How to tell if your lithium battery is a fire risk — and what to do

Videos like this phone charger bursting into flames. Scary right? So how do we stay safe when our homes are full of lithium batteries in our phones, laptops, power banks, drills, vacuum cleaners, scooters, e-bikes? Well there are warning signs before they actually catch fire. If they're hot, if they're smoking at all, if there's any odors, they're making weird sounds like a hissing or popping noise, that's time to unplug them and move them to a safe spot and call 911. But ideally don't wait for those warning signs because it means your battery is in a really hot self-heating state called thermal runaway. Luckily batteries don't just go into thermal runaway instantly it progressively gets worse and worse you're charging your phone it keeps getting hotter and hotter. That's something you can feel with your hand or monitor with an infrared thermometer gun or heat detector or you could use thermal stickers like the kind made by Gels' company These change colour when the battery reaches 60 degrees. That would be an indication like, unplug it, let's get it away from anything that's flammable. Then we know there's something wrong with the power bank and we won't use it again. Even if it cools down again, which it might. Experts warn that even if your batteries have been fine until now, you should still keep an eye on them because there are lots of ways they can get damaged. Such as if they're dropped, exposed to high heat, recharged too many times. So even if it's not an emergency yet... If our devices are getting strangely hot, for us to realize that we should probably disconnect them from being charged and perhaps have a technician look at it. These little pieces of awareness go a long way.