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 An unpublished FDA analysis found 66 reports of e-cigarette overheating, fires, and explosions in 2015 and the first month of 2016, a number the agency calls "an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."

Comments

darwinian pressure

[just another AC]

And people say evolutionary pressure doesn't exist in modern society...

Re:darwinian pressure

[Dunbal]

That's why I make sure not to vaporize and breathe my keyboard.

Re: darwinian pressure

[hairyfeet]

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.

Re: darwinian pressure

[slazzy]

The batteries shouldn't explode whem plugged into a USB with higher ampage available. That is a defective product.

Wow

[geek]

66 whole reports?! Why, we need a law immediately! Someone call Congress!

Re:Wow

[BenJeremy]

Hundreds of victims!

No way is this FUD from the tobacco industry trying to protect their cigarette, gum and patch sales.

Re:Wow

[TemporalBeing]

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?

Re:Wow

[bluefoxlucid]

That's funny because tesla cars are the least-dangerous in the most-severe collisions. Even when the battery is all fucked up, the fire is isolated away from the passenger compartment; and high-impact collisions transfer much less energy to the driver and passengers, thanks to enormous crumple zones.

Re:Wow

[bluefoxlucid]

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.

Re:Wow

[TechyImmigrant]

Diesel is the solution

No it's the solvent.

If you aren't part of the solution, you are the precipitate.

And the solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Government to the rescue!

Seriously, use a protected battery, use only one battery in the device, in low wattage devices that have short-circuit protection, and don't overcharge your battery. And don't buy the cheap shit batteries - the three bucks you save won't be worth it. It's that fucking simple.

They forgot to mention

[phishybongwaters]

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

Looney Toons

[Kenshin]

This is why you never accept a vape from Bugs Bunny.

Re:No, Not Good

[Farmer Tim]

Propylene glycol is also known as fog juice, the stuff that goes into stage smoke machines, and it's used as a food additive. It metabolises to lactic acid and is considered safe, which is why it's used in e-cigs.

Antifreeze is usually ethylene glycol, which is toxic. However, both salt and ethanol can also be used as antifreeze, and while they can be lethal in sufficient quantities they too are considered fit for human consumption. Calling something "antifreeze" tells you no more about its toxicity than calling something "natural" (i.e. snake venom) or "organic" (i.e. benzene).