My charger melted. Is my scooter still okay?

Hoping to get some advice from you experts.

Recently I took delivery of one of those hoverboards, smart balance scooters, segway thingies, whatever you want to call it. I ordered it before the news about them catching on fire. Today, I charged mine up for the first time within an hour, the charger brick melted (photos below). I quickly unplugged it before it got worse, but I'm wondering if it's just the charger that needs replacement or if I should be concerned about the hoverboard itself, particularly the battery or the controller inside. I don't know if it matters, but I should note that the charger was blinking red for two seconds, then green for 2 seconds and then back to red and kept repeating. From what I understand, that's just a trickle charge and isn't anything out of the ordinary. Definitely call me out if I'm wrong about that.




The vendor got back to me and agreed to send me a new smart charger today which will stop charging once full, so it's supposedly a better charger than the one that melted.

I had a similar experience where a charger died on me. It didn't melt, but in that case it did end up being just the charger and after I got a replacement smart charger, I was good to go. The Cruzin Cooler (see sig) kept going and even now it's working great.

I had bought the latest 4th generation hoverboard pictured here. Maybe it's naive of me, but I figured this version may have worked out the bugs from the first three versions.


Any recommendations on what I should do or shouldn't do? I haven’t ridden the hoverboard since. A bit scared to until I hear some advice from experts like you.

I’d appreciate any thoughts you may have on the matter. Thanks in advance.

Mmmm... Given what you've seen already, and what has been seen by others and posted in various places here and elsewhere, I'd charge it outside in a fireproof box, away from any buildings or any flammable objects, if I were to keep it at all.

I probably wouldn't even keep it, or I would completely replace the entire battery and charging system, including all of it's wiring, because I would never trust what it came with.

Open it up and see what's inside

If you gave that to me for free, (since I would not buy one due to fall injury risks), I would attach a large finned heat sink to the hottest side, and also a tiny 120V fan, that was hard wired into the input, so that when the charger is plugged in, the fan is spinning.

I recently added a large finned heat sink to the charger for my laptop, and even without a fan, the difference is significant.

Thanks for the replies, but I am not interested in keeping the charger. It's clearly damaged.
If I were to open it up, my expertise isn't enough to know what I'd be looking at. Although it is the charger that's damaged, my concern leans more towards the hoverboard. The charger is already being replaced by a smart charger with auto shutoff or trickle charge.

My reply was about the scooter itself, not the already-damaged charger.

I see. Thanks for your clarification. So you feel it's toast or at least too big of a risk to keep around. Bad news for me I guess. Ugh. I was really looking forward to using this.

I just wouldn't trust it without doing the above, since the actual reason for the fires is not really known, and the likely way to find out it's not reliable is to have a fire with it.

As you might guess, I'm a bit paranoid about fire hazards. :/

How did you make out with the new charger? Ours melted EXACTLY like yours and I'm trying to decide what to do.

Thanks!

I don't have the new charger yet. I purchased two. They're both shipped to my parent's office. Not trusting deliveries during the holidays where I live for stuff left at the front doorstep. Safe, but getting crazy these days. Haven't had a chance to pick it up yet. Should be there this week. I'll take a look. I'll be running some tests with my uncle who knows more about this electrical stuff than I do. He'll be testing the current drawing from the charger. Might go for a third commercial grade charger. Haven't quite decided yet.

Issue though is that even if we can get a charger that is robust enough, any issues would just go to the next weakest point which unfortunately could be the battery and we might end up like the "other" hoverboard owners out there. This is all too unfortunate.

This is just a hunch, but I believe the earlier models costing $500 before the craze or early on are legit and do just fine. It's when companies started competing like crazy using lower and lower prices that the manufacturers started cutting corners and picked safety features to cut out to save a few bucks. Meeting the demand. Tough call on what to do next.

Luna charger$100 or a Satiator $295 and be done with charger crap.

Martha356 said:

How did you make out with the new charger? Ours melted EXACTLY like yours and I'm trying to decide what to do.

Thanks!

Click to expand...

I would be very interested to know the specs, vendor, and manufacterer of your hoverboard. Can you post photos or links to where you might have it published elsewhere if you've already done so?

Looks like two sensored 3-phase brushless hubmotors, two controllers with foot switches and a battery (unknown spec) with what looks like a BMS, leaving the charger as just a dumb PSU.

If the cells and BMS are of acceptable quality then the problems may just be with a poor quality PSU.

Disassembly video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHdiWohQm0Q

Interesting. So are you suggesting that a new charger is all that's needed? Any particular one you recommend? I've been told to get one with higher amperage so that it can handle what the hoverboard demands be drawn from it.

That would make sense if your scooter has a battery with a BMS that properly limits charging current. The only way to know for sure is to either find a full spec or disassembly article for your specific model of scooter, or to open yours, take photos and hope the clever folks on here can tell you what you have.

Or just get a good quality replacement charger and follow the advice about expecting it to catch on fire someday and only charge and store in a suitable place to safely contain a fire. A lot of people do this is a matter of course with their lithium-ion batteries.

In response to you recommendation for taking photos, here they are. I unscrewed half of the hoverboard exposing the battery. Although I still have my doubts on whether this is genuine or not, I'm at least glad there was an attempt on showing a Samsung battery. I wouldn't really know for certain unless I ripped it open to see the cells. Didn't go that far.

My intention for opening this up was simply to see if there was an obvious BMS and to confirm that the battery wasn't visibly swelling like I've seen my other Lipo batteries do before.









Maybe I'm just easily impressed, but it looks like they did a clean job of putting this together. The zipties were clean and the connectors appeared to be decent quality.

Do you see a BMS? Any comments regarding these photos?

Yeah, it doesn't exactly look thrown together. Can you tell if the battery is can or pouch cells? If it's made of 18650 can cells, Samsung or not, that's a good sign. I think if there's a BMS it's part of the battery. If you can get the battery out you may be able to get a peak at it under the blue shrink wrap if its there.

From all the photos I've seen of these things, they're can cells. I was told the BMS might be built into the board rather than into the battery like we typically see in electric bike battery applications. Not sure. Little worried about rupturing anything and/or not being able to get everything back together nicely.

Over the weekend, I bought an ABC rated fire extinguisher! The things we go through to ride a risky device. Ugh.

I was looking before to see if the BMS was integrated into one of the motor controller boards, but this would require a set of balance wires joining the two, which didn't seem to be present.

That's presuming it has a *balancing BMS, or one that actually checks cell levels. It could have one that only checks total pack voltage, and/or limits total current draw. With the issues on the news about the type of board, I'd hazard a guess that if it has any kind of BMS at all, it is that latter type, that does not have cell-level access, so that it can't check if the cells are balanced/etc. So when a cell is overdischarged, while others are still high (possibly because they could ahve been overcharged due to several cycles of this going on, making the imbalance worse and worse), it doesn't know abotu either one, becuse the total pack voltage adds up the way it expects.

Eventually something gets far enough past it's limit that it fails.


But personally, I expect they left the whole BMS thing out entirely, and so a problem with the chargers (overcurrent? overvoltage?) is damaging the cells, or actively causing the fires.

This would more readily explain the instances that seem to indicate first-time-chargings may have dramatic failures, too--that shouldn't happen if it's a slow imbalance but that a BMS was still shutting off charge (or discharge) past a certain pack voltage.


I figure all that is in there is an LVC on the controller itself, to tell it to stop once it reaches a certain voltage for a long enough period (so sudden sag on takeoff with a low battery doesn't stop it from working).

I received the replacement chargers. This is the one I'm using. it's made by landbirdboard. 2amp vs the 1.5amp ones that are more typical from other vendors. This one should be able to handle all the power being drawing into the hoverboard better. It's also UL listed which is a big plus. I checked out the UL website and the company is indeed listed, so I'm thinking it's legit. Plugged it in. Watched it like a hawk for at least 30-40 minutes. No green light yet, but I'll continue charging again another day. So far so good.


This is the replacement one that Chinae-health sent me in place of the original one that melted. It is definitely a different charger than the one that came with the hoverboard, but the specs are the same and it's not UL listed: