[Elecraft] Fire in the house li-ion

[Fred Jensen]

A good friend, colleague, philosopher, and programmer once told meas we 
were leaving yet another interminable "Lessons Learned" meeting for yet 
another troubled project: "The problem with Lessons Learned is that 
theyrarely are."

I brought up my experience because it happened on discharge and the 
thread had focused on the charge cycle. It may have just been defective. 
Good lithium chemistry batteries tend to have very flat discharge 
curves, and because of extremely low internal resistance, can deliver 
massive amounts of energy with little voltage sag.  A lesson from my 
experience might be, "Never put a lithium<mumble> battery inside your 
radio."

To avoid rapid discharge of your bank account with no return, avoid the 
really inexpensive [as in cheap] Li-<whatever> batteries available on 
line from unknown off-shore sources.  I fell for onealleged 10 Ah 
Li-ion.  It may have stored 10 Ah of energy, however its discharge curve 
resembled the glide angle of a brick and I was lucky to get 1 to 1.5 Ah 
out before the voltage fell to cutoff on my K2.  Iwill tire of operating 
with my K2 well before depleting my 4S1P A123 LiFePO4.

73,

Fred ("Skip") K6DGW
Sparks NV USA
Washoe County DM09dn

On 5/18/2017 2:47 PM, Ron D'Eau Claire wrote:
> Ouch, Fred!
>
> One of the standard airline emergency procedures for a smoking/burning/fizzing phone or other personal electronics is to submerge it in water or wrap wet towels around it to reduce the temperature and keep it from igniting nearby flammable materials.
>