This might be common knowledge and I was just out of the loop but I made that mistake this weekend. I've trickle charged the battery back to life multiple times because of stupid mistakes (key left in) but this time I was in a time crunch...

Story goes, guy leaves key in car ignition all day, guy needs to pull car to grid, car is dead. I jumped it with my spare battery and fired right up. Sweet, head to grid and let it idle for a while to charge. 5 min later smoke start billowing out of my hood, OH ****!

Huge thanks to everyone standing around, especially Mark Deshon and Greg McCance. They may be the reason the car didn't burn to the ground. We had two tire sprayers and a standby fire extinguisher while we pulled a smoking lithium battery and tossed it away from the car.

I did have that spare battery and mount (ETS Mini) I keep just in case. I ran to the trailer and grabbed the battery and tools to bring back to the car and try not to miss first session. As soon as I showed up Mark and Greg jumped to action to help pull out old mount, swap terminals, install all the other parts, and get it running with time to spare.

Have had no major issues running the tiny lithium for the last two year other than draining too far a couple times. I dont want to deal with that anymore so the future plan is to just mount a big *** battery in the passenger rear corner so I just dont have to worry about it anymore. Thanks Tom Berry for the advice there.

Will add a brain dump to the SM thread later about the car and event, but...

DON'T JUMP A LITHIUM BATTERY!

 

LOL. Noted.

But wouldn't you want the battery on the driver side? Just asking, for future reference.

 

Driver side is in general heavier due to driver weight. I also already put the ACD pump on driver side so could add weight opposing that on passenger side

 

Guess I was still in Impound when this happened

Glad to see everything ended up ok!

 

gotcha. I saw a lot of people saying our cars are extra light on driver's rear, Since the engine is passenger front.

 

Maybe I should toss the car on some scales to see which side actually needs the weight then. To be honest, I've never scaled the car with properly leveled scales so my numbers aren't really relevant. I guess I just assumed based on driver weight plus what I've seen of certain other cars.

 

For what it's worth, my STU car (without driver)

 

So..from what I read once a Li discharges copper deposits can form in the cells, if a sudden surge comes in (the jump) this can "short" inside the cell and "sometimes" create intense heat. That about what happened?

 

My car has ACD pump in stock location, and the battery in the driver rear of the trunk. When doing the corner balance, we had to add weight to the driver rear via suspension adjustments. Just FYI on my car.


And yes, Balrok, that is likely about what happened. LiPo's do not like surges.

 

Getting a lot of varying answers. Its actually starting to sound like the light side is the driver side. Helpful to know going into an ACD pump reloc plus battery etc. Guess I'll put both on the drivers side in the trunk... Trying to do this going into a corner balance since I dont have scales at home to test with.

 

Good to know. I've been considering doing a Lith Ion mini battery kit in the future to save weight. The F/R weight distribution on this chassis is atrocious.

 

Put a full size battery in the trunk.

 

The added weight of 0-4 gauge cable to make up for the loss in length makes that null. Been there. I landed on putting a mid sized AGM in the rear pass floor, fire bottle in the driver floor and cool suit cooler in the pass seat area.

 

Battery in the trunk is definitely my end solution. I dont want to deal with the small battery anymore and Im basically at min weight anyways. I even have rear seats still in just for ballast to stay mid 29xx.

 

Just added lithium. Thanks for tip!