Have You Ever Accidentally Shorted a Battery ?

[Ypedal]

From Newbs to Gurus, play with batteries long enough and it's almost inevitable that sooner or later you will make sparks..

Now, this does not apply to the times we do it on purpose... easier on the nerves when you expect it..

Figured it would be interesting to know how many spark-arc virgins we have in here :lol:

 

[karma]

shorted a 36v ebikekit.com battery pack in the driveway sparks and smoke. after repair it still works :wink:

 

[neptronix]

yes, while i was trying to desolder a lipo cell, i managed to discharge 1 cells and overcharge 1 cell. It was not happy.

So i used the YPedal method and tool a dremel to the pack and said screw it.. dremel badger don't care.. dremel badger don't give a fuh!

 

[fizzit]

You think you're impressed with LiPo sparks.. should see some of the sparks I've made with 350v capacitors... 10 or so little disposable camera flash caps can make a surprisingly big bang :lol:
Luckily I haven't shorted either my 44v 10ah of lipo or my 450v 2000uF capacitor that's the size of two soda cans!

 

[biohazardman]

I have built five or six decent sized 48-66V a123 M1 packs and only once have I done so without any sparks no matter how careful I was. Pieces of solder, solder iron tip, a pair of needle nose pliers and my volt meter probes have all been shortened or converted to liquid metal in an instant with a blinding flash and cool sound. ;^) I hate building packs as I am always paranoid I will hook something up wrong but that is not what happens. It's the moment I am trying to be really careful and fully aware of what will happen if I'm not that something falls or I twist a tool the wrong way and ZZaaappp.

 

[Metallover]

I shorted my 6s 5ah Turnigy pack

edit- I've shorted parts of my pack at the main discharge leads around 3-4 times.

Packs that have shorted developed weak cells down the road. I've replaced two weak cells and I have one more starting to show now.

 

[Rassy]

The two I remember right now were with 36V SLA's. Very carefully removing the series and parallel wires from a 3S2P pack when I dropped a wire. Went right for a dead short, but the 40A fuse saved the day. The other one was with a multimeter on the wrong setting, creating a dead short. Melted the probes and ruined the connectors being probed, all in an instant. Little burn on the fingers.

In the old days, 1940's and 1950's, my Dad would open a pair of pliers and touch the end of one handle to the positive post and the end of the other handle to the negative post. If there were sparks, the battery was good to go. Everything was 6V in those days. We didn't have a battery charger or jumper cables or voltmeters on the farm. Did lots of push or pull starting.

 

[AussieJester]

I have shorted the whole battery pack on my latest bike 4 times already, the bus bar setup is sweet but such little gaps between them plus no covers on them, lets just say I have broken out butane torch to replace the gold bullet connectors a couple of times along with replacing bullets on the pack leads lost the end off a small screw driver to , no matter if I am half expecting it or not, out always makes me jump.

KiM

 

[floatingdog]

Smoked the charger with a backward connection and burned the ends off my Fluke probes by leaving it set to read amps. No KF fingers yet. I rearranged my Andersons so that it takes more than color matching to plug them in correctly.

I don't want to argue the merits of different connectors when it comes to high power, but the Andersons are great when it comes to configuring unique connector arrangements that defy misconnecting.

 

[Toorbough ULL-Zeveigh]

while loosening a terminal nut to disconnect the pack i shorted to the adjacent cell while turning a crescent wrench despite being super paranoid careful trying not to.
to date, never blown a meter with the amp/volt setting, knock on wood.
did try to strip the insulation off a live 120V house wiring.
blew a pair of holes thru the jaws of a my side cutters creating a perfect fit 14g wire stripper.

my outlook is that of 88 fingerz louie,
"ya play wit a hot pee-anna, yer gonna git yer fingerz boynt."

 

[El_Steak]

A few years ago, I shorted a 48V SLA pack, on my kitchen table. Didn't go well with the GF.

I also shorted my Lipo pack twice when going from series to parallel for charging (balance taps). Hasn't happened since I started charging my whole pack in series with my two 14s chargers.

 

[Kingfish]

Twice on my last trip to California, and both times it happened when I was fatigued.

First time was in Centralia and heading south: I thought that I had unplugged all the batteries and I was in the midst of hooking up the Balancing Plugs; magic sparks flew into the air and all over me as I had forgotten one. My white long-sleeved shirt was stained with little bits of carbon soot. Thank goodness I had my hat on or my hair would have been singed.

The second time I was really tired and I had pulled off to get some water and rest in northern California on the way to Gold Beach. I was trying to lean the bike against a post and reaching in the right pannier to get some water, accidentally pulling one or two connections loose. When I put attempted to reconnect, well… I think I had crossed up the pairing between another “unit in series” and it was easy to see how one could weld with DC current. That took me about 15 minutes to trim off the melted plastic and affect repairs.

But never did anything serious enough to ruin the batteries.

Frayed, slightly melted, and humbled, KF

 

[amberwolf]

Of course not!

...except maybe for the time I accidentally dropped a nut between two 31Ah SLA batteries, which were facing each other with + and - opposite each other, about 1" apart. One set of + and - were already jumpered together with 8 or 10g cable (bolted to the terminals with thick lugs), and the other set had bolts thru the terminals but not all the way yet.

Like any smart guy I reached in there with plastic tweezers to pick up the nut so I couldn't short the terminals with the tool, but I was holding myself up off the floor a bit with one hand on the top of the batteries at that end, and my fingers pushed the bolt in one of the terminals all the way thru it, and when I pulled the nut out, it was close enough to both terminals to touch and arc and melt away some good chunks of both sides of the nut, and the end of the bolt, and melt the tweezers to the nut, in less time than I could even react to. Other terminal didnt' seem harmed. No KFF smoke, though my eyes were more than a little dazzled. SLA were fine, too.

Someplace on my old Electricle blog there are probably pics of the results, but I can't find them right now.


And the time when I was much younger (early teens, living in farm country with other stupid kids that liked to dare even stupider things to each other), and deliberately dropped a wrench across an old car battery, just to watch it glow red and melt. It didn't actually do that, because an inch and a half of it on one end, along with that post of the battery, ceased to exist, and even with the acetylene-torch-shield-type goggles I had on, I was still momentarily blinded by the flash (and got a sunburn).

The battery still started a truck after we drilled a hole in what was left of the post and put a machine screw in it to hold the cable down on it. Then some of the kids took it out in the fields and shot at it with various guns, but I wasn't stupid enough to stick around for that part, so I don't know what happened except that three of them had bandages on the next schoolday.

 

[Spacey]

Ok....so if anyone is going to be a dumbass it's going to be me.

Yep.....in my rush to get home from work I plugged a fully charged 17.4ah 66v Turnigy Lipo pack directly into itself. The bang was huge and blew the connectors from out of the plugs. My hand was black and the tips of my fingers all shiny where the finger prints were burnt off, won't do that again.

Building Headway packs I was always shorting the bus bars against other cells, it's easy to do because when you take off one of the screws on a copper buss bar you forget that unscrewing the other one makes the buss bar spin round and it always hits another cell.

You have about 3 secs to beat the buss bar off the cell before the cell is ruined, normally the fail safe on the Headways pops before thermal runaway lol. It's nice to know the cells are safe but I now pay uber attention when building Headway packs.

 

[Philistine]

Asking Ebikers wether they have shorted a battery before? Isn't that like one of those polls where they ask "have you every masturbated before?", 99% say "yes" and 1% lie.....

Just like I won't regail you with tales of all my great wanks because they are nothing I am proud of (OK, I have had a few more wanks than shorts, but I have had a lot of shorts, but I mean, its not like I have trouble sleeping at night without having a quick short), I will save some of my great "short" stories for their own threads. The last one involved a "long lunch" and causing an entire 6 storey office building to be evacuated and the fire brigade to be called.....

 

[liveforphysics]

I've shorted batteries more times than I could count.

I've had shorts that blew apart 180amp anderson connectors. I've shorted massive packs by doing all sorts of stupid mistakes. Thank God with RC LiPo, if you short too solidly for more than a second or two (which is hard to do because it normally arc's away the contacting points in a split second), it simply pops the tabs and opens the circuit.

In the large EV game and TTXGP, there have been some folks with pretty epic shorts that make all the shorts that I've done seem pretty tame. Some needed skin grafts...

 

[Thud]

Best short out I ever saw was my good buddie Dave at a thursday night 1/10 scale buggy race.

He droped a fully charged 6cell pack into his front pocket on his baggy shorts (apptly named) & the pack settled onto his car keys blowin a firey hole through his pants....of cours the key was the ignition & that was destroyed. Had to drive him 30miles to get the spare set.

But i have experianced welders spots after vaporising 4mm bullets on a miscue

 

[dbaker]

epic shorts for sure :lol: The baggy shorts car key could have been bad My dramatic short experiences have come from using a multimeter to measure voltage when the leads were plugged into the 10 amp ammeter socket

 

[tedcs]

I dropped a wrench in a live 480 volt circuit breaker panel once.
The result was spectacular and I think it would count.

 

[ohzee]

When I got my new triangle bag I was placing my batteries into it and hooking them up.
So 24s3p in total. Some of the wires were a bit buried so I failed to realize I was almost
done and needed to plug the 2 ends into my andersons/controller. Rather then do that
I plugged the pack into itself with 4.5mm bullets..

WOW what an explosion.. bullet connectors were gone and my left hand was totally black
all the way up to my wrist.. Looked a lot worse then it actually felt. Worse part was the
ears ringing and eyes flashing. Well and my pride.. 1st time I have admit this on the board heh.

 

[richirich1113]

Well, about five years ago i had the great idea to wire up some portable dvd player lipo's to run my remote control car. Well those are definatly not batteries you would want to short. I still not sure what i did but the end of the pack started to glow , the wham it started a pressure flame almost 1 1/2 ft long. it sounded like a jet turbine engine just blowing flame. This was on my bedroom floor. it was a good thing i had a fire extinguisher outside the door. A good blast and i thought it was out but woom it went off again. Another blast of extinguisher it was out but the battery at this time was just an ash. It left a 2ft burn of melted carpet and my room was a so solid of a cloud of smoke, i held my breath to get to the window and turned on a fan and the closed my door. It took like 3 hours to clear out. Afterwards i had to throw all my bedding and some clothes away and had to clean everything from floor to ceiling to get the toxic residu off EVERYTHING. IT sucked soooo bad.
I still used lipo's in my remotes but not homemade ones anymore. I think i still kida have a lipo phobia now.

 

[miuan]

I have a 20S 15Ah turnigy pack. I use no precharge circuit so every now and then I just change out the 4mm bullets. It was already quite late and I should've probably gone to bed instead, but hey... I took some massive steel pliers to cut off one of the plugs, but somehow forgot to separate the other wire.
Flashing eyes and black hands with burnt skin were well deserved, but the 5 x 5mm hole in my pliers was an unexpected bonus

 

[FastDemise]

... I took some massive steel pliers to cut off one of the plugs, but somehow forgot to separate the other wire.
Flashing eyes and black hands with burnt skin were well deserved, but the 5 x 5mm hole in my pliers was an unexpected bonus

Something similar is exactly how I ruined my good pair of wire cutters. Just had some SLA and saw my wires were too long and stupid me just clipped both wires without a second thought. lol, man I was laughing more than scared due to be knowing how stupid I was. The ones that scare the shit out of me is when I'm measuring a individual battery and 1 of the DMM probes slides into the other.

 

[Farfle]

accidentally plugged a set of two 12s3p 20c packs into one another, instead of in series. What bullets? Have not had any 100v pack level shorts yet, I hope I never get to experience that...

 

[amberwolf]

I can't get it to focus well enough to take a pic, but I damaged another set of meter leads the other day when tracing out wiring on CrazyBike2 ot find out why the taillight stopped working. There's a "temporary" connection I made for the laptop adapter that boosts the voltage to the CFL taillight, which is basically just the tapped wires to the pack and to the light itself wrapped thru the holes on the AC cord prongs and taped with electrical tape. I'd intended to go back and splice things together properly, back when I built it, but it kept working and i kinda forgot about it. :lol:

Anyway, while testing it I accidentally stuck the meter probe all teh way thru one of the holes in the prongs, and touched the other with it. So that shorted the 14s 20Ah pack, and vaporized a pit in the meter lead and burned away about 1/4" of the 20g wire used to supply ground from the pack to that plug. Saw spots for a few minutes there. No harm done except the wire and meter lead tip. Easily fixed.