Battery Safety - A Life-Or-Death Issue?

17 May 2018 | Daniel Hollyman

I woke this morning to find a BBC article forwarded by our MD, relaying the sad tale of a man from Florida who was killed by an exploding e-cigarette. This is of course a highly tragic story, and our condolences go to the loved ones he left behind.

In terms of the reporting, there was definitely a change in tone from usual media reports: the BBC openly acknowledged that the user had tampered with the device to allow it to put out more power, rather than demonising e-cigarettes as a whole. They made clear that it was user intervention, and not the device as originally sold, that lead to the unfortunate outcome.

This article is here to serve as an important reminder, to all users, how important it is to understand battery safety. But before jumping into it, a little context:

Facts and statistics

It is estimated that one in ten US citizens now vape. That’s around 33 million people, equivalent to half the population of the UK. Obviously, this is a number that has grown exponentially year-on-year, but [highly] conservatively, that must include over 100 million lithium-ion batteries currently in circulation (given users who have multiple devices, or mods that use multiple cells), let alone all the cells that have completed their life expectancy and ended safely recycled.

It is therefore quite telling that from all of those batteries, and all of those users, only 195 incidents involving exploding batteries and/or injured users were reported between 2008 and 2016 in the US. This is the very first death as a result of a battery failing. So, defective batteries is a problem encountered with 0.00000195% of the [conservative] number