it wasn't in the docking station, you can still plug in and charge a Laptop, how else do you charge the battery? But the main point was no one was trying to put it out, just a fire fighter point of view & proves studies done on people's reactions to fires.
Fire14 is correct. If there is a problem, unplug the thing. Using the battery does not cause cell balancing problems, charging the battery can cause problems with certain LiIon batteries. This is a well known issue with multi-cell LiIon batteries since they were first used on computers in the mid 1990s. The problem was solved by carefulling controlling the charging. Sony made some sort of recent change in their manufacturing, and it has led to problems. Unplugging the docking station may not save the laptop, but it will limit the problem.
I guess my reaction to fire is not normal, then . My reaction is to do something about it before it goes out of control. I know this because I've been in similar situations in the past.
as a fellow firefighter myself, im amazed how people will stand around and say; would you look at that. wow
