Have You Ever Accidentally Shorted a Battery ?

[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 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.

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.

[Sacman]

Threw my keys into my rear paniers where there was partially exposed battery connections.
Sparks shot out and blew a hole in the paniers.
When I retrieved my keys I found 2 of them were arch-welded to each other.

[Ypedal]

Damn.. 56 to 4 to far !!!...

[rojitor]

Once i almost weld the andersons when plugging, i turned it off and everything went ok again, i had to replace the connectors though.

[tedcs]

Damn.. 56 to 4 to far !!!...

If the number of events were considered, I could push the ratio higher than 14:1!

BTW: Steel reinforcing bars can be used if jumper cables are unavailable.

[Doctorbass]

For those who might doubt about the dewalt 36V pack.. give a try... you'll see!

These damn BMS have their case connected to the negative of the battery.. and when you unsolder them.. you better disconnect the NEG first!!!.. otherwise when desoldering the positive tab, the risk of shorting the positive to the BMS case is really high!

The blast was impressive and the firework that produced felt on some paper on mt table and they caught fire! fortunately i had time to react!

I also shorted my two 14s4p A123 together ( i reversed one of the parallel connections ... This is impressive how fast a SB50 connector can dissapear... vaporize!

Any KFC sponsor here?

Doc

[lostrack]

My granddad was an electrician who was working on overhead live lines. He checked with his partner to see if the power was off, which the dude said it was, so he climbed up there and started working... He took a 30,000 volt shock and flew to the ground...and survived!
This man was winding his own TV sets with copper wire around a cathode ray tube before tv was being broadcast! If he was still around I'd be building an EV with him

[e-bike-is-fun]

Yea that's good.
I drove a boom lift w/two men into lines on a cage.
Men survived (pussy's) but shut down half the town.

[blake.thomas.80486]

I dropped a wrench across a car battery once, it stuck and burned a chunk out of it and the terminal, thankfully lead acids are tuf and it didn't seem to harm it.
I took 20Kv or so from hand to hand (high voltage supply failed and arced) I felt my chest thump, it rather scared me.

[Ykick]

My dad told me about being in the Phillipines when a volcano erupted - the iron dust spewing into the immediate area shorted car batteries and created dramatic sparks and mini explosions. Power lines and transformers too!

[Doctorbass]

Whe3n i was in car audio hobby ( SPL contest) We had a VW gold with 8 parallel optima yellow top Group 31 12V battery with aluminum bus bar. A frind of mine droped a wrench and... yes it have fall directly on those

12V is not so high for arcing.. but still impressive when you have alot of amps ( 10 000+A) it's dangerous!

One of the aluminum bus bar ( 1" x 1/4") melted and fall on the car carped wich melted too

Doc

[mdd0127]

I did the same thing! We built an Isuzu pickup with six Cerwin Vega Stroker 12's and six custom, one off linear power 2500 watt monoblock amps. I can't remember how many yellow tops we had in there but we used 1" X 1" aluminum bar for the buss bars and after tightening the last battery, the wrench slipped out of my hand. It instantly vaporized in the middle and I swatted the molten metal off of the top of the battery before it did any damage. We had to bolt a chunk of 2" x 4" solid aluminum from between the seats to the top middle of the windshield frame to keep the 3/4" lexan windshield from blowing it's rivets out! That truck was hitting 174.9db......in 1996!

The most recent battery short was while demonstrating the coolness of my lipo parallel blocks to someone. As I was saying, "I designed these so that the batteries can only be plugged in correctly.", I touched the lipo bullets to the parallel block in reverse polarity causing a giant spark and the instantaneous vaporization of the two 75A castle bullets that connected the pack to the controller. My ego has a scar from that one...didn't burn my fingers though! While it was impossible to actually plug the battery packs in backwards, it sure wasn't impossible to touch the terminals together!

[Ypedal]

Heh Heh.... i hates bullets.....

Andersons all the way. ( no matter how many people try to convince me otherwise )

[Doctorbass]

I did the same thing! We built an Isuzu pickup with six Cerwin Vega Stroker 12's and six custom, one off linear power 2500 watt monoblock amps. I can't remember how many yellow tops we had in there but we used 1" X 1" aluminum bar for the buss bars and after tightening the last battery, the wrench slipped out of my hand. It instantly vaporized in the middle and I swatted the molten metal off of the top of the battery before it did any damage. We had to bolt a chunk of 2" x 4" solid aluminum from between the seats to the top middle of the windshield frame to keep the 3/4" lexan windshield from blowing it's rivets out! That truck was hitting 174.9db......in 1996!

The most recent battery short was while demonstrating the coolness of my lipo parallel blocks to someone. As I was saying, "I designed these so that the batteries can only be plugged in correctly.", I touched the lipo bullets to the parallel block in reverse polarity causing a giant spark and the instantaneous vaporization of the two 75A castle bullets that connected the pack to the controller. My ego has a scar from that one...didn't burn my fingers though! While it was impossible to actually plug the battery packs in backwards, it sure wasn't impossible to touch the terminals together!

Are you sure of your 174.9dB score you mentionned?.. because the loudest SPL that waas made in 1998 it was John Henry with the 12x 12inch woofer and the Mmats amp that had 174.7dB back in 1998.... i think no one ever beated that score BEFORE 98 ?

Doc

[Ypedal]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFd-OeMu3E4

[el_walto]

I once shorted a 48V 15Ah ping battery. Melted the fuse AND the fuse holder and made a very bright flash of light.