Battery just caught fire

Merlin5

Merlin5

Merlin5

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Joined
17 Aug 2009
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Location
Finchley, London
Just had the scare of my life. In bed using laptop and all of a sudden a crackling sound and thick smoke thick wafting in front of me, pouring out of my laptop. Heart pounding I jumped out of bed, pulled the PSU jack plug out, and like a hot potato in my hands, got it off my bed and onto the floor in panic.

Then quickly picked it up, fortunately no damage or marks to my new flooring and ran into the kitchen with it and put it down in the sink. No water poured over it, I let it smoulder and the smoke stopped after a few minutes.

My whole flat still reeks of burning battery an hour later. My duvet cover right over my legs got burnt and fortunately didn't have time to burn further through.

These are the pictures after I managed to peel the melted battery from its compartment. I'm hoping the hard drive is ok which is located further down. I guess it should be. I'm trembling from the shock and panic. Thank god this happened while I was here and not out when it was in sleep mode sitting on the bed. :eek:

New laptop then. :(

This probably sounds like a really stupid question, but does anyone think it's worth trying to see if the laptop would still work so I could try and do an Acronis backup, or too risky?

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Wow! :eek:

Was it a new battery, recently delivered by DPD? :D

Seriously though -

Were you using the correct charger for that laptop? Was it a genuine one? I'm inclined to say that the fault is more likely to be with the charger or the charge circuit in the laptop rather than the battery itself. Do you recall the charge level before it happened? If it was full then a faulty charger/circuit could have tried to 'over-charge' it.

You may be able to do a normal backup if you buy a new battery and put it in, but I wouldn't plug a charger in! Of course that means that you need to make sure the battery you buy doesn't need charging prior to use.

How old is it? I'm assuming it is out of warranty since that model was released circa 5 years ago? Even so I'd say its worth getting in touch with Dell!
 
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It's the correct model of charger, yeah. Was supposedly a genuine one for my laptop and I bought it last year from ebay after my last one died. I also bought a supposedly genuine battery several months ago. Whether either are really was genuine I don't know.

Here's some background. I recently had an issue where I was getting a message saying adapter not recognised and that I should plug a 90w charger in. It also wasn't charging the battery. It got to a point it wasn't even putting any power out at all. So a couple of weeks ago I ordered a genuine PSU direct from Dell this time.

Meanwhile, before receiving the new PSU, I fixed the issue by opening the laptop and noticing the DC Jack (that I had also replaced earlier this year) needed tightening down. Since then I haven't been getting any warning messages and it's been charging fine, still using the old PSU. So the PSU would appear to be ok.

I doubt I could install a new battery as there's so much melted plastic in the compartment. The metal connector pins look ok. though. The laptop normally powers up with just a PSU. If I plug in the new absolutely genuine Dell PSU, would that be ok?

To your other questions, I noticed the battery was almost depleted at which point I plugged the charger in. But I don't recall how much or had charged before the disaster.

I bought it in 2011 almost new, so yeah, well out of warranty!
 
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Thanks Rroff, I've edited the product key out.

Hotwired said:
Pull the HDD, clone it/backup/whatever, put it back in and then have a go with it in the crispy laptop.
Click to expand...

I've taken the back off and fortunately the ram and hard drive are untouched. I don't see how to make my backup though as my desktop pc is currently out of action.

I was thinking about buying the same model Dell Vostro 3550 laptop from ebay for about £100 and putting the harddrive in that in the hope it will boot. But the specs tend to slightly vary in different 3550s and I suspect it wouldn't boot properly with any differences in some of the hardware?
 
Id give it a go, pull the hard drive, power it on and if it seems to power on ok, switch off then retry with the hard drive connected. It looks far more like a dud battery cell (these types of cells are notorious) than a problem anywhere else.
 
Yeah. My only real danger concern is where it melted that bit in the middle right under the screen, and whether powering it on will suddenly spark a fire. I'll remove the hard drive though and give it a shot.

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Merlin5 said:
Yeah. My only real danger concern is where it melted that bit in the middle right under the screen, and whether powering it on will suddenly spark a fire. I'll remove the hard drive though and give it a shot.

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Click to expand...

If memory serves me, the bit above the battery and under the screen is purely plastic and not mobo so worth trying....on the kitchen counter....near a sink.
 
Merlin5 said:
Thanks Rroff, I've edited the product key out.



I've taken the back off and fortunately the ram and hard drive are untouched. I don't see how to make my backup though as my desktop pc is currently out of action.

I was thinking about buying the same model Dell Vostro 3550 laptop from ebay for about £100 and putting the harddrive in that in the hope it will boot. But the specs tend to slightly vary in different 3550s and I suspect it wouldn't boot properly with any differences in some of the hardware?
Click to expand...

When my previous laptop topped itself I pulled the drive and used a tool on another PC to image the drive to a .vhd VM image (imdisk I think not sure off the top of my head which one I used) then booted it up on Virtual Box to get stuff off, etc. (could just pull files normally but had some stuff it was useful to be able to load up in Windows).
 
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Yeah Acme, I guess I can continue to use it for a while. I'll do the backup anyway. But I guess I need to consider buying a new laptop as I can't really use the battery compartment nor want to risk using it.
 
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Rroff said:
When my previous laptop topped itself I pulled the drive and used a tool on another PC to image the drive to a .vhd VM image (imdisk I think not sure off the top of my head which one I used) then booted it up on Virtual Box to get stuff off, etc. (could just pull files normally but had some stuff it was useful to be able to load up in Windows).
Click to expand...

Yeah. I've been using Acronis True Image 2011 to do backups and restores to and from my external drive. I'll do that today.
 
well if you are lucky you will be able to find a non-working one on ebay and just use it for parts, all it looks like you need at this stage is a new screen bezel/palm rest and base plastic/chassis.

it appears that your damage is superficial, it isn't too hard to take the thing apart and swap the guts into a new chassis if you can be bothered and money is tight.

on the other hand if you like/want new toys then go get a new one :)
 
You've got a point there Jim :) I've stripped it right down to the bare bones several times and removed the motherboard for various repairs. I've changed the network card, DC Jack, thermal paste on cpu and gpu a few times, replaced the hard drive, backlit keyboard, the dvd drive, battery, psu and even replaced the whole screen. In fact, this laptop has had practically everything replaced over the last 5 years! :p So yeah, I could lookout for a spare parts vostro 3550.
 
Dell support : Have you restarted your computer. Catching fire is a added feature of Dell laptops- no other laptops have this feature it's supposed to keep you nice and warm. It's perfectly normal.
 
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