The Chinese on Ebay again
This is about batteries. Recently I bought a flashlight on Ebay, from a Chinese Vendor. It was not expensive, and it came with an 18650 Lithium battery and a spare battery. Advertized as " light torch". Illuminating trees that were 300 meters away, with a blinding beam. I thought to myself, even when the flashlight is no good, the batteries alone are worth it. So one way or another, I could not go wrong.
When it arrived, I found the flashlight gives only 3x more light as the LED of my Iphone. I do not understand what kind of thoughts these Chinese factories have, but it seems to me they have no pride at all in their products. But I do not know this for sure.
Anyway, this article is about the batteries only.
The batteries were a plain fraud. They have so much self discharge, they get half empty just by storage after 3 weeks. That is no compare against Japanese 18650 batteries, I have here. These are superb, they keep 80% charge for one year, and I used them for many years, they are still fine. With those Chinese batteries, after 4x cycles already, the self discharge began to accelerate, and after 8x charging the batteries were at end of life. All of that in just a few months.
Now how can that be? I saw a video on youtube, about some Chinese, selling power banks of which every second battery was just an empty shell, filled with sand. So I was curious what was inside the batteries they sold me. I expected something like a very tiny battery inside, and then filled up with a weight.
Battery of the infamous JINBOSHI Brand, with it's jacket off.
One of them was swollen.
A swollen battery, should not happen, because it indicates very high pressure, and they could explode. A swollen battery is dangerous junk. But how can it be swollen? I only know this from my Apple SE Iphone, where it happened to me three times already. These Iphone batteries have no safety valve, and they just pop the display out of the phone. But steel capped batteries should have a safety valve. I guessed, there must be something wrong with that valve. So I took one apart, and yes, I found the cause, but it is not as you may think.
While taking off the top cap, an extremely powerful blow of gas came out. This was much more energetic as I expected. It was frightening to see the energy of that. I realized afterwards, it could have exploded in my face, or cause a fire in my house, while charging over night.
The gas smelled like Acetone. Which is a very well burning, self inflaming at high temperature.
So I wanted to see what's wrong with the safety valve. Pictured below here:
It was a FAKE safety valve.
This product was MADE with the intention to cheat. What a DISGUSTING attitude, to set up a production line for fake products. It is also a pity for those factories who do actually produce quality items, and have not the intention to cheat.
Now you can think about president Trump's China policy what you want, but the way he handles this junk industry, to my opinion it is their well deserved treatment.
FAKE pressure valve from the inside. As you can see here, it is a solid round plate, and not a valve at all.
That was not very promising for the rest of the battery too. Here is the mess which came out:
Opening the side, some strange brown smeared soup becomes visible. This battery was 4 months old, and only 8x charged.
More of the brown soup.
This is the best part :)
I know little about batteries, but it needs no trained eye, to see this is a total mess, The black stuff is the Lithium, or whatever the bastards used. It is not very well attached to the copper. I have no way to verify the Lithium content of this stuff. From what I heard, Lithium burns aggressive, it is dangerous. Well, if this black stuff is the Lithium, why does it not want to burn? When just held into a flame, it did a little something for a very short moment. II would not call that burning. Still very hesitating to throw this thing in the dust bin, because it may start a fire perhaps still. So to deactivate it, I decided to put this roll it in a jar of water. To my suprize that caused a chemical reaction. It boiled enthusiastic, but without getting warm.
It was setting free the typical "smell of vacuum". I know that smell. Now you may wonder perhaps how vacuum can have a smell? Astronauts say, spacesuits used for a space walk, and also moon rocks, once brought into air, have a specific smell, which is like a "burn" smell. They call it the smell of space. (Google for it).
You can have this same smell, when you break the glass of a defective vacuum tube. It has a burn smell too. It also compares with the smell of a gun which was just used before. It is exactly this specific smell, produced by this battery, when put in the water. Don't ask me why that is.
Afterwards, the copper foil came totally clean out of the water jar. Very strange.
I mentioned to my wife, the possibility of an electric car. She said: NO WAY. She heard to many horror stories about fires.