Comment on exploding cell phone batteries
My cell phone popped open when I was talking. The reason is the battery had expanded to three times its normal size. I searched the Internet and found this is called “swollen battery” and found some videos of cell phones exploding and burning when the swollen lithium battery is punctured or compressed.
My question: Is the cell phone company that provides the phone responsible for replacing the battery? Are they liable for damages? I ordered a battery replacement from Amazon, and hopefully my phone still works (sometimes the battery expansion breaks the phone screen). I was curious why, when I contacted my phone company, they said “Oh this a great opportunity to buy a new phone”, rather than “We will send you a new battery”. I got a reply from the company while I was writing, and they do not know about this. Maybe someone in the company does, but the support people have no clue.
What I recommended was they check their records to find people with older phones. I have had mine since Dec 2018 and the failure is likely related to total charging time. I will check the Internet to see if someone has charged batteries to failure.
“batteries” “fires” has 14.9 million entry points on Google just now. So it is a fairly large topic on the Internet.
(“batteries” OR “battery” OR “lithium”) (“fires” OR “explosions”) “charging time” has 295,000 entry points.
These are topics that waste much Internet user time, because there are too many wrong, incomplete, isolated, untraceable, duplicated, false, misleading, and wrong materials left on the Internet. And anything “good” gets lost in that jumble.
If you happen to have studies where someone has tested (temperature, charging rate, charging cycles, total current applies, current used, pressure, that sort of thing) to catastrophic failure (fire, swelling, explosion, rupture), I would like to read them. I don’t have time to read millions of pages, curate it for myself, compile and verify that much stuff. Imagine hundreds of millions or billions of battery users (there are about 4.9 billion people using the Internet) each having to read tens of millions of pages from the Internet on (“battery” OR “batteries”) (“failures” OR “fire” OR “explosion”) and you see the scale of what I deal with every day. I thought EPA might have the computer skills and resources to deal with a few tens of millions of pages on this “small” topic.
Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation
