Cor van de Water via EV wrote:
I don't charge my car in the living room, but the attached garage is just a layer of sheetrock removed from the living room... In there are a large number of CALB 180Ah cells...
Our ICEs all have tens of gallons of highly flammable gasoline in them. This sits in a wooden garage, often attached to a home, with little more than a sheet of drywall between them.
Yes, there are house fires caused by a car in the garage catching fire. They are rare, thanks to considerable effort on the part of the automakers to prevent that gasoline from accidentally catching fire.
Presumably, EV manufacturers also consider the consequences of some design error or component failure starting a fire in their lithium battery pack. They then include safety precautions to make this impossible, or at least extremely unlikely. (If they don't, they're leaving themselves wide open for a lawsuit if anything goes wrong!)
I think the risk comes from hobby DIY types that either don't know the risk, or choose not to do anything about it. There are bound to be idiots that store gasoline in an open-topped bucket in the garage, and somehow haven't blown themselves up. Or that didn't bother to install circuit breakers in their electrical wiring, and haven't set the wiring on fire yet. ("What could possibly go wrong?")
The same type of idiot could also wire up a bunch of lithium cells, and use a "dumb" charger on them. It would work fine, until the day that something goes wrong. Then he'd have a lovely roaring fire.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't charge lithium batteries inside. It just means that if you do, you'd better know what you're doing, and do it RIGHT!
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