UNDERSTAND the risks and consequences

Understand what you can do to prevent a lithium battery fire in the first place, including:

• Your batteries, chargers and warning signs
• Best practice charging procedures and guidelines (and follow them)

Understand what could happen if and when a fire starts, including:

• The dynamics of a Lithium battery fire itself and progression cell-by-cell
• The catastrophic potential of a chain reaction of secondary fires

The first part of this is the almost unavoidable message of understanding your equipment, the warning signs of impending problems, and the best practice charging guidelines and procedures. Our Resources area links to a number of general articles from fire and insurance related entities covering the wide range of lithium battery powered devices. It also covers off on some hobby related media that goes deeper into some areas.

These are necessary foundations to understand, but not always practical – including full time supervision.  And, in general, they don’t go far enough into what happens if a fire does start.  Hence the second part of the ‘Understand’ theme that we hope the Incident Reviews part of this site brings to life. 

If we understand the likely progression of the reaction across cells within a lithium battery, we have a better understanding of what to expect and how we can prepare if something does go wrong.  Similarly with the risk and impact of secondary and tertiary fires – in many ways the easiest to prevent but not part of our day-to-day discussions. These secondary and tertiary fires, consuming all flammable and explosive material in their vicinity are likely the cause of escalation to catastrophic damage.