atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Can batteries really explode?

I've been replacing a lot batteries in UPS's lately. And I've heard this tale of batteries exploding if they are being charged when they are past their normal service life.

BTW if you have an APC SmartUPS 1000. Change the batteries before they bloat on you. Otherwise you have to take a good part of the chassis apart to get the batteries out. Why do they bloat like that anyway?

Oh YES they can. We have a customer that had that happen in their switch/server room and the blocks are forever covered in sticky soot.

The bloating comes from the loss of the chemical reaction in gel cells, causing the continual charging to simply "boil" them.

The times I've personally known of it happening were reportedly related to gasses that escaped from the batteries and collected in the bays. Then a spark from the contacts ignited the gasses.

Yep. I have personally witnessed CO wet cell batteries(approx. 2ft x 2ft x 2ft) explode, had car batteries explode while starting and jump starting and have had a string of 8 wet cell batteries on a Nortel SL1 PBX go off when deinstalling a location. It ain't pretty. Battery bloating is pretty common as they age.

Years ago my mom & dad were driving along when the truck battery exploded. The only thing left of it was the plastic bottom and the terminals in the connectors, and of course battery acid on just about everything under the hood.

All batteries will sulfate and this is one of the causes of expansion. Sealed lead-acid or gel cell it doesn't matter, hydrogen gas will be given off, think Hindenburg here.
Battery safety precautions should be paramount!

You better believe it.

And it always leaves a very nasty mess to clean up when it happens.

On a smaller scale, other types of batteries can explode in the event of a short as well. We heard a loud bang coming from the stock room one afternoon and it turned out to be shorted leads on 3.6V Lithium batteries. The stock clerk removed 25 batteries from a protective tray(these are through hole PCB mounted batteries)and placed them hodge-podge into a drawer parts bin. All those leads touching each other eventually caused one of the batteries to heat up and BANG! We were glad it wasn't over the weekend because there were 24 batteries left in that bin!

We had a fire in the cargo area of an Astro van. Traced to the deterioated Ni-Cads on a Iwatsu Omega IV CPU. Carefully packed in anti static bag in cardboard box, buried in a pile of card boxes on the floor. August in KS in the middle of a heat wave, temp over 100 F. Held the heat in just fine, until the box caught fire! Unfortunately this was a passenger van with the seats in storage. Full interior. Had to replace almost everything but the front seats. If it didn't burn, it smelled burnt. Even when everything was replaced, they still had to 'perfume' it. Thing smelled like a french whorehouse ever after. After that, I instituted open air storage of anything with a battery on, or in, it. All we needed was a fire in the parts room! Better housekeeping in the van would also probably have prevented it! John C. (Not Garand)