Imagine this: While pulling into your garage, you accidentally run over the battery for your son’s electric scooter. Aside from a seemingly superficial crack, the battery doesn’t appear to be damaged, so you place it back in the charger. What you don’t know is that the battery’s cell has been crushed. It begins to overheat, releasing toxic gases and eventually combusting. Before you’re even aware, a cardboard box sitting next to the charger lights on fire. The fire spreads quickly from the garage into the first floor of your house. You and your family all get out safely, but the smoke and fire damage is extensive and countless valuables and priceless items are lost in the blaze…
Lithium-ion batteries revolutionized electronics and the way we get around. Without them, we wouldn’t have cell phones, laptops, or e-bikes. But these game-changing batteries also present growing risks, including fire and explosion.
Lithium-ion batteries enter the danger zone when overused, overcharged, put in excessively hot environments, crushed, or physically damaged. By understanding how these batteries work and the dangers they pose, you can protect your home, your possessions, your loved ones, and yourself.
These are rechargeable and non-water-reactive. Found in a wide variety of items, including cell phones, laptops, cars, power tools, toys, e-bikes, e-scooters, and much more. Some of these batteries are easy to remove from their products, others cannot be removed. If it’s rechargeable and electronic, odds are it has a lithium-ion battery.
Made with lithium metal, these come in a variety of sizes including AAA, AA, C, D, Coin, Button Cell, and 9V. These batteries are often found in pacemakers, remote controls, games, watches, and other small items.
Since its introduction into the commercial market in the early 1990s, the lithium-ion battery has skyrocketed in popularity. In the eyes of device makers, lithium-ion batteries have it all. The batteries have a high energy density, meaning they can pack a lot of power into a small package. They have a long-life cycle and require little maintenance aside from recharging. Plus, lithium is a lightweight metal, making it very portable.
Perhaps most importantly for manufacturers, lithium-ion batteries have many applications, making them cost-effective to produce. Uses for lithium-ion batteries will only continue to grow. By 2025, the global lithium-ion battery market is expected to reach $100.4B.
Knowing this, it’s crucial for everyone using devices, riding toys, and vehicles with lithium-ion batteries to understand the risks and take appropriate measures to protect themselves during usage, storage, disposal, and recycling.
Every lithium-ion battery contains a liquid electrolyte. The electrolyte is highly volatile and flammable, which creates a fire and explosion risk, especially in high temperatures.
In addition, the way a lithium-ion battery produces power generates heat as a by-product. Usually, this heat safely dissipates. But sometimes, the heat can’t be cooled normally, which creates what’s called “thermal runaway” — a dangerous battery failure.
When thermal runaway occurs, it can result in fire, explosion, smoke, and the release of toxic gases such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and more.
What makes this situation even more catastrophic is that lithium-ion batteries are extremely hard to put out. Water can help cool the battery down but can’t extinguish the fire until its energy is dissipated. Standard fire extinguishers often won’t help either. Firefighters need specialized fire suppression and containment equipment to put out lithium-ion battery fires. This can sometimes take hours, leaving time for the fire to spread and cause costly damage to homes, buildings, property, and valuables.
In the early days of lithium-ion batteries, it was common for laptops, cell phones, and other small devices to cause fires. Those devices are now far safer thanks to advancing technology, but a new major risk has taken their place.
In recent years, small recreation vehicles, such as hoverboards, e-scooters, and e-bikes have become common causes of fires. Since 2019, in New York City and San Francisco alone, lithium-ion battery fires from these vehicles have caused at least 20 deaths and more than 300 injuries. The cities’ fire departments responded to nearly 700 lithium-ion battery-related fire incidents in 2022.
E-bikes and e-scooters are significantly dangerous to homeowners. The batteries are much larger than those found in personal devices, and they are often charged indoors or in garages. Because of the volatile nature of the battery’s energy, it can fuel a self-sustaining fire that spreads quickly and is difficult to put out. In extreme cases of lithium-ion battery failure, the cells can shoot as far as 60 feet, meaning multiple fires can be sparked from a single battery.
For high-net-worth homeowners with high-value homes and possessions, losses related to a lithium-ion battery fire could be millions of dollars.
Luckily, this is avoidable.
With care and awareness — and by following the recommendations below — you can enjoy your e-bike and stay safe.
Always inspect batteries for damage and properly dispose of lithium-ion batteries if damaged. Use of a damaged battery can lead to thermal runaway. The effects of damage may not always be visible, but can be caused by:
When mishandled during the disposal process, lithium-ion batteries (and the devices with these batteries), can be crushed or damaged and become a fire hazard. To help prevent this from happening:
Despite the risks, there are still very few national regulations in place to address the hazards these batteries pose. In some states, officials are taking action to set standards for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries and lock in nationwide consumer guidelines to protect people and responders from fires caused by the batteries.
Additionally, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued a letter to over 2,000 manufacturers, importers, distributors, and retailers of e-bikes and scooters to sell products that use batteries built with standards set by Underwriters Laboratory, an industry safety organization, to reduce the fire risk. States such as New York are also introducing legislation around battery standard requirements. Hopefully, as more people become aware of the fire risks and the industry adopts the standards, we'll see far fewer fires related to lithium-ion batteries.
Mitigating fire hazards and using lithium-ion batteries safely are key to keeping you and your property safe. But having the right coverage is also an essential part of the equation. To ensure that you’re covered against fire risks and other hazards, get in touch with a qualified private client insurance broker.
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