Would that be the Magicshine company that had the batteries that caught fire?

J.

Yes, three of them out of the thousands sold. With the same battery technology that causes Nokia cell phones, Sony and Apple laptops, and many other devices to catch fire.

It's also unreported as to whether the ones that caught fire had been damaged. ANY LiIon cell that gets damaged can catch fire, no matter who built it. Hell, they can EXPLODE. That's what you get with high energy densities, no avoiding it.

the ppm out of magicshine is much higher than the same out of the other companies you mentioned. And, there were some serious fires that occurred.

Personally, it's not worth it to save a few bucks to me to take that sort of risk.

J.

What about for other similar products? Bike light batteries are a lot more likely to get abused than laptop batteries. Especially batteries that have no armor around them. It could be that the only real problem with them is that they weren't in a hard plastic shell, making them vulnerable to damage to the protection circuitry, or direct damage to cells, if dropped. 18650 cells, if impacted sharply on the top corners, short out and WILL burst into flames, period.

That could mean that it's a bad design decision to not put them in a protective case, but if it requires abuse to cause them to flame up, IMO that's something to take into consideration.

Risk is always a tradeoff. There's no such thing as a LiIon pack which can't possibly burst into flames. I kept my cells on a flameproof surface when charging and storing, as I do with all my larger capacity devices.

The fact is that it basically turned into a total recall because of several fires one of which caused significant damage to a home and was fortunately found before the place went up entirely (as opposed to a closet/bedroom IIRC). There was no replacement alternative for months and when there was it came from the US importer and not from the manufacturer. So whether it was poor design or a poor recovery or both doesn't really matter. None of it speaks well for the company or the product or their ability to support their customers. Another example of "you get what you pay for."

J.