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E-Cigs Are Exploding In Vapers' Faces At An Alarming Rate (buzzfeed.com)
E-cigs are becoming increasingly popular, but are they safe enough? BuzzFeed News is reporting about accidents where e-cigs have exploded in vapers' faces. The report claims that these incidents are occurring at an alarming rate. From the report (condensed): Across the country, defective e-cigarettes -- the nicotine delivery machines that have taken over every strip mall and sidewalk, seemingly overnight -- are creating hundreds of victims like Cavins (a 63-year-old Orange, California-based family therapist who lost an eye after an e-cig device exploded in his face), people whose lives are suddenly and horrifyingly changed when their devices blow up. They are people like Thomas Boes, whose vape exploded while he was driving outside San Diego and struck him with such force that two of the three teeth he lost lodged in his upper palate; Kenneth Barbero, whose exploding device ripped a hole in his tongue; and Marcus Forzani, a 17-year-old whose left leg was charred from his calf to his thigh after a vape battery exploded in his pocket. An unpublished FDA analysis found 66 reports of e-cigarette overheating, fires, and explosions in 2015 and the first month of 2016, a number the agency calls "an underestimate of actual events."
Hundreds of victims!
No way is this FUD from the tobacco industry trying to protect their cigarette, gum and patch sales.
The battery... I've only ever heard of them exploding or overheating with the massive, third party, batteries that go well beyond 4.8v This is the same nonsense as the "e-ciggs cause popcorn lung" fiasco. No, they don't. But if you are an idiot that heats it up to 700 degrees, you deserve what you get. I've quick smoking thanks to my ecigg, and i'm basically done using that as a crutch. THAT'S why these reports exist, follow the trail and you'll find yourself at the feet of big tobacco
66 whole reports?! Why, we need a law immediately! Someone call Congress!
I wonder..how many...new Lung Cancer incidents due to tobacco were there in the same period? house fires? car fires?
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I was looking for those 18650 batts for an arduino project (good for quadrapeds) and I noticed all the really scary sounding chinese brand names like ultrafire.
could the chinese - oh, I don't know - HIRE someone who speaks english as a first language and consult with them before picking stupid anglo sounding names?
whoever thought that adding the word 'fire' to a BATTERY would help sales - he needs to spend some qualty time with the same batteries for extended periods.
china simply sells the lowest quality that will still allow them to continue to sell but that is so dangerous and has no q/a that a US vendor would be sued to bankruptcy in no time flat.
thing is; you can't sue china or their companies! this is the scam. you guy some dangerous shit from amazon or ebay via chia brands and it blows up on you. who do you go after? amazon has lawyers to cover themselves. good luck with that. ebay, same thing and they'll just blame the seller, who is already on his 23rd company name, soon to 'go out of business' and restart all over again.
this is the scam. they are untouchable and they know it.
china batteries are the issue. its not about anything else but the batteries and the chargers. both are fires just waiting to happen.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I know that the first thing people will reach for is regulatory oversight, including banning them, but I remember that Underwriter's Laboratories isn't a government agency, and people are buying vaporizers from dodgy sources. Lawsuits, in this case, can only do so much I think. The companies will simply go bankrupt.
So I have to ask, as I'm a non-smoker who hasn't looked into it, are there any safety organizations that have published safety standards and are offering their guarantee mark to vaporizers that meet said safety standards?
A few stories like this making the rounds of e-cig communication lines(forums, magazines, websites), and the saying to 'get a UL listed one or you risk it blowing up!', and safety should improve.
I don't read AC A human right
That's an absolute-fucking-lutly horrible place for a fire to happen, you know how fire travels ... Right?
In every Tesla crash which has breached the battery and caused a fire, two things have happened. First, the passenger compartment was more-than-adequately protected--to the point that passengers actually came back WHILE THE CAR WAS ON FIRE, got back in the car, retrieved personal effects and left. I recommend against this, as lithium smoke is bad. Second, firefighters tried putting out metal fires with water--never do this.
And the car actually carries FAR MORE energy in the passenger cabin during frontal impacts. In normal front engine ICE cars, the engine and all its mass is the first thing to stop, adding no stress to the cabin.
The engine carries more momentum and can act as a ram to possibly break down an object that's distinctly not a tree (if you hit a tree, it will stop you). Otherwise, the engine is a huge brick that doesn't do much to protect the passenger, and gets in the way of crumple zones--meaning the car disperses less of the energy of stopping, and SLAMS the passenger to a stop where a Tesla more gently slows the passenger to a stop ("slows" is a relative term here, as is "gently").
On the other hand, the tesla battery is directly attached, very strongly to the cabin... Effectively driving it forward with all the battery mass/energy. Are you still so silly to think that's better cause if so you need some basic physics lessons.
I think it's better because, in all tests and all real-life collisions, it has proven to be better.
Hate to break it too you, but those two things are examples of tesla getting it wrong
What's wrong is your basic theoretical understanding of the practical engineering of the Telsa car versus an ICE in the context of a high-speed collision. You can scream about how you *think* high-energy impacts are going to work in each platform all you want; and, in the real world, they'll work out HOW THEY ACTUALLY HAPPEN.
This is the same thing as when you look at a sheet of aluminate glass and say, "oh, that's a glass, it can't possibly hold up to an impact," and then somebody smashes a 25 pound sledgehammer into it and it bounces off. Aluminate glass, at 1cm, holds up to impact pressures of well-over 1,000 kg per meter even when heated to hundreds of degrees celsius. Whether you perceive it as being a frail material matters as much as whether you perceive a Tesla to be dangerous: when the hammer comes down, those perceptions won't hold up.
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And if you bother to dig any deeper, rather than take these "studies" at face value (many of which are paid for by Lorillard through their "citizens for a concerned America" PAC) you'll find they ALWAYS land in one of 3 camps,
1.- Rich dumbshit with more money than sense buys a $300+ mech mod, which has warnings all over it saying how you MUST know ohms law, resistances, and the strength of the batteries you intend to use to use this product safely, then promptly buy a $20 gas station top and slap on it, thus blowing his deserving dumbass up,
2.- Cheapskate dumbshit buys a $10 knock off of a $90 unit off of Chinabuye and then is shocked! Shocked I tell you! That a cheapo Chinese Crap knock off is actually unsafe and blows up in his dumbass face,
3.- Impatient dumbshit ignores all the warnings in the brochure that came with his battery that says to ONLY use the slow trickle charger that comes with the unit, thinks "hey its USB, my fast cellphone charger is USB!"...can you see where this is going? Yep he uses the fast charger to cook the batteries and then is amazed when a device designed for a slow trickle charge becomes unstable when you use a charger that puts out 4 times the amps as what the unit was designed for.
I'm sorry but stupid is as stupid does, and if you actually buy quality units instead of fakes and follow the instructions that come in the box? Then you have NOTHING to worry about. These scare studies hold about as much truth as the ads staring doctors big tobacco used to run, because they ignore the fact that the users were either ignoring instructions, using fakes they picked up off a ChinaMart, or like the mech mod moron buying a unit designed for guys with the skill to build their own sub-ohm coils from scratch and just slapping some top he got in a gas station on it.
To use a /. car analogy it would be like blaming motorcycles for the rich kid that buys a Ninja for his first bike and wraps it around a pole at 150MPH+ or the cheapskate that buys one of those "long fong" Chinese scooters and finds out the brakes don't work going down a steep hill.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
To be fair the gear blew up...
So do frozen turkeys if a dumbass drops one in a gas-burner deep-fryer.
Funny, nobody suggests banning deep-fryers or frozen turkeys.
There is very little that is safe when the people involved are the "Hold mah beer, watch *this*!!" type.
Considering the tens of thousands or more vaping devices of the mechanical-mod type already out there and comparing vaping-gear related deaths/injuries to how many are injured or killed annually by normal, everyday things like ladders and hammers, at under 100 deaths vaping gear is very safe indeed. Particularly when you factor in the lives saved by people stopping their tobacco smoking by switching to vaping.
Many thousands saved from lung cancer/COPD/etc versus...what? Less than 100 deaths/injuries? Of stupid people because they acted stupidly?
I'd call that a bargain!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
We'll be waiting a long time for that one...
I started smoking at age 10; at age 62 I tried an e-cig "just for the hell of it," fully expecting it to be unsatisfying, or "just as nasty, or whatever... I inadvertently quit "smoking" on the spot... two years later, still happily cigarette free. My wheezing when climbing stairs went away almost immediately (I noticed this 12 hours later). No more huffing and puffing. No scent of "tobacco" and associated tars, etc, on my clothes, in the car, in the house. Friends who were "allergic" to smoke invite me to vape at will in their homes and cars.
I had one nasty "accident." I had a pocket full of quarters (extremely rare for me, as I hate "change") that I was going to dump in the console of the car, for parking meters, and put a battery (not an e-cig, just the battery) in the same pocket. My pants caught fire while I was taking a leak. Stupid? Yeah, definitely. Related to vaping? Not in the least. The quarters provided a closed circuit for the battery. Really dumb. But...vaping? One of the brightest "choices" I ever made.
Almost all of the anti-vape, "we need regulation", etc., "ads" and "PSAs" out there, are funded by big tobacco, in an effort to "regulate" all the mom 'n' pop vape retailers, juice mixers, and gadget head makers into oblivion, so that Big Tobacco can take over the industry. I try to avoid the Chinese marketplace, as a safety precaution. I recommend others do the same.
And I'm saving a shitload of cash, vaping organic naturally-extracted flavoring of tobacco, with USP-grade nicotine. Even with high-end vaping gear, a total economic winner. People in the US are exposed to tens of thousands of chemicals, on a daily basis, that have never even been screened for carcinogenic properties. I'll take my chances with nicotine & caffeine... everybody else can sit in their "smoke-free" bars and parks/stadiums (etc) and tut-tut themselves into early sugar- and booze-enabled graves. RIP suckers...