Nigel, I somehow doubt that. It does happen but in the last 10 years I've not heard a single news report of someone being killed by a lead acid battery in normal use. By contrast, there have been several deaths this year from LiPo fires.
I deliberately avoided answering Dashmallow above so as to prevent this diversion from the main topic being ongoing, but on the subject of swelling batteries, 5.32 of this RISC Authority handbook says any swelling battery should be removed from the premises immediately to a safe area:
file:///F:/Downloads/RC61%20(1).pdf
I'm not trying to sensationalise this, nor point a finger at any manufacturers using these, as there's a small proportion of incidents. However, it's significant enough that people should be aware of it and be careful in the handling and use of these batteries, and again the advice is care should be taken using them in hot or cold environments and outside of certain charge levels. Given that 3rd party parking backup batteries potentially get direct sunlight onto the battery casing, I would imagine these are higher risk than well tested OEM camera batteries that are at least shielded by the camera casing from direct light.
Nobody, especially me is disputing the need for caution and common sense in the use of lithium batteries. If you'd been paying any attention I've been bringing this to people's attention here on this forum literally for years, especially in regard to responsible battery management and charging techniques. In fact, there are numerous lengthy discussions on battery safety in the
Batteries & Capacitors forum, so I question why you feel the need to completely derail the side camera discussion in this thread claiming that,
"this was too important not to mention." It's kind of selfish I think but I guess you must see yourself as a some sort of civic minded public servant and boyscout. And as usual you're handing out advice on something you have no personal hands-on experience with unlike the many of us who have actually been using power banks for quite some time.
What I take issue with is your alarmist hysteria about racing out of your house with a li-po battery pack that may have swelled a bit, recommending that people shouldn't even store lithium batteries in their houses or that, "there isn't a safe battery method" for using power banks to run dash cams in parked automobiles.
There are literally millions of lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries in service used by millions of people in all kinds of products and in all kinds of situations, including automobiles. People leave smartphones, laptops, battery banks and indeed battery powered dash cams in their cars all the time. Whether that is a wise thing to do or not it happens all the time and the reports of fires or explosions are rare. Personally, when I began using power banks four and a half years ago I was extremely paranoid about them but as I gained experience with them I also gained confidence in their reliability. The main ingredient required is simple common sense.
Despite your claim that you are, "
not trying to sensationalise this" (sic) the fact is that you are doing exactly that! When you post sensationalist YouTube videos featuring spectacular footage of exploding battery packs with heart pounding dramatic music playing in the background, what else can one call it?
And the video starts out specifically stating that the exploding battery pack was DAMAGED and brought in with a drone for servicing such that the repair personnel had no clue about the history of the power pack in question.
Drone battery packs bear virtually no relationship with how we use power banks in our cars, or phones or dash cams or flashlights or smoking vaporizers or any other popular modern gadget that people use and store in millions of homes every single day. Power packs used in drones are regularly pushed to their max during use, both with repeated cycles of fast charging and hard discharging. At the same time, perhaps more than in any other usage scenario they are subjected to constant vibrations and strong shocks which tends to dramatically increase the likelihood of an internal short circuit and eventual thermal runaway.
So, to sum up, the issue isn't proper common sense lithium battery handling, it's your hysteria and alarmism.
The folks publishing the video had no idea regarding what may be happened to the battery or drone before it was handed over to them,
except that they knew it was damaged. So the video tells us nothing useful about battery safety or the propensity of lithium packs to catch fire, it's merely senational YouTube click bait.
