People who advocate such policy need to be taken in hand and removed to a re-education centre where common sense is drummed into them before release. Is that too extreme? No more so than the original Big Brother / State control of small things proposal was.
Battery Fires
- Thread starter saneagle
- Start date
Not knowing much about this stuff - all of the BMSs I've seen on AliExpress seem to be variations of crapness: even as we squeak, I bet the poorer members of this shadowy consortium of industry vested interests are frantically Googling those variations of crapness for existing BMS and controller designs they can lock the fsck down, rather than invest in R&D to manufacture or order the manufacture of EM3EV style custom BMSs which sacrifice potentially problematic cell banks, which might even be resettable after cell replacement. Even after they've inevitably killed off the easy to repair DIY kit conversion scene as we know it, there will be battery fires which increase with ebike numbers, and there will be a reckoning when battery fire outrage reaches critical mass again. When that happens, I hope they're all jailed.
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How many people keep their petrol powered moped or motorcycle in the house. Large stores of energy are always potential hazards if mishandled or faulty.
I think these control freaks clucking (Chicken Licken reference) about ebike fires are the same sort who legislated that motorised carriages must be preceded on the roads by a man walking with a red flag, and that they must never pass him by.
Whatever happened to the idea I was brought up with that people had better look out for themselves and be responsible? Now we have numbers of people who think they need Big Brother to protect them against all possible hazards.
The result of this will be a useless generation of impotent wretches, who can do nothing. Just like that horrible case of the two PCSOs, who stood by while a child drowned in a shallow canal or pond because 'they had not been trained in water operations'. Two pensioners got in and saved one child. The other, unfortunately died because of the delay in helping him. I see this sort of thing as part of the same problem of dis-empowering the independence of people by over regulation and the obsession with so called 'health and safety'.
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183 fires for about 100,000 ebikes is much too much when you consider how much collateral damage versus the cost of preventative measures.
You can see how regulation works with hate speech. When we were teenagers/ young adults, people might swear at someone or call them names. Nobody cared. We used to shout back, "Sticks and stones would break my bones but names will never hurt me". Basically hate speech didn't exist. Now they've increase the regulations more and more to the extent that nobody can even understand what the rules are. Hate speech is worse than ever on all sides and some people are turning to violence.
There are some simple things that can be done that don't cost anything, but would help the layman, like using different sized connectors for different voltages.
183 fires had 183 causes. Without knowing the exact causes, none of us and nobody else should be proposing countermeasures. We can all invent possible causes, but where's the evidence that those possibilities were realised? When you know the exact cause of any one of those fires, you can introduce an exact countermeasure to prevent that cause happening again. After 183 countermeasures, there would be no more fires.
Google says we have about 550,000 ebikes in the UK, not 100,000, so your figure is only wrong by over 500%.....
So - running with that figure, we see that the rate of ebike fires was more or less one in three thousand. Factor in the ridiculous, abuse the fire brigades cite as the most common cause and what do we have?
I'll have a go at summarising the position in answer to that question:
Ebikes are very safe unless abused by fools and lunatics. Good practise dictates the following:
- ONLY use the correct voltage charger supplied with the battery and NEVER any other
- ONLY EVER charge the battery in a supervised, safe place and never charge when you are sleeping
- Disconnect the charger when the charge light indicates full charge
- NEVER cobble together a dangerous contraption with a badly made power pack
- Always make sure the battery is capable of supplying the load demanded by the controller
@Wisper Bikes couldn't produce stats! They looked at photos and listened to speculation!
...said I had to do my "own digging"!
...said I had to do my "own digging"!
I don't think there are any stats. I reckon it's all based on vapourous opines. Whatever pointless and deeply ungreen unrepairable uncustomistable crap they eventually offer for sale, this bunch of vested interests can't be held liable when all evidence is burned to smitherines. Golden rule is whoever has the gold makes the rules, to accumulate more gold.
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Add to this the fact that a so called 'Hate Crime' has no other definition than that the person complaining 'thinks' whatever the event was, was motivated by 'hate'.
Now - I am not aware of any other crime that does not have some sort reference to objective happenings or if an offence is for example a public order one, that a 'reasonable person' would be upset, or intimidated. But now, any vexatious blow in can turn up at a police station can assert that a hate crime has happened and have it recorded as such.
They cause collateral damage through explosion. Stop the explosion is first low hanging fruit. Stop overcharging is also low hanging fruit. Common sense, nothing to do with free speech.
Not speech in this case, but freedom of action is being targeted, by the likely demand that people be prevented from making their own conversions.
Freedom, or the lack of it, is not just about speech and opinions being prohibited. It is also about whether the state interferes with what you are allowed to do, in the way of ordinary things, like getting out your tools to convert your bike with cost effective parts into a pedelec.
I have seen a video on saneagle's youtube site where he had made a conversion about a decade or more ago, with an electrically powered crank. He had fabricated a bracket and attached an electric motor. It was not a kit. From a quick look, it had certain safety implications, to do with an exposed, powered chain, and unless I am mistaken, pedals that rotated under motor power and might have conceivably smacked him on the ankles. This contraption looked well made to me, even if it did have the odd foible that might catch out the unwary. He isn't unwary though, and needs to be free to experiment and to make things for himself.
This principle should apply to all of us and not be taken away because one ebike in over three thousand when abused horribly by a careless fool, might catch fire. This of course would not be an issue had not the people abusing them been doing so in their houses - usually at night.
Oh and by the way, many of the ebike fires I have seen, were delivery bikes, blowing up in the street - maybe something to do with running two kilowatt motors from home made 56 volt batteries dangling about, unprotected from wear and tear and being bashed, in fabric triangle bags. These are often being fast charged and worked to the limit. If these monstrosities were out of the equation I think we might have a very much smaller number of fires than we have.
"Show me the Bodies" Brian Martin
www.insidehousing.co.uk
www.building.co.uk
Official told safety campaigner to ‘show me the bodies’ when warned of tower block fire disaster, inquiry hears
A trusted source of up-to-date news for social housing professionals – the only place to get comprehensive coverage of all the big topics.
Government admits deregulation left officials “unable” to escalate fire safety warnings in years before Grenfell
But housing department lawyer tells inquiry that "competent professionals" would not have signed off dangerous materials
www.building.co.uk
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The ashes you mean. They'll have heard dreary droning confused opinions from fire fighting dudes pointing at pictures of ashes and toxic dust, relating badly remembered or outright false accounts of what owners bought, and did with whatever they'd bought and used incorrectly. All while anticipating the arrival of their new planet killing money printing machine.
Funny how Arconic, the American manufacturer of the Grenfel Tower cladding seems to be immune to stern enquiry. We know that they KNEW it was a fire risk, because the emails between people in the company make it very clear that they knew it could catch fire and destroy a building, but nonetheless said the shortcomings should be kept confidential to avoid loss of sales. St-Gobain, the French company who made the flammable Grenfel insulation also knew of its ability to catch fire and that it released highly toxic smoke in fire situations."Show me the Bodies" Brian Martin
Official told safety campaigner to ‘show me the bodies’ when warned of tower block fire disaster, inquiry hears
A trusted source of up-to-date news for social housing professionals – the only place to get comprehensive coverage of all the big topics.
So much easier to pursue government and fire department officials for errors of judgement than the sellers of the stuff that caused all the deaths WHO KNEW the stuff was wrong and dangerous..
That's capitalism for you and that's why you need regulations
Grenfell Tower inquiry: Ex-minister unaware red tape cuts affected fire safety
Lord Pickles could not give an example of fire safety being exempt from a policy to cut regulations.
www.bbc.co.uk
That is wicked deceit and malpractice for you, rather than capitalism.That's capitalism for you and that's why you need regulations
Grenfell Tower inquiry: Ex-minister unaware red tape cuts affected fire safety
Lord Pickles could not give an example of fire safety being exempt from a policy to cut regulations.www.bbc.co.uk
It was capitalism that made the modern world and its discoveries brought millions and billions of us out of the abject poverty and disease of the pre-industrial world.
I do not deny that bad people make bad decisions and harm others and that some rules must apply to the way business works to prevent such behaviour. This does not mean that BMSs should have a count down timer in them to shut off your ebike battery after 500 cycles, or some other number which was suggested earlier,or that people should only be allowed to buy and possess a battery made by some huge profiteering corporate, like Bosch or Shimano, who already sell their products at vast expense, even when they face cheap competition. Neither does it mean that the ebike kit market needs to be curtailed.
There is no such thing as an illegal scooter. The general rule in UK law is that if anything has a possible legal use, it can be sold.
The onus of legal use is upon the user, not the seller, logical of course since only the user has control over the use, the seller has no such control once the item is sold.
The exceptions are where control is by licencing being necessary, guns, radioactive substances and certain chemicals for example.
E-scooters already require a driving licence at present, but pushing for that to be enforced could well result in pedelecers also requiring a group Q licence.
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look at the issues this way: we know why batteries go wrong: bad cells, overcharging, undercharging, charging while one or more cells are faulty. We also know how to stop the problems and the solution costs next to nothing. Should we do something about this by imposing a minimum set of standard specifications? If you buy your battery ready made then the legislation does not apply to you, only to manufacturers and importers. If you build your own battery then the additional feature will protect you.
Isn't battery building and repair about to become illegal without a licence?
The Manufacture and Storage of Explosives Regulations 2005
Substituted to create future legislation below:
"Ebike batteries not to be manufactured without a licence"
Nope, that'd take me years - too late to have even the vaguest hope of stopping you.
Why not ask her to join this forum? She could hear from us DIYers directly.
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