Burned to a crisp

Very horrible. Glad you all made it out. Very smart inspector it seems. Years ago I had a power strip trip it's own breaker out in the shop. I unplugged some stuff off of it, reset the breaker and continued to do my thing. I came back in the shop a bit later and the strip was smoldering due to a failed Craftsman battery pack on a charger. It welded the breaker closed on the strip somehow,,but not enough juice pulled/shorted to trip the outlet breaker back at the box. No matter if your power tool charger is rated to say connected continuously to the pack,,ALWAYS disconnect once they indicate charged and never leave unattended. Top dollar LiPO, lithium Ion, lead acid, AGM,,,doesn't matter what you buy or how much you spend on tools or what name brand you trust,,,,all the batt cells are made overseas to the lowest bidder,, even if the tools are not.

China does not care if we burn to the ground,,they just want to see us buy another Belkin power strip.

Again,,very glad you and yours made it out. It could have been much worse.

 

Interesting about the batteries. I generally pull my battery unplug my Kobalt charger when it is done, but there have been times I have left a battery on overnight.

 

That's crazy! Glad you and your family is ok!

 

Have got into the habit of placing a used cookie sheet under it all and moving the charger and batt away from the burnables if I need to leave one unattended for a short period. It's unavoidable to not walk away from it. Can't sit there like a lapdog and watch it continuously. But you can mitigate the chances of fire a bit. Had one of our Racing Radios split the cell pack in the car trailer because it was left on it's base charger and the trailer power was plugged in. The car was in the trailer. $225K Nitrous Outlaw 10.5 car. Racing radios recalled those packs and batch numbers once they had ours in there hand.