New Rules May Raise Cost of Buying Gadgets Online

ericatcw writes "Buying your next laptop or smartphone online could suddenly get a lot more expensive if a little-known US Department of Transportation proposal to tighten rules around the shipment of small, Lithium-Ion battery-powered devices by air goes through, says an industry group opposing the move. The changes, designed primarily to reduce the risk from Lithium-Ion batteries, would also forbid air travelers from carrying spare alkaline or NiMH batteries in their checked-in luggage, according to the head of the Portable Rechargeable Battery Association. The proposal is under review until March 12. It can be viewed and commented upon by members of the public."

Comments

Blame XKCD for this one

[Hadlock]

Seriously. Look at it. Just look at it:
 
  http://xkcd.com/651/

Re:Blame XKCD for this one

[Hadlock]

But due to the paranoid delusions of many, many Americans, air travel is now less convenient than it was 20 years ago.

It's true. Usually we drive from North Dallas to my mother's family's house an hour west of San Antonio. It's about 6 hours by car on average, since we only travel down there on busy holiday weekends. Finally with a good job I decided to "treat" us to a 45 minute plane ride. Between parking, security, waiting on the tarmac, picking up luggage and getting the rental car it actually took us 7 hours to get to our destination. I'm seriously looking at starting a PAC to get high speed light rail between Dallas and San Antonio (with a stop in Austin of course).

Re:Blame XKCD for this one

[Hadlock]

Income taxes are a fairly recent invention here in the US. We used to pay for the entirety of the Federal Government's budget (including the military!) solely on import/export taxes. Chew on that for a bit.

Re:Blame XKCD for this one

[PopeRatzo]

Am I the only one who finds the women in XKCD cartoons so damn sexy?

I've always liked slim women.

Re:Blame XKCD for this one

[Ironsides]

And how many cases have we seen of batteries actually starting to burn by themselves?

*raises hand* Mind you, I work in a building that tests lithium batteries for safety. It was quite a surprise to the others guys in the building when it started to smoke before we had even unwrapped it. Then again, we don't work with consumer batteries.

Re:Blame XKCD for this one

[adolf]

Even at a rate of 10% , it wouldn't pay for half of the current military expenditures.

There. Fixed that for you.

the article's examples are a pretty big range

[Trepidity]

The proposed rule itself is pretty inscrutable (as usual, I suppose), but the article's examples are all over the map. Some of the examples seem like the small-scale sort of thing that would indeed cause inconvenience to ban: individual electronic devices sent air-freight from NewEgg to a consumer, or spare batteries in checked luggage. But it also mentions that existing regulations exempt "a pallet containing thousands of lithium batteries" from hazardous-material reporting and packaging requirements... and in that case the change doesn't seem too unreasonable to me, because maybe a pallet with thousands of batteries really should be subjected to the packaging and reporting requirements?

and it's safer on carry-on bags?

[cl191]

"would also forbid air travelers from carrying spare alkaline or NiMH batteries in their checked-in luggage" If it's so "dangerous" to be in the checked bags, then why is it safe to be on carry-on bags?

Re:and it's safer on carry-on bags?

[mrjb]

"would also forbid air travelers from carrying spare alkaline or NiMH batteries in their checked-in luggage" If it's so "dangerous" to be in the checked bags, then why is it safe to be on carry-on bags?

You're asking the wrong question. The right question is, "are spare alkaline or NiMH batteries in checked-in luggage are a safety risk?" The question can be answered objectively, rather than theoretically, because people have been stashing their batteries in checked-in luggage for decades. Right, batteries in checked-in luggage are an accident waiting to happen. We've been waiting, {and waiting,}* ... but nothing happened.

Re:and it's safer on carry-on bags?

[hey!]

Flight baggage are written with the convenience of the rules enforcer. Not the passenger.

If you think that through, it makes sense to do it that way.

The laptop battery installed in a laptop is properly stored. The laptop battery kicking around in somebody's suitcase is not necessarily so. Most accidents are a compound of events people thought unlikely: it is unlikely that a laptop battery will explode due to redundant safety features (unless it is a cheap knock-off, which are sometimes produced in the same Chinese factories as the real thing). It is unlikely that something stored properly could cause a problem. We count on that redundancy in case one of the assumptions fails. Don't forget that the ValuJet crash way back in the 90s was due to shipping the same oxygen generators that sit over every passenger's seat. In that storage setup, a faulty detonation results in the mask dropping in front of the passenger. In a crate of oxygen generators down in the old, it was fatal to everyone.

Here is a cautionary tale about storing batteries properly. Just recently I took three dead button batteries and put them in my pants pockets rather than get up and put them in the trash. I forgot I had them there and the next day I was sitting at the table and was surprised by an explosion in my pocket. It was small explosion by normal standards, but there is no such thing as a small explosion when it happens in your pants. (Gee that sounds like an aphorism.) I felt the electrolyte leaking onto my leg and immediately pulled my pants down. Good thing this wasn't at work. Now I knew I shouldn't have put those batteries in my pocket, but you could walk around with button batteries in your pocket every day of your life and never have something like that happen. I counted on it not happening in the fifteen minutes I expected to have them there. Everybody does things like that they know they shouldn't do. Now multiply that by thousands of times, and put tens of thousands of lives at risk.

Anyhow, the point is that we could train TSA guys to be able determine whether a laptop battery was safely stored. It wouldn't be hard. But that's one of hundreds, maybe thousands of cases. What you *really* need to do is to hire people who've gone through the equivalent of an associate's degree program on engineering and safety, put them through stringent application tests and continually retrain and restest them. Then you'd get much better security and much less hassle.

But guess what? We as a people would rather put up with the hassle than pay for safety AND convenience. That's not an entirely irrational point of view either. You've got to draw the line somewhere, and no matter where you draw that line, somebody will be inconvenienced unnecessarily. Take model rocket enthusiasts. They *should* in an ideal world, be able to take most of their stuff aboard a plane if it is properly stowed. But a ruleset that encompassed all such cases would be so large that the people enforcing them couldn't know them by heart. They'd be sifting through the rulebook on every passenger.

Naturally, the rules *could* be made better. But it's not easy to come up with rules that (a) inconvenience nobody unnecessarily and (b) can be implemented everywhere with affordable personnel and (c) don't cause traffic jams at security gates. Oh, yes and (d) which keep people safe. It takes years. It's been almost a decade since 9/11, and even if rules hadn't been side tracked by security theater, you wouldn't expect the rules to be perfect.

Ban crying babies . . . and their parents . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

. . . I find them much more annoying than exploding Lithium Ion batteries . . .

Hmmm

[Dunbal]

Forbid forbid forbid, that's all I hear coming out of the "land of the free" lately. I went to the US 2 months ago, and I have never heard "you can't" as often as I did when I was there.

Not just alkaline and NiMH but Lithium also.

[Jane Q. Public]

"Sec. 173.220 (d) Lithium batteries. Except as provided in Sec. 172.102, Special Provision A101 of this subchapter, vehicles, engines and machinery powered by lithium metal batteries that are transported with these batteries installed are forbidden aboard passenger-carrying aircraft."

Laptops, cell phones, iPods, etc. are all "machinery powered by lithium metal batteries". And it doesn't say anything about shipping or checked luggage, it says they shall be forbidden aboard passenger-carrying aircraft!!!

One could argue that they are not "machinery" in the conventional sense, but this is far too vague. In my experience, when the language of a law allows it to be enforced in some way, eventually it will be.

Am I reading this right?

[Diddlbiker]

This was discussed ad nauseum at photography forums last year. Key is to read the actual proposal and not depend on the warmongerings of a journalist trying to attract more traffic to his site:
Cartridges packed with equipment to be packed in intermediate packagings together with the equipment they are capable of powering.
The fuel cell cartridges and the equipment must be packaged with cushioning material or dividers or inner packaging so that the fuel cell cartridges are protected against damage that may be caused by the shifting or placement of the equipment and the cartridges within the outer packaging.

All the rule is basically doing is requiring that batteries are transported in such a way that they cannot short out. Either by putting them in the device they are made for (so your gameboy is safe) or by putting them in a special container (the big Li-Ion batteries for SLR's come like that in the box anyway).

After the Great Battery Scare last year with all those laptops combusting spontaneously their was little choice but to start with at least some regulation regarding the combustable nature of these batteries. The requirements are minimal and reasonable and quite frankly I have yet to see anything shipped commercially that doesn't meet those standards.

Re:Ban crying babies . . . and their parents . . .

[ColdWetDog]

If it screams, stop it from screaming.

Come on guys. Use your Geek fu. This isn't hard:

Got batteries with accessible conductors - use duct tape to cover them.
Got annoying, noisy children or adults - use duct tape to cover them.
Got a terrorist trying to blow up the plane - tape 'em to the seat with ... duct tape.
Just give out a roll to each flight attendant and you're golden. Nothing hard about this at all.