Great! glad I could help.
I think I can fit a mini smoke detector upside down on the inside of the top cover a Alecto SA-100.
Gonna drill some holes near the edges in the drawers so that wenn for example smoke comes from the bottom drawer it can reach the detector at the top.
You know incase of a rare meltdown.
Your storage looks good & safe. all the cells are neatly stored so no short-outs are possible. The chance of an idle Li-Ion cell just venting or exploding is less than the chance of getting struck by lightning three times in the same day, or winning the lottery twice in one day. keep them stored in a dry place and away from any metal to risk shorting and your fine.
This is a good topic to talk about and it’s important to respect the dangers inherent in any concentration of energy and know about the pitfalls. The greater the concentration, the greater the risk and since this is obviously a greater concentration than a phone, laptop, or power tool, or even all of the above combined going to greater measures seems prudent. A question or two to add:
How often should you test the voltage of cells in storage? Obviously you would want to recycle any that self discharge rapidly enough to fail in a testing period but how long should that period be?
What kind of fire suppressant should be kept handy along with the type gas mask you would need to wear in order to approach close enough to use it?
Should there be a heat-resistant barrier under and behind the case to prevent the wood floor or wall from scorching or igniting?
How well is humidity controlled to prevent condensation? Some places it varies considerably and might exceed the buffering effect of silica gel.
Cells look innocuous and harmless but they do contain energy that has the potential to cause damage. The more of them you have the greater the odds you will be unfortunate. One in a million becomes one in a hundred thousand when you have a hundred of them. The odds are possibly worse if bad cells are left in place.
Tolerance for risk is a personal thing. On the whole I don’t worry to much about this as much as other things but I’d rather keep my reccomendations on the conservative side and let the reader decide where their tolerance set point lies. Of course I hope my neighbors are more like Hank than myself. :zipper_mouth_face:
wow, thats a heck of battery collections.
Some thoughts for brainstorming:
The most common effective Li fire-fighting agent is sand. It doesn’t stop things as much as it contains them, so to be effective the entire problem would have to be completely covered with a few inches of sand.
Airline personnel are taught to use water which mostly helps prevent sympathetic combustion of nearby materials. Being so heat conductive I’d guess it would reduce the burn-time at least a little. The problem is that the water could react with non-affected dells and get them started.
I don’t thing there’s any gas-mask or respirator effective here; at least no common ones are. SCBA fire-fighting gear would be the best lung protection- it’s all ‘canned’ air only so guaranteed safety. And skin contact with HF is a;so very bad; in a matter of seconds it’s in your bloodstream and it reacts with your skin. There’s an expensive ‘cream’ you can apply to stop the reaction and neutralize it. $70 for the smallest tube means few if any of us will have it.
Federal rules regarding the storage of Blackpowder requires that any quantities more than 10 lbs be stored in a wheeled closed container which can be rolled out of a building in the event of a fire. This is something we should be considering because it might not be the cells where the fire starts but they can be involved if they can’t be moved outside rapidly. My thoughts run toward a plastic cooler with wheels and a tight-fitting lid for large quantities and this also precludes multiple small containers that would need several trips to take outside. IIRC, ordinary sheetrock is fire-resistant to 1200 degrees F for 10 minutes, doubled holds up twice as long. Cheap to buy, easy to cut to shape, line that wheeled cooler with it including a couple layers on top inside. Plastic might seem an ideal container but when on fire it emits dense dangerous smoke plus melted plastic makes nasty burns on bodies. Wood is actually a better idea as it keeps shape and strength for awhile as it burns and it is not as easily ignited as many plastics are.
You could also pitch smaller containers out a window in case of fire so storing them near one might be good. Plus that would make any Li fire in your cells more easily visible from outside so maybe someone could get the Fire Department there faster when you’re not home plus if you arrive home to a house fire you’ll know instantly from the outside if your cells are involved by looking at that window. Discrete outdoor storage in something like a concrete block well-house some distance from your home would probably be the best solution, but it can’t happen for a lot of us. A wooden sand-box on top covered with roofing material would make it sort of self-extinguishing though there would be some delay before that process worked.
Don’t forget that it’s not just you- everybody in your house needs to know what to do because you may not be home yourself when the problems start. It would also be smart to have good signage at your cell storage to let firefighters know the situation if nobody is home when things go bad. I’d be hesitant to have many cells so close together that a thermal runaway in one could overheat and set off very many more cells- 100 cells tightly together in one place is begging for disaster; smaller subdivisions of cells isolated from others would be far safer. And there needs to be a way for gasses and heat to escape your container.
A good mnenomic for fires is “RACE”- *R*escue or remove the people first; *A*lert the proper responders next, *C*ontain the fire after that, *E*xtinguish it once those are done if you can.
Phil
Very nice cabinet! By the way where did you pick up those plastic storage cases? They look perfect for 18650s.
The silica gel bottles aren’t going to do anything since they absorb moisture to an ambient level. You would have to dry out the silica gel in an oven to get them dryer than the ambient humidity, then put them in an airtight container immediately before they equalize with the ambient humidity again.
I got them from a big kinda like Dollar store chain here in the Netherlands called Action.
Holy smokes, that’s a lot of 18650s !!
You really shouldn’t store them fully charged though…
And i think a refrigerator would be a very good place too.
This thread made me regretful of turning to recycle two faulty notebook batteries of mine. Had no idea you could find useable cells scavenging them 
Cross-reference to a more recent thread here: