Ready Kids › Road Badge › Badge 1 › Lesson 1.4
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The battery
Charge and store a lithium-ion battery the way the fire service says to, and name the warning signs that mean stop using it and call for help.
1Look
The worst place in the house to charge it
The hallway
An e-bike plugged in on the floor of a narrow front hallway, the charger running off an extension lead, the front door directly behind it.
At least three separate things are wrong in that picture. By the end of this lesson you will be able to name all of them.
2The idea
Why a riding course is talking about a plug
The CPSC recorded 310 e-bike deaths between 2017 and 2024. Nineteen of those were lithium-ion battery fires, across thirteen incidents. Nobody in those nineteen was riding at the time.
That is what makes this lesson different from the rest of the badge. Everything else here is about what happens to you on a road. This one is about what happens to a house at night, and you are the person in yours who knows how the battery works.
3The idea
Charging is the moment
In the CPSC record of 227 micromobility battery incidents from 2019 to 2023, 195 of them — 86 per cent — involved fires, with 39 deaths and 181 injuries. 120 of the 227 happened during charging.
The two things that hurt people in those incidents were smoke inhalation and burns. Smoke is the reason the location of the charger matters more than almost anything else in this lesson: where it sits decides whether the way out is still a way out.
4The idea
The rules, from the fire service
These are New York City Fire Department instructions, and none of them are complicated.
Charge outside if you can.
Keep the battery at room temperature.
Plug the charger straight into a wall outlet.
Charge and store it away from anything that burns.
Use only the cord, adapter and battery that came with the machine.
And the do-nots.
Not near a door or any other way out.
Not in your bedroom.
Not on any surface except the floor.
Not in direct sunlight.
Not on an extension lead.
5Build it
Put it somewhere
Where does it charge
A cutaway house with a hallway, a bedroom, a garage, a kitchen worktop, a back step and a cupboard under the stairs. Drag the charging machine into a room and the card lists which fire service rules you have just kept and which you have broken.
Try the room it charges in now, first.
6Decide
Your charger has died. There is an unbranded one on a marketplace app, cheap, next-day.
Pick one to carry on.
7The idea
The mark to look for
Look for a UL mark. UL 2849 covers the electrical system of an e-bike, UL 2272 covers personal e-mobility devices such as scooters, and UL 2271 covers battery packs that can be taken off and swapped.
Be straight about the status of that: the CPSC has proposed making those standards mandatory, but it is a proposed rule and not law. So it is not something to argue about in a shop. It is something to look for, and to ask about, before anybody buys anything.
8Find them
Which of these mean stop using the battery?
Tap the ones that count.
Find all 5.
9Say it
The sentence for the moment it happens
Say it out loud, in your normal voice
“Nobody touch it. Everyone outside, and I am calling 9-1-1.”
If a battery smells, swells, changes colour, leaks or makes odd noises, it is finished. You do not investigate it and you do not carry it anywhere. Get people out, then call, then do what they tell you.
10Do it
Before you leave this page
Go and look at where your battery charges tonight. Is it on the floor, straight into a wall socket, out of a bedroom and not in the way of the front door? Move it if it is not, and tell whoever else lives there where it is now.
Tick it when you have done it.
Lesson done.
On the floor, straight into the wall, with its own charger, where you can see it, and never across the way out.
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