Is this Li-Po battery still safe to use?

[anon(10181084)]

So recently I brought this Windows CE GPS with me from home as I wanted to play around with it. It is about 9 years old and still seems to work great. The one thing I'm worried about is the battery, which still holds a good charge. The battery doesn't look quite flat. It also doesn't look like a "normal" puffy soft pack Li-Po (see picture). I asked elsewhere online and apparently this thing is a bit risky to charge according to one random guy. I'm kinda skeptical as it doesn't look like other bloated cells I've seen. Should I continue using this as normal and leaving it unattended to charge like I did before I discovered this weird battery shape? The last thing I need is an unextinguishable fire in my dorm room...

 

[Mooncatt]

Any battery deformity is cause for concern. I would replace it, then take this one to a repair shop for disposal. Simply tossing this in the trash or in one of those self serve recycling drop offs is just asking for a fire. A shop should be able to fully discharge it down to 0V for safe disposal.

 

[Rukbat]

It looks to me like a pack of 3 cells. Can you measure the voltage on it? (If it's about 3.75 Volts, I'd replace it, but if it's around 11-11.25 Volts, that's normal for 3 cells. (The plastic around them might have originally been filled with air at a bit of pressure, that's now leaked out.)

 

[B. Diddy]

I'm with Rukbat on this. It reminds me of rechargeable battery packs in certain cordless phones. I bet if you opened the packaging, you'd see 3 AA or similar batteries.

 

[anon(10181084)]

I'm with Rukbat on this. It reminds me of rechargeable battery packs in certain cordless phones. I bet if you opened the packaging, you'd see 3 AA or similar batteries.

Nope. It says on the back that it is 3.7v so it is either single cell or multiple in parallel. It also self discharged its last partial charge in a week and a half so I have to get rid of this ASAP. I have a fire proof mat, soldering iron and a lab where I can get resistors should this thing not be sufficiently discharged. The bin for cellphone/laptop battery recycling sometimes gets puffed batteries so if I get this thing out safely without burning the lab down, it will go straight to that bin.

 

[B. Diddy]

Oh, I see. Well, make sure you have a fire extinguisher handy!

 

[mustang7757]

Nope. It says on the back that it is 3.7v so it is either single cell or multiple in parallel. It also self discharged its last partial charge in a week and a half so I have to get rid of this ASAP. I have a fire proof mat, soldering iron and a lab where I can get resistors should this thing not be sufficiently discharged. The bin for cellphone/laptop battery recycling sometimes gets puffed batteries so if I get this thing out safely without burning the lab down, it will go straight to that bin.

Its 3 cell like Rukbat says each 1.25v×3 =3.75v
Same as car battery which has 6 cells each at 2v ×6 =12v car battery .
But the phone/computer battery cant open to check voltage on each cell , some car battery you can .

 

[anon(10181084)]

Oh, I see. Well, make sure you have a fire extinguisher handy!

Well, successfully removed it. It was discharged to 3.1 volts when I removed it, I then discharged it further with a 22 ohm resistor until it suddenly dropped to zero volts (protection circuit if any most likely kicked in, who knows). I had a bottle of water next to me (these batteries AFAIK have no metallic lithium so water can be used as a last resort) and handled this stuff on my non-ignitable soldering mat. At this point I doubt it has enough energy to do anything serious. Sadly, despite my utmost care it did get ever so slightly bent (usually typical occurrence in amateur battery repairs). I had it wrapped in the mat for a few hours sitting on my room desk while watching videos of exploding batteries, and I periodically inspected it for heating using my thermal camera (there was none whatsoever). I then disposed of it appropriately (library was closed, so I luckily found another appropriate battery disposal location). So yeah, generally went well and with no fire. I've never ever had any battery fires due to my extreme care and, in this case, checking it during and after the removal process with a thermal camera. And yeah, I know how dangerous these things can be because of doing a research paper last semester on li-ion batteries. Li-po cells are a tad bit different than pouch/prismatic li-ion cells are and are hence more dangerous, but when handled appropriately they won't blow up.

 

[B. Diddy]

Dang, you're like a bomb squad expert!

 

[anon(10181084)]

Dang, you're like a bomb squad expert!

More like just a safety obsessed electronics geek. Anyways, this type of crap is another reason why you see me raging against non-removabke batteries all over the forums..

Edit: typo fix