Lipo's - Food for thought...

[Groomi]

http://www.liverc.com/news/special_f...ave_got_to_go/

I think it's right to question the continued use of lipo's in the face of unsettling failure rates, however it will always be true that the majority of racers will not want to be made to go slower.

Thoughts?

[richm]

its quite daily mail.

i am not doubting that lipos can be dangerous. and have been fortunate that in the short time ive been racing that i havent seen a fire, and ive been using lipo batteries for work for years with no issue (as well as LiFe for 18 months).

but what the article doesnt mention is how any of the fire may have started. was there faulty wiring involved in the car fire? was a battery left unattended on charge overnight? depending on how your connectors are setup, there may not be any protection if something shorts out the terminals whilst you are charging, or when the cells are in the car and connected to the speedo. how old were the cells? had they previously been mistreated or the case modified?

almost anything i search for on google will have hundreds of thousands of hits, but how many of them are individual rather than repeating the same info / source?

and i have seen a lot of poor soldering on both battery and motor terminals which can cause problems if wires some loose.

im not questioning the safety of lipos, just pointing out that the article could use a bit more research.

[beale]

Not sure how you post a poll on here but if we all put how many cells we owned in total with estimated total charges then compared it to actual failures most not even creating fires we would say 98% safe and probaly class nimh's as being more dangerous,
I've had a 3 year old pack puff enough to split the case by leaving it fully charged for 2 weeks (in a steel box) dumped it in a bucket of water for a few days tested 0vdc so took it to the tip battery box job done!

[stumpiey]

i suspect that most of the time it is user error, the amount of times i have been racing and some guy is laughing about how puffed his lipo is, and there is those that charge on the wrong setting etc etc, lipo's are not dangerous, people are, if lipos was a problem with bursting into flames randomly then we would have read about shops burning to the ground on a daily basis.

also, how many lipos are out there being used everyday without a problem, they are everywhere, not just RC, phones, ipods anything battery powered could have a lipo in.

this is like a daily mail knee jerk reaction trying to fan some lipo flames

[DCM]

Anything is dangerous if you become complacent about things, and this is what happens with LiPO's in the main. We could post the same thing about chip pans, hair dryers, cars, motorbikes, BEER even. At some point the end user HAS to take responsibility for their actions.

I am sure the author of the 'wheres waldo' articles has good intentions with the article but, just maybe, to get page hits up he/she has gone for shock tactics.

[catman79]

i personally think the banning / withdrawl of lipo batteries would be a massive, massive backwards step for the sport. ive been racing years, and during the last few years of nimh use, i was replacing the cells every 6-8 weeks, just to keep up with the top guys at our club. nowadays lipo's last a season. and with numbers dwindling as is it would be suicide to ban them, but as people have said above, it wont happen. its a lovely article by wheres waldo, but a complete waste of (virtual) ink.

[HOTSHOT III]

Originally Posted by stumpiey

i suspect that most of the time it is user error, the amount of times i have been racing and some guy is laughing about how puffed his lipo is, and there is those that charge on the wrong setting etc etc, lipo's are not dangerous, people are, if lipos was a problem with bursting into flames randomly then we would have read about shops burning to the ground on a daily basis.

also, how many lipos are out there being used everyday without a problem, they are everywhere, not just RC, phones, ipods anything battery powered could have a lipo in.

this is like a daily mail knee jerk reaction trying to fan some lipo flames

100% agree, at a club I used to race at there was a guy with a really expensive 1:1 scale car who used to charge LiPos in the engine bay without a LiPo sack every week. Out of exasperation I even offered to lend him one on one occasion but he refused.

I've used LiPo batteries for over 3 years with no problems whatsoever, and I knew nothing about them when I started. All I did was read the article below a few times and I was good to go, and i've asked a few times now for it to be a sticky in the electric section of this forum:

http://www.rchelicopterfun.com/rc-lipo-batteries.html

[Gayo]

FYI, the lipo fire on a race near Paris last weekend was because a central CVA axle worked loose and made a punch on the lipo. Bad luck, bad design of the car, but not really a lipo failure if you ask me.