Battery Fires

[lenny]

Tube union threatens strike unless e-bikes are banned from London Underground after platform blaze

Tube union threatens strike unless e-bikes are banned from London Underground

The fire at Rayners Lane station sent toxic fumes billowing across the station and caused temporary disruption to the Piccadilly and Metropolitan lines

www.standard.co.uk

London Underground passengers at risk over e-bikes - union

Aslef union says it is considering balloting members for a strike, over e-bikes on the Tube.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[lenny]

Tube union threatens strike unless e-bikes are banned from London Underground after platform blaze

Tube union threatens strike unless e-bikes are banned from London Underground

The fire at Rayners Lane station sent toxic fumes billowing across the station and caused temporary disruption to the Piccadilly and Metropolitan lines

www.standard.co.uk

London Underground passengers at risk over e-bikes - union

Aslef union says it is considering balloting members for a strike, over e-bikes on the Tube.

www.bbc.co.uk

TSSA walks out of TfL meeting over refusal to ban e-bikes

TSSA walks out of TfL meeting over refusal to ban e-bikes

TSSA Health and Safety representatives stormed out of a meeting with Transport for London management on Tuesday after TfL refused to issue an immediate ban on electronic bikes following the fire at Rayners Lane

www.tssa.org.uk

 

[lenny]

Sadiq Khan demands book exchanges reinstated in Tube stations amid fire safety row
TfL had ordered the libraries’ removal for fire safety reasons outlined by the LFB - but Mayor says he is hoping for ‘very swift announcement of a U-turn’

Sadiq demands book exchanges reinstated in Tube stations amid fire safety row

TfL had ordered the libraries’ removal for fire safety reasons outlined by the LFB - but Mayor says he is hoping for ‘very swift announcement of a U-turn’

www.standard.co.uk

 

[Ajax]

Great thread, but it seems to me there should be several categories of e-bike/ battery fires.

As well as the types of fires there should already be advice on how to best avoid,
or even on what to do if a fire starts, besides run.

Are there extinguishers that will contain a battery fire?

Would running an e-bike without proper cut-off brakes cause the motor to overheat,
eg if ordinary disc brake levers were used to slow the bike whilst the motor was still being powered?

As another thought :

These days, you have controllers that will operate as either 36v or 48v.
What would happen if you had both batteries, 36v and 48v and then confused their chargers.
What would happen if you attempted to charge the 36v with a 48v charger, or charge a 48v with a 36v charger.
Would the over-voltage or under-voltage protection still work?

You would not want to try this just to find out, but have these scenarios been tested, as controlled experiments by the professionals? 0

 

[AndyBike]

Are there extinguishers that will contain a battery fire?

There are, but they are seriously seriously expensive.

At a pinch, you could throw a large fire blanket over the area and try to deal with anything that catches- wood,carpet etc with a standard extinguisher.
Obviously the harmful smoke will be a problem, and that might make any DIY firefighting problematic.

 

[Woosh]

Renault (cars) have a simple battery fire fighting system. They fit a funnel to the battery compartment with an adhesive cover. If fire breaks out, firefighters would just flood the battery compartment with plain water. The system kills the fire in a few minutes. I suppose it could be adapted for ebike batteries.

 

[AntonyC]

Why wait for the fire brigade? For ebike-scale batteries there are several efforts researching insulating materials for filling the spaces between cells to impede propagation. I'd like to see them try out a capillary foam flooded with a low-temperature gel: when the first cell overheats it's cooled by a pack's worth of gel boiling off then insulated by the dry foam. I don't think I've come across research into dumping heat effectively (as opposed to safely).

P.S. it takes around 100g of water / gel vapourising to absorb the energy from a fully charged 21700 cell burning up.

 

[Ajax]

Just a thought, but apparently, because we still don't know for sure, the first sign of a battery fire is these things starting to overheat. So what about a heat sensor [or semi-official sticker] on the sides of these batteries that either changes color or sounds a piezo buzzer?

This way if you were around, say, charging the thing, or even still riding the thing, you would have this early warning with ample time to take it outdoors or dunk it in a bath of water, [or whatever the recommended procedure is].

Right now, it's all a big mystery, with no official word on the causes. You would have thought that with 'so many' fires, there would be post-mortems where the common factors were made known to the e-bike community.

For example, are e-fire more likely with DIY batteries, or bikes bought second-hand without a compatible charger, eg nicked, leaving the new 'owner' to source their own chargers?

 

[Ajax]

TSSA walks out of TfL meeting over refusal to ban e-bikes

TSSA walks out of TfL meeting over refusal to ban e-bikes

TSSA Health and Safety representatives stormed out of a meeting with Transport for London management on Tuesday after TfL refused to issue an immediate ban on electronic bikes following the fire at Rayners Lane

www.tssa.org.uk

What about banning mobile phones or laptops? After all, they have the same battery technology, with the same potential if misused.

 

[Woosh]

What about banning mobile phones or laptops? After all, they have the same battery technology, with the same potential if misused.

Mobile phones electronics is much better built compared to what you see on the bikes used by the food deliverers.
I think also the risk and potential damage rise with the number of cells and exponentially with the capacity of the batteries.
If you go by the pictures of those bike fires, they are mostly from those with large rear hub direct drives.

 

[matthewslack]

Just a thought, but apparently, because we still don't know for sure, the first sign of a battery fire is these things starting to overheat. So what about a heat sensor [or semi-official sticker] on the sides of these batteries that either changes color or sounds a piezo buzzer?

This way if you were around, say, charging the thing, or even still riding the thing, you would have this early warning with ample time to take it outdoors or dunk it in a bath of water, [or whatever the recommended procedure is].

Right now, it's all a big mystery, with no official word on the causes. You would have thought that with 'so many' fires, there would be post-mortems where the common factors were made known to the e-bike community.

For example, are e-fire more likely with DIY batteries, or bikes bought second-hand without a compatible charger, eg nicked, leaving the new 'owner' to source their own chargers?

It is not a big mystery, there is plenty of information on causes, and there is not ample time to take action once over temperature is detected on ths outside of the casing.

Cheaply made and cheaply sold batteries are one part of the problem. Online sales routes readily evade proper regulation and checks, and people will buy the cheapest.

Hard life is another: rough roads etc mean the internal structure gets a hammering, and many cheap batteries rely on the cell interconnections as the main internal structure.

Connecting multiple batteries in parallel, then charging all from one charger bypasses all the BMS protections on the parallel batteries.

A fundamental risk raising issue is the fact there are many cells, many interconnections, and it only takes one defect to start a problem that the BMS cannot protect against.

And then there is batteries that should be weatherproof but are not, but are used in the rain, and the occasional idiot who drops their bike in a canal...

 

[AntonyC]

Please everyone, don't be quick to refer to people posting here as idiots. The guy filmed the issue like everyone does but then asked on here (smart), discounted the first dramatic advice (also smart), reconsidered and rehoused the bike to the shed, he even thanked us. We need people to bring problems here and we learnt more about the scope of mishaps.

More to the point, name-calling shifts responsibility onto the user for failures of consumer goods that have been unfit to survive a consumer environment. Cells in water eventually fail but don't ignite, but some batteries do, draw your own conclusions. The prime example of this misdirection being the term 'over-charging' to undermine any pressure to equip batteries with better protection. As matthewslack says, there is plenty of information on causes.

 

[lenny]

Power bank likely caused S Korea plane fire - investigators

Air Busan: Power bank likely caused plane fire, investigators say

The Air Busan plane was destroyed in January when a fire broke out inside the cabin.

www.bbc.com

 

[lenny]

Ceramic powders with Archimedean shapes resist extreme heat and oxidation

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-ceramic-powders-archimedean-resist-extreme.html

 

[lenny]

E-bike on charge sparks severe fire at flat in Lowestoft

Flat severely damaged after electric bike on charge sparks fire

A ground floor flat in Lowestoft was severely damaged after an electric bike caught fire while it was on charge.

www.lowestoftjournal.co.uk

 

[lenny]

E-bike charger fire destroys home after exploding in mum's living room

E-bike charger fire destroys home after exploding in mum's living room

Mum-of-three Rosie Dobson, tried to stamp out flames as they spurted out of an un-plugged lithium-ion battery she says went “off like the firework”, at her flat on Saturday, March 15.

www.dailyrecord.co.uk

 

[MikelBikel]

From Net Zero to Ground Zero in one Blaze ! :-/

And all the whales and dolphins getting the runoff, to what purpose, poor porpoise ?

Will they be eating any seafood from around that coast for a while?

Will they mine the ground there for minerals, it must be enriched by now? Make more Teslas

 

[Raboa]

One solution is to have the battery and charge removed from the bike and carried in a bag. The should be probably be fire resistant but that would be difficult to enforce
Each tube station will have an ebike battery fire suppression unit, in layman's terms - a big container of water.

 

[lenny]

Family home destroyed after e-bike caught fire while on charge
"On March 8, Jess took her three children out to lunch, and left her son’s Revvi e-bike on charge unattended.

She says the instructions said batteries had a maximum of six hours charging time – and she thought it would be safe to leave it for ‘less than two hours’.

But at 2pm, when she returned, she saw the house destroyed – and firefighters inside, trying to tackle the blaze."

Family home destroyed after e-bike caught fire while on charge

'I've been crying every day.'

metro.co.uk

 

[saneagle]

According to The MacMaster (Youtube), a guy did an FOI request to leicester Fire Service basically asking for a breakdown of vehicle fires to show the proportion of EVs. They said that they couldn't provide that information because they only had records of totals, and they didn't record whether it was an EV or not. The MacMaster thinks that they might be trying to hide something. Do you think they would or wouldn't have that data, even approximate?