PSA: check drawer with old devices regularly. Found a swollen battery in my PSP, after not touching it 7-8 years. Same with an old motorola A920 (quite old). Who knows how many years both had swollen batteries but, then again, newer batteries have much more power to contain.

If you think about it though, there are billions of shoddily made lithium batteries sitting in drawers everywhere for years now, and yet there are only about 10 fire incidents a day.

So like many other boogeymen, driving to work is still far more dangerous. Back of the napkin shows about 100x more likely to die in a car crash than experience a battery incident in any given year.

Fingers crossed it doesn't burn your house down when your out and about. At least put it somewhere outside.

I have plenty of fire alarms, both local and remote, and extinguishers of different types around, I'm not too worried :) But thanks for the concern kind stranger!

Your extinguisher will do absolutely nothing. Get rid of it. Soon. Better now.

The extinguisher is not for the battery itself silly, it's for when everything else around it is on fire :)

But if the fire continues after the extinguisher is done… what is covering that scenario?

At least put it in a coffee cup or something like that!

How am I supposed to be able to observe it slowly swell more over time then? I think I might have overstated how big this battery is, or understated how small it is. It's fiiine :)

YES!!

The other thing to do is discharge it, so it has little energy stored to maintain/enlarge a fire

A drone engineer I worked with would immediately put any suspect battery into a barrel of water for several days, then get them disposed of properly.

The risk really seems trivial, probably because of our extensive experience with ordinary alkaline and NiCad batteries with a very benign degradation pattern, but the risk with Li-Ion is no joke.

All your fire extinguishers will do you no good if it goes off while you are out of the house. Also, the fire extinguishers will only suppress the surrounding fire, and do nothing about the core Li-Ion fire itself.

It's trivial until they go, and then it is instant misery. I've done it on purpose just to see how bad it would be and even knowing it will happen it will still surprise you with how sudden, total and hot those things burn. You have < 2 seconds from first signs of ignition to all-out fire with the battery moving all over the place due to outgassing. It's a thing to behold.

Lol, literally none of those will meaningfully reduce or stop the damage if it happens.

Very applicable example for the thread!

If you have an oven light or a resister, you can use it to almost fully discharge the Lipo battery. Doing that will mostly render it inert, but if it's already swollen, you'll want to do it in a metal bucket/container outside. It can take awhile depending on the capacity of the battery. (This is how I dispose my FPV drone batteries).