 It's about to go. You're ready to fire extinguisher. Welcome to Road to Riot. I'm Joshua Bardwell. I'm the drip. Captain Bandover. It's your boy, Vortex. And today we're talking about getting rid of batteries. When you need to get rid of a battery, what is the right way to do it? What is the safe way to do it? So we're going to show you five good ways and also five really, really bad ways to go ahead and get rid of your light posts. We have some really... Why are you looking at me, man? Once you've gotten the battery discharged or destroyed, what's the best way to actually dispose of it? You mean you guys are not just like throwing them in the trash or something? No, you can't. You gotta recycle, Geoffrey, or else we're going to get mean comments. Actually, I just hoard my old batteries. I'm like, maybe I'll use one of those cells one day. And cut the leads off because you can recycle them. You can upcycle the leads into your own use, for sure. But the pack that you've now cut the leads off, you should recycle. And you actually find recycling bins at a little place called Best Buy. And not just Best Buy, but most hardware stores, Home Depot, Lowe's... Obviously, those are great ways, but you shouldn't just throw them in the trash. I said, okay, I know that doesn't fit with the script, but like I've read that lithium batteries don't contain like a bunch of mercury or anything, and that if you decide what you wanted, it's better to recycle them. But if you decide you want to throw them out, it's not like you're killing the planet if you choose to do that. Mike, it's global warming. It's discharged. As long as there's not a charge on it. So if you need to dispose of a battery for whatever reason, before you actually dispose of it, you want to get rid of all of the charge. We're going to the grocery store to get some salt. And the theory is that salt water is conductive. If you put the battery in a bucket of salt water, the ions in the water will let the electricity slowly flow from positive to negative and discharge the battery over time. Let's get a few. It's 84 cents. I think we can afford it. Yeah. How much salt should we put in the water? Well, you told me 30 grams to every liter. That's what Oscar Leon says. We don't really know. That's like $1 worth of salt. So we're just going to pour a whole bunch in. We're just going to submerge this in here. Ah! I'm going to put it in there. That's it. Is it bubbling? It is bubbling. If electrolysis is happening, then we could be making hydrogen. When you push a DC current through water, it breaks the H2O into HNO. Something's going on. Yeah, look. It's kind of fizzing. I thought at first it was just air. But no, it's coming from the balance lead and it's coming from the XT60. Set it in forward, get it. Oh, you can see, look, there's some corrosion. There's corrosion there on the positive lead. This is actually the question about this discharge method. People have said that when it corrodes, then it doesn't conduct electricity as well and it doesn't fully discharge. So let's see. But it did discharge it. We're not getting anywhere near 16. No, we're reading 8 volts. So it is doing it. I can't believe how fast it works. It didn't take that long really. I thought it was supposed to take a long time if it even worked. But I was convinced that it was a mess. I didn't think it would work either. However, it's still kind of messy. So I still think there are some better ways. Yeah, that took like hours. I can think of one quick way to take a battery down to zero volts. Cut these off and just... That would reduce the potential. I wonder what would happen if we did that. I was the one who was willing to overcharge the batteries and I really, really don't want to be around this. This is going to be way less dramatic. Yeah, you're all voted 31. Okay, well then I'll... We can get 50,000 likes. You'll find out what happens in three seconds. We're going to connect the negative. Always connect your negative first, kids, so that you're not working with a live wire. We're going to connect negative here. Good. And... Wait, you're going to do it like that? I don't think it's going to be that crazy. It's not going to freak out. I'm freaking out. See? Totally uneventful. That's it? I thought this was going to be way worse. It's pretty big wire. It's probably absorbing a ton of the current. Get a cell checker. Each cell has got voltage. Okay, so this... And now it's warm, by the way. It's full charge. So this is actually an extremely dangerous scenario. So what's happened here is something inside the battery acted like a fuse and blew. So now what we have is a battery that's fully charged and no way to discharge it. That's right. That's not conductive. The tab ripped off or melted off or something. Okay. Just desoldered. That has to be what happened. Current was so high that it desoldered that we got so much current flow that the battery self-destructed. Okay, so that was a pretty uneventful. It didn't look like anything. I didn't even see it spark. I thought it was going to be bad. Something bad still didn't happen. You ruined your lead. You got energy stored in the battery and, you know, you don't have access to your main power lead. What we have here is a safe way to do it. What is this, Joshua? This is the RayStake Quads and it's designed by Jelly Bean FPV. RayStake Quads makes it. It is a battery killer and it basically runs all of the battery current through this tiny little resistor and it kills the battery. It takes several days. It does it really slowly, which is safer. You do have to buy it. It's a few bucks. It's a nice little gadget. And if you'd like one, link in the description. It's a really, really impatient person. We can just use like a staple gun. Yeah, that's instant. I've seen a lot of people do this in the field. Just kind of as a gag, right? Drop it with like a knife that they have or something like that. It always kind of freaks me out. It's just a big plume of smoke, actually. It's surprising how sometimes you'll get big flames and sometimes you don't. That was just a big smoke bomb. Yeah, lucky. It definitely will always destroy the battery. I'm truing it with something metal. It's worth noting that we actually charge the battery all the way up, too. So we were basically trying to get as fully charged as possible to see if we could get it to catch on fire, but all it did was smoke. And that was with the nail gun. So you had another idea. Look at that perfect block. He perfectly shot that battery now. And one half of it did smoke and kind of start to want to go. Absolutely nothing. It was just so bad. Why do you think that it didn't... My theory is that what makes it go off is when the interleaving layers kind of touch each other and that the saw cut it so cleanly versus like a puncture where they're pressed into each other. I guess a takeaway here is that lipo damage is unpredictable. You can have the worst banged up lipo and it just seems fine. And then you can have another one that sometimes seems to have no damage at all just because you saw your buddies get away with cutting a lipo in half doesn't mean you should do it because you could end up with something worse happening. But if you're looking for a fast way, that definitely was a fast way to do it. But it was faster, so what's a safe way that we can discharge the battery faster? What's this? This is a smoke stopper. And the number one purpose for a smoke stopper is to protect against short circuits in your quad like you've accidentally bridged something that you shouldn't have the first time you plug in your battery the smoke comes out. Okay, so it's a smoke stopper, but does it also discharge or did you have to change something? Good question. So when you plug this in it doesn't discharge the battery. But what I've done is I've created this which is an XT60 that I have just bridged the pads. So when I do this... If you put this on a battery by itself you will short circuit but because the light bulb limits current this is completely safe to do. And the battery will discharge slowly over the course of several hours. In the meantime you could use it for studio lighting. If you're going to do this definitely make sure it's somewhere safe the bulb can get pretty hot probably not going to start a fire or anything but it might like melt something or I don't know so just put it somewhere safe on a hard surface a ceramic or stone surface I just don't have to buy anything and also I just don't wait three days to discharge life though why don't just like go fly a quad at full throttle until it falls out of here. Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh it's on fire! Oh no! Oh no! My whole flight controller went up in smoke Oh my god! It melted the XT60 too many amps. I know exactly what happened because I've had the same thing with race quads actually in the past where if your KV is really really high and you don't have thick enough wire and you're not using the proper solder on a power lead if you hold it even with a race quad wide open on a thick prop I've had XT60 do that same thing I'm looking at your solder joints here Drew Uh-oh, build quality It does not look like these had to un-melt very much That was definitely faster but still not the safest Everybody running after it with smoke coming out you could do that Yeah and I actually damaged my drone We actually failed to kill the battery by doing that so that was a complete fail Overall it's just a little bit reckless If you decide to do it that way do it line of sight because your video will drop out but it still wasn't the best way to discharge the battery No, the charger has a discharge program but actually in the interest of safety it actually only discharges the battery down to 3.0 volts per cell I won't take it all the way down None that I've ever known will take them all the way down so at 3.0 volts per cell is definitely better than 4.2 doesn't actually fully discharge the cell I know a way that's more fun to discharge a battery that gets even hotter and that is the van over charge Yeah So right now all I'm doing is going in because the ISDT chargers have a setting to HV the batteries HV is where you go over the recommended voltage The recommended voltage you're supposed to charge a battery to is 4.2 volts a cell However ISDT chargers in particular will go to 4.4 a cell while balancing the battery Personally I can't recommend or not recommend this I'd only recommend it if you're in a race and you're struggling with flight time but if you're going to do this obviously charge it at above 1C and also watch the battery I'm going to get it up to 4.4 and then from there I'm going to go like 7 amps nickel metal hydride You want to get it balanced because then all the cells will be up because if you just nickel metal hydride some of the cells won't get all the way up there you basically want it as high as it can go already and then you push it up even higher We are explaining too much how to do this When the bottom line is you should not do this This will destroy the battery pretty quickly Go all the amps I've never actually done this 14 amps You can hear it You're going to hit the fire extinguisher Successfully destroyed the battery Good job Bring that in I'll show you how ugly that can get real quick Imagine if you overcharge real quick imagine a flame that big in your bedroom even if it doesn't take your house down your bedroom ain't the same anymore It's going to leave a lasting effect I've never had a lipo fire and ran away from it Don't worry Jeff's going to take care of it Freaking out That is not how you're supposed to use a charger to discharge a battery It was spectacular looking It was really not safe Honestly it didn't take that long It took a lot less time to do that than it was to do about any of the efforts As an advantage when it was done you knew it was for sure discharged It was really dumb Do I need to leave it on there a little bit longer? A great way to tell if your pack really is done is if it's on fire Thank you to the community who suggested this We're always listening to suggestions from them and this is one of the episodes that you guys wanted so now we made it and we hope you love it Visit our store for some ways that you can safely discharge your batteries Which of these did you like the most and are there any that we overlooked? Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one Wait I'm just saying this now Van overcharged That's not good My last name cannot incorporate