Have always had good luck with charger/lipos minus a couple punctured cells in a buggy that led into leaking the lipo smoke. But nothing like what happened this time around. Was charging a venom 3s pack when out of nowhere the lipo decided to overcharge and burst into flames. Take my loss as an example to use precaution when using/charging/storing lipos. Use lipo sacks!

Luckily, noone was injured at the track but I did sustain a substantial amount of equipment loss. 2 venom ultimate 10a chargers, 2 common sense blinky balancers, 2 venom lipos, 3 gen ace lipos, power supply, jawbone bluetooth, and misc. accessories. Charred (had to be repainted) DX3R transmitter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egEl-M7CamM
Before:

After:

Yikes!

Questions if I may, the battery being charged, was it hooked up to a blinky balancer, the charger balancer, or ?
Charge rate?

I would look at A Main..I got a real nice proTec 10 amp charger with a balancer for $80 shipped, it's just DC but it was hard to beat the price..

lipo was being charged at a 1c rate( 3.2 or something like that). Lipo was being balanced with a seperate blinky balancer. Now this leads me to believe that the best way to charge + balance a lipo is with the built in circuitry of the charger; so that the balance reading can communicate with the charger how much to charge and exactly when to stop charging. All it takes is one cell to be off voltage (overcharged) for the pack to begin it's swelling + bursting/smoking. Can't see it much in the pic, but that lipo was accordianed 3x it's size before it burst into a mushroom cloud.

Exactly my guess. If I'm not mistaken the blinkys have limited balancing power (150mA??), and can't tell the charger to slow down if they aren't keeping up.

Hope you weren't balancing before charging, that is generally a mistake.

Thanks for sharing, a reminder is always good. Sorry for your loss though.

Venom........still making a bad name for itself....



That sucks man

this is just me but i always keep my lipos that are being charged away from everything else. i especially dont put hundreds of dollars worth of electronics/batterys within a 2x2 square of them

Sorry for your loss man.... But like others said never EVER balance with a blinky because they can't discharge fast enough and this is most likly why your pack blew up.

Now if you used the chargers balance system it would have first warned if a cell in the pack had to low of voltage... and if during charging something went wrong it would have most likly shut down.... Guess it was a expensive lesson learned.

Never leave your batteries unattended. Sorry for the loss, but thats called "learning the hard way"

That really sucks I have puffed batts and while taking them apart I have punctured a cell and been able to throw it in my ammo box.

Lipos are very dangerous but if you treat them properly they are great.

What I do is do not balance charge. I just normal charge to about 95% of the pack ( about 4.15V/Cell) then let the pack sit while I charge the other ones. Then throw it on the balancer to finish charging very slowly.

sorry for the loss, that sucks..

Hyperion...

Isn't that going by the assumption that the pack is already closely balanced?
If one cell is .1v higher than the rest, by the time you get to 4.15 there would be one overcharged cell.

Best and easiest way is to just balance charge from the start, I think.
Most simple and has the least amount of risk, not to mention no chance of forgetting to stop it at a certain voltage to balance it.
Also the fastest method, by the time you get to 4.15v it's already charging at a pretty low rate.

Also most balancers I have looked at (those built into chargers as well) are all usually 150-250ma, not many are higher.

I think the point is that in the wrong hands lipo's "can" be dangerous, with a little knowledge and common sense the risk is greatly reduced.
I 'spose the saying "If it can happen, it will happen" fits here, however rare it does happen, it's still a good idea to charge away from other expensive items and batteries.

Wow....chills....

Just gave the bro in law my old Multiplex 5014 and a common sense blinky with volt checker....we always use lipo sacks... BUT he is new to lipo...

wow...

x2
x3

x4

No-one use lipo sacks anymore?