POP. BANG.
What was that? Sounded like somebody banging on one of the closed garage doors. BANG POP POP. What the hell?
I went into the next room to see who was banging on the door, but as I reached to open the door, the POP POP BANG sounded again but BEHIND me. I walked over to the Better Place battery pack from the Renault Influenza that we use on the OEM components test bench. BANG POP POP. These are actually pretty loud. What the……?????
This pack was right out of the cargo container and we never even attempted a bottom balance. We were only going to use it for testing chargers and DC-DC converters and the UQM test bench. But as the result of one of our assclowns playing around with the bench while I wasn’t in the shop, it had drained down very slowly overnight to a very low level.
It seemed to charge back up ok. But never quite got to full charge. So I had hooked it up earlier in the afternoon to bring it up some more.
I quickly shut off the charger and cut off the contactors. But it continued to BANG and POP irregularly. I can’t leave to go to bridge with it like this I’m thinking. As there had been several of these “no show” moments in the past few weeks where I threw my wife under the bus with regards to one plan or another, this was not really good. I can’t believe I’m doing this again.
Suddenly the pack begins to issue the familiar white smoke – just a bit at first, then more. The pack weighs 450 lbs, and the fork lift is at the other end of the building. I went over to the wall water spigot, glad I had a couple hundred feet of hose there to water our grass. No hose. Assclown somewhere had made command level decision to move it down to the basement in the other building apparently. There was a hose, but it was four feet long.
By this time the white smoke was coming out pretty good. I don’t know why, but I was curious what the temps were. So I grabbed an infrared gun and shot all the cells. Most were warmish in the 35-40C range but there were two sitting at 95C. Not good.
Suddenly the pack spewed a spear of sparks and flame about six feet straight out the front – right where I had been a moment before. And then it exploded into a massive fireball shooting flames up to the ceiling with such velocity that they splashed laterally from there.
It would have made excellent video I must say. At this point, I’m out of altitude, airspeed, and ideas all at the same time. I jumped in the Tesla and backed it out of the building. For some reason, I closed teh garage door after I was out, as I always do. I then had a positively exasperating wrestling match with the car for control of my cell phone to dial 911. I mean this car wanted to do ANYTHING except dial the phone. It played some Kriss Christopherson “Help Me Make it through the Night” (right) and some Rod Stewart. But it must have taken me three or four minutes to get it to dial 3 digits.
