X-Ray Scans Reveal the Hidden Risks of Cheap Batteries
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
theverge.comTechstoryHigh profile
calmnegative
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Lithium-Ion BatteriesSafety RisksRegulation
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Lithium-Ion Batteries
Safety Risks
Regulation
The article discusses the hidden risks of cheap lithium-ion batteries, revealing manufacturing defects and safety hazards through X-ray scans, sparking a discussion on the need for stricter regulations and safety measures.
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I've personally commented on lots of dupes lately.
Makes me wonder if HN dupe detector is broken/changed recently.
Not sure if there is any additional value in the re-coverage, though it does feel like the message is important enough to be spread, and I suspect there is more readers of The Verge than the original source.
Some day I might make a dedicated battery box corner with a vent to outdoors though because batteries only seem to be getting bigger and more powerful.
Joiry
Ultimately, society only works on a foundation of trust. We trust that our food is safe, our medicine is effective, and our products won't explode. When folks have that trust broken, I view it as a systemic failure, not a personal one.
As a sidenote, Amazon is truly a dumpster.
or the plot line to an arson investigation procedural
Joiry
Yep, big mistake.
I really scaled back when I started going back and looking at old purchases, only to find out 8 of my last purchases were all counterfeit stuff. These were not just random electronic resellers. They were Lucky jeans, a Microsoft keyboard, a JBL bluetooth speaker, Under Armour shorts, Adidas work out tshirts and some other stuff. But altogether, I thought I was buying brand name, safe stuff that was priced in the same range as stuff you'd buy retail and I still got burned.
Just made me distrust everything I was seeing on Amazon.
Same thing with the keyboard. I ordered one off of the MS site. Got it and started using it for my work keyboard and immediately grabbed the other one I was using for my personal work. Subtle differences, but the one I got on Amazon was not the same. Rubber on the mouse was different the keys felt different, they had a different sound than the real one.
The JBL speaker my son pointed out the inconsistency in the logo letters. Got his real JBL cans and showed me - it was close to the naked eye, but when you saw it against the legit logo it was obvious.
The shorts and work out gear had that Chinese factory smell when it came. If you've ever bought stuff directly from China, you know what I'm talking about. Again, pulled out some of my other stuff I had bought that I knew was real and same thing, logo inconsistencies, poor stitching in areas, different thread than the originals.
Again, I ended up catching all these well after the fact, but the fact remains that stuff I thought I was buying on Amazon, was not. The troubling thing is it happened across products I would never suspect would be counterfeited.
Do you see original logos? Do you see it mentioned over and over how its original or OEM? You shouldn't be looking for reasons why its not a good buy, on such places you should expect it as default and try to give reasons why it actually may be an OK buy.
I simply wouldn't be buying such things from Amazon to start with, since seller can easily put those words there for quick profit, stickers can be fake and that's about the remote analysis that can be done, reviews are often gamed and useless. Its aliexpress/temu equivalent, nothing more.
In reality, scum bags are going out and buying cheap counterfeit junk, sending it to Amazon, which just throws it in the bin with every other item. Then someone buys it and gets a counterfeit one.
https://infinite-battery.com
Did you get auto-incorrected?
Because this can involve portable refrigeration, people realized you could use this just for batteries.
It's called a CE mark or equivalent, there is already a system, penalties and tests.
The customer doesn't enter into a contract with the manufacturer when they buy an item from a retailer. They do so with the retailer.
Which is not to say the agencies shouldn't also ban the product from the market. But that doesn't absolve the retailer of their duties.
The retailers are the front line for returns as that's the point of contact for the customer. That's just the nature of the beast. If a company establishes itself as a maker of decent products that retailers can trust suddenly gets lazy/cheap/profit focused to the point they cheapen their products, it is not the retailer's fault.
Retailers shrugging their shoulders is what I would call gross. You shouldn't sell a product to the public that you're not willing to stand behind. Retailers have a lot more ways to protect themselves from from shoddy manufacturers - and, fundamentally, operate at the kind of scale where they can do so - than customers have to protect themselves from shoddy anything.
How does a customer of a retailer hold a manufacturer accountable when they have no relationship with said manufacturer?
> But most of the time, retailers are just selling products they think customers will want to buy.
I don't think retailers are nearly as helpless or unwitting as that. Amazon definitely know they have unsafe products on the shelves no matter how dumb they may play.
> The retailers are the front line for returns as that's the point of contact for the customer
They're also the front line for consumer safety reporting, by law. All companies (not only retailers, actually) have a statutory duty to report unsafe consumer goods, even in the US, and not only for CPC/GCC certified goods. When a customer reports an unsafe product to their retailer, the retailer should forward this information, along with batch codes, origins, sourcing information etc (which the customer obviously will not know). This is the early-warning system that leads to things like recalls, withdrawals and so on, before something causes widespread harm.
Those who wonder why Americans can get so many things so cheaply - yes, we have lower tariffs (or at least did), but also we don't have those minimum-duration warranties that allow the consumer to return to the place of purchase as much as a year or more after purchase and demand satisfaction from the retailer. Those are expensive to provide.
Yes, if a technically-savvy person tells me "I've done X, Y, and Z, and it still doesn't work", I will believe them. A member of the general public? Even if they aren't scammers, it is entirely possible that they will eat up hours of effort at the store trying to do this.
It's obviously not free. I've seen a low-staff store - I was in a pharmacy (erm, if you're not in the US or Canada, our pharmacies carry a lot more than just health products, though in this case I was there to buy a product you would find in one in the UK or Europe) last week in Canada where they didn't have a cashier at the front. Only the pharmacist and a couple of techs at the back. If you needed assistance rather than self-checkout, you had to ring a bell to summon someone.
Walgreens, CVS, and the like are horrible to their retail employees and only care about retail business to the extent it drives more Rx business. You'll be happier using an independent pharmacy or one inside a retail business that would exist without the pharmacy, like a grocery store, and statistically safer, too.
They make a poor example if you want to extrapolate to other retailers.
And back then there was also this weird "China Export" logo that resembled the CE logo specifications for about 95%. The average consumer could not know the difference.
It also gives me a chuckle when i see this weird 'QC passed' stickers on components. Completely worthless.
Without registering every minute product variation with a testing certificate, how else would you handle this though? As much as I think regulators should be swinging the axe more than they do, from an engineering perspective it's impossible to actually do unless everything is locked down ISO 9001-style, especially for electronics and doubly so when software is in the mix.
Lying on a self-declaration should always be taken very seriously, but I feel like it often isn't. For example, if Amazon is found to have fake-CE marked good for sale after it's been reported to them, the penalties should make even their eyes water and have their responsible people shuffling nervously.
There's a limited amount you can do for Temu direct-shipped deathtraps (I suppose if you went to an tech-brained extreme, you could use the x-rays of packages at the border that they already do and have something like AI-based statistical recognition of known-bad products). But there's also not nothing you can do if you really cared. For example, you could imagine a registry of every single tested-bad product, photos of it, where it came from, known aliases, sightings in the wild and so on.
> And back then there was also this weird "China Export" logo
I am pretty sure that is a myth. It's just a sloppy, not-quite-to-spec logo. There is no China Export scheme. Maybe it was a sneaky deliberate way to avoid being hit with a "fake CE mark" charge but instead argue it's "no CE mark", but in either case it's not a legal product if the product needed a CE mark in the first place.
Not hammering down on that hard and fast is what allows that kind of thing. Recall the products you see with that and the retailers and importers would quickly get the message. Test products preemptively and publish the results. Allow it to fester and you get problems and people actually die.
There can be an enourmous difference between UL compliance and CE self declaration. No standard (normal?) business is actively trying to kill its customers, but there are a lot of small companies that love to make a profit by cutting a lot of corners.
That is one of the reasons these kinds of certifications exist in the first place and people should be able to rely on them. You cannot rely on CE and hope for the best.
Having certain UL certifications require rigirous and continuous testing in certified labs or environments. It makes things super expensive, but also very trustworthy. The fines, investigations and lawsuits are no joke. Not even for huge megacorporations. I've seen documentation where for instance General Electric had 48 hours to fix a problem or the product cannot ever be sold ever again, there would be a complete recall on their costs and the company could face banning from doing business completely.
I once had companies design power distribution units that required UL compliance. Price tag for a single unit was pretty insane. Around $400 per unit if i remember correctly. No consumer in their right mind would ever pay that if there is a market with a zillion cheap alternatives.
Even back then the market was flooded with fake CE crap. But it's also incredibly cheap, so lots of people (myself included for some things) buy the cheap stuff. They want the full experience, but don't want to (cannot?) pay top notch for it.
I get why. I get the process where everybody wants to make money. But it wil continue to demand lives, because there will always be people cutting corners if they somehow can and there will always be people who will buy the cheap stuff, because they want it.
I suspect that some manufacturers do not get challenged on that nearly as often as they should when they sell into channels like Temu and no-name importers. And so they can skate away with just not doing the certs, so they don't need to do the design work to meet them, and so they don't do it. If anyone asks, you just just don't sell to them.
Whereas if they sell, say, 500k units to Costco, they will be required to produce that paperwork because Costco is taking on the liability in the market and they can't just vamoose when something explodes.
It doesn't always work: things that have been "correctly" CE-marked sometimes do turn out to be unsafe and get recalled, but I suspect the real problems are things where the CE mark is fake and no one is stamping on heads in the way that UL does if you take their name in vain. Once it is known that testing and certification is statistically optional as long as you sell to the right channels, someone will do it unless they are stopped.
Compare this to eg. car crashes,... you probably know more people who've been in a car crash compared to people who've had batteries explode.
...on the other hand, we've banned liquids on planes because of an even rarer event.
If you're interested, you can order them here https://infinite-battery.com
I.e. my understanding is most devices are not like the 3s lipos I put in my hobby robots, but instead have integrated charging circuitry that you just give an appropriate voltage to... and that proper charging behavior avoids a lot of the dangerous scenarios with lipos?
I ask because, loosely, the # of battery fires seems like a function in part of: (1) use of good charging logic; (2) cell manufacturing quality; (3) # of cells in the wild. While the growth of 3 probably dominates the improvements to 1 and 2, I'm guessing the number of battery fires has grown but not "exponentially".
I'm not sure your understanding is correct. There are assembled packs with a BMS on them, laptop batteries this is usually the case. The cells themselves can be lipol, prismatic, or cylindrical (like 18650's). The cells almost never have active BMS built-in. It's always external (either on a board on the pack or on the device itself charging it).
I really think the battery fires are mainly qc issues and running bad qc cells beyond limits (either fast charging or discharging). If capacity is staggered a ton between cells then even charge balancing the cells isn't going to do much good. Pouch cell fires probably more related to physical damage due to expansion in places they aren't designed well to expand (so it pushes the jellyroll down and causes a short/thermal runaway).
Your mentioning of specific failure modes helps me, specifically breaking up the failures into multiple categories.
One question though: it seems like the contact between the PCB side panels and the cells relies on flexing the (FR4?) PCB material of the small per-cell "fingers" that are surrounded by cutouts, on the side panels. I wonder if once it's in this "flexed state", it will eventually fatigue, or settle into the bent state, after some time (years?), and no longer press on the cell ends strongly enough?
A bit like if you were to leave a rubber band in stretched state for a while, it won't fully go back to the diameter it was before.
After seeing this I refuse to sleep near my 20,000 mAh power bank. I saw this Jackery power station for sale for an ultra discounted price and noticed it was not lithium iron phosphate and I noped so fast.
It's not an ideal solution and not just because of examples like the Samsung Galaxy Note7. It's because I love rooting for the startups, the disruptors, the innovators. But in the world of battery powered products I'm inclined to think (or hope!) that the bigger players have more to lose by cheaping out on cheap batteries.
I learned this lesson over 10 years ago when I was visiting a night market in China with someone. He was so delighted with how cheap the portable chargers were that he bought a bunch to give to his friends/family back home. When we returned to the hotel one of them started emitting smoke. From that day I've only ever bought reputable brands, and even then I worry about it.
(I'm not complaining, mind you - I did find it very interesting to read. It just doesn't strike me as typical AT content, or at least not the kind that people typically share for it. Thank you to OP for doing so!)