It's summer, so hopefully we are all driving our cars to keep the battery charged!
But today I got this e-mail from my insurance company about preventing fires caused by battery maintainers. Worth reading to prevent a tragedy:
https://condonskelly.com/blog/avoiding-fires-while-your-collector-car-is-in-storage/Here's the body of the article:
>>>Many of us use battery maintainers when we don’t drive our collector cars for lengthy periods of time, but few of us knew that the battery maintainers could be a potential problem unless we take a few prevention steps. We recently visited with a large and well-respected auto restoration shop which deals with a lot of very expensive vehicles. The owner of the shop told us that he had three clients over the past year who had fires, much like the fire that John had with his 1970 Charger, all due to the battery maintainers. Those clients of the shop sustained significant damage to their vehicles and homes. One of the clients had some extensive investigation done to determine the exact cause of the fire, and it was found that the battery maintainer had caught on fire because of a power surge. Apparently, power surges could cause a battery maintainer to catch on fire. The shop has over a hundred battery maintainers, and they unplug each of them every night, and plug them back in every morning, under the fear that a fire could occur overnight when nobody is at the shop. We’ve heard these things before from others, so it’s time we found a method of prevention.
Since the issue of a power surge seems to be a possible trigger for fires with battery maintainers, we recommend that everyone using a battery maintainer consider having it plugged into a surge protector, which are readily available as small single units or multi-unit power strips. We know that different surge protectors are not all equivalent, and some can handle larger power surges. If a power surge is powerful enough it might cause the surge protector to fail, and the power surge would then get to the battery maintainer, potentially causing a fire. So, although surge protectors are inexpensive, you should consider getting one that has high power protection ratings. Often the ratings are in joules. A rating of 600 joules is good, but a rating of 1,000 joules (or higher) is better.
The next thing to consider using is a fire-resistant bag/box for the battery maintainer to sit in when it’s in use. Those items are flexible fire-resistant fold-up boxes that are available in different sizes, so you can find them to fit whatever size battery maintainers that you’re using. The fire-resistant boxes are sometimes described as “fire proof”, but almost nothing is actually fire proof, so we’ll refer them as “fire resistant”. The ones we’re describing are intended for use when charging or transporting LIPO batteries (used in certain remote-control toys) which are known to sometimes catch fire, so these boxes should be useful for containing any fire that originates at the battery maintainer. If you use the search words “LIPO Safe” in one of the large global online retailers, such as the one that’s named after a big river in South America, you’ll find lots of the fire-resistant boxes in different sizes, for fairly inexpensive prices. We bought several sizes, and the average price was around $5 each. Try to avoid the boxes that have only one layer of fire resistant material. Instead, you want to buy the ones that have a double layer of fire resistant material, because those will better contain a fire, and are less likely to have a burn-through. The battery maintainer should be completely inside the fire-resistant box, and the cords can go out any of the sides. Most of the fire-resistant boxes have Velcro closures, but the boxes are not air tight, so there is ventilation, but generally not enough for a fire to burn as it might without this extra protection.
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Another tip is to put the battery charger on a timer so it only runs a few hours a day.
We should revisit this topic in the winter as a reminder to keep safe!
