A look inside the slightly notorious (recalled) EE Power Bar and some analysis and tests to see if it is as dangerous as the media made out.
In brief, a UK based mobile phone service provider made these handy power banks available with their contracts, with the novel idea that if you were caught short for power you could pop into their nearest shop and exchange your flat Power Bar for a freshly recharged one.
Then there were some incidents where the Power Bars caught fire, with one incident resulting in a picture of a burned hand where the owner had woken to find the Power Bar on fire and had justifiably panicked and picked it up to get it to a safer place. The media pounced on the image and implied that all these Power Bars were dangerous and EE recalled them all.
If you enjoy these videos you can chuck a dollar to Big Clive for cookies and coffee at https://www.patreon.com/bigclive
In brief, a UK based mobile phone service provider made these handy power banks available with their contracts, with the novel idea that if you were caught short for power you could pop into their nearest shop and exchange your flat Power Bar for a freshly recharged one.
Then there were some incidents where the Power Bars caught fire, with one incident resulting in a picture of a burned hand where the owner had woken to find the Power Bar on fire and had justifiably panicked and picked it up to get it to a safer place. The media pounced on the image and implied that all these Power Bars were dangerous and EE recalled them all.
If you enjoy these videos you can chuck a dollar to Big Clive for cookies and coffee at https://www.patreon.com/bigclive
You can tottally get the battery out by submerging the bottom in boiling water and applying pressure gently, itll take a few seconds to melt the glue and the battery comes out, saving you the need for a dremel
It's too bad because of product misuse (User Error) we lose decent products and have to warn the public like they are children. Thanks for your video and remember not to eat the packing peanuts.
It’s now 2022 and I still use mine, had no heating problems at all
I used to think it would be great to have a battery car, and when it went flat, change the battery for another at a garage. In and out on the road again in a couple of mins. More intelligent friends came up with a couple of reasons why this is not so. Petrol is a raw fuel and comes in handy 35,000? litre tanks hidden in the ground garage that are topped up then drawn from for each car. Nothing much can go wrong with the fuel.
Batteries are not fuel. Electricity is. Batteries are generators or processing plants. They occupy lots of space so you'd need a massive space in a depot for 'fueling' the same number of cars.
But, relevant here, the batteries would not all be subject to uniform usage rates and with the energy density needed vs ill treatment, would be subject to all sorts of potential issues.
I think we've seen that here on a smaller scale. It looks like EE have well understood the situation been robust in their construction approach.
It's a pity it hasn't worked out. If it did, it may have been the butterfly of destiny flapping its wings and a different leg in the trousers of time in the timeline for electric vehicles.
I don't understand why you used force to get in when it's a known quantity, treat it like opening a phone and use heat.
"Smoke the Choke"…. Excellent. 👌
2022 and mines still going strong 🤣
If you sleep with lithium batteries under your bed, that's darwin's fault.
'smoke the choke'
So basically, just an unfortunate case of Murphy’s law.
No matter how many safeguards you include in a system, if you produce a large enough number of them, you’ll inevitably eventually end up with a few cases of the “perfect storm” scenario — where all of those safeguards happen to fail at exactly the same time.
It’s a sad truth that applies to engineering any kind of system, and even nature isn’t immune to it.
Just about how cancer develops in cells. Fundamentally it’s the same idea: at some point, over the millions upon millions of individual – and often repeated – processes in the cell cycle, occurring in the billions of human beings on earth, you get situations where a whole bunch of failsafes and error correction mechanisms happen to go wrong at the worst possible time.
Do you prepay for your electricity and gas if you use gas? Or is it like a regular bill? And do you have separate hot and cold spigots? And do you pay a tele licence still or have they done away with that? Not trying to be too personal, just curious, as I heard about the "prepay" for electricity a week ago.
It seems to me that some of the potential abuse could be checked-for rather quickly with a resistance check. Or even a quick test charge to see if the unit passed a quick charge/discharge test. Just taking it back and exchanging it without at least testing it for resistance levels was kind of a dumb plan. Perhaps an in-store display with a keyed array of locking quick-recharging boxes would have been a better solution (kind of like at the malls with lockers, only smaller and with a charger inside). The customer could stick the EE Power Bar into the quick-recharger, and come back and retrieve the same device recharged in a few minutes to a half-hour. It seems to me that the way they tried doing it was failed from the start, as people would treat the units with the worst cells as a sort of hot potato. They could go around trying to find the EE Power Bars that still hold the best charge, while unloading the ones that have gone bad onto victims. Also, why not just exchange the cells themselves? They made this thing such that the well-designed controller board gets tossed into the trash when it very likely still works perfectly. They could have put a door on it to simply exchange the cell when it goes bad. And the cell WILL go bad. There's no cell that can take an infinite number of charge/discharge cycles. So what was their strategy to remove the units with cells that had been through the max # recommended charge/discharge cycles? This product was just poorly thought out in a number of critical areas. I can't see how they could have succeeded even without the tragic fires.
EE's concept of being able to just call into any EE shop and get your power bank swapped (and in some cases charged and returned the same power bank back to you while you wait/shop)
You were never in the position of being out shopping and ending up with a flat phone battery, so long as you have this very neat and petite power bank, even if your power bank is "empty" just call into an EE shop and swap it for a fully charged power bank and if you empty the power bank charging your phone, just go swap it again.
I used their swappable power banks up until the day they stopped allowing you to do so. I still have three EE power banks, though one needs a new 18650 due to simply being worn out through a great deal of use. Opening one of my EE power banks wasn't quite as traumatic as yours Clive, luckily for me the top popped relatively easily and nothing was stuck down internally.
This is just typical of the media blowing up out of proportion one or two incidents (from 1000s of these power banks that were in service) and without any explanation of how the power bank failed, they just blamed the EE power bank. What a great shame for an absolutely wonderful service that EE used to give to their customers.
Keep up the great videos, Clive.
My wife thinks I am having an affair with someone called Clive because of spending so much time watching your very informative videos.
Regards,
K Watt.
Yes, that is my name.
I once had an SOS torch, it went — – – – — — – – – — — – – – — — (with flashes) I suppose it would be for if you got lost in the Brecon Beacons they would send a pony and cart to find you.
Ah the media. Sadly panic sells better than rational science and statistics
yes sad media only jump on clickbait and destroy so many great products and ideas, the few batteries that died probably had been charged and discharged 10.000 times and where worn out and abused daily for years, With this swap thing and 99% using them clueless how to preserve a battery its a miracle they dont all burn. Same with hoverboards and other battery powered items, now we cant even bring a phone or spare battery for the phone into a plane, but laptop batteries with 10 times the energy are fine. So sad all these ridiculus restrictions based on incompetence and never based on fact.