The TRUTH about RV Lithium Fires

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Every time I talk on the internet about installing lithium batteries into RVs, I get a whole host of people talking about how we need to be so afraid of lithium battery fires. So, today we're going to talk about why all of these people are concerned and why you shouldn't be. If you don't know me, hi. Hello. My name is Emily. I'm a certified RV repair tech and this is RV repairwoman. So, right off the top, TLDDR. Not all lithium is created equal and the type of lithium that we put in RVs is very safe. So if that's the only thing you needed to know, I got you. If you want to understand why, let's dig into it. So when we're talking about why people are a little nervous about batteries, we need to talk about concept called thermal runaway. So inside each cell of a battery, and a battery is usually made up of multiple cells, you're going to have two pieces of metal. One is a cathode and one is an anode. They're usually two different types of metal and then they're separated by something called, of all things, a separator.

[00:01:04]Don't get worried if this is sounding really scientific. I promise we're keeping it real simple here. Overly simplified, but in normal battery operation, these fancy atoms called ions, which are just negatively charged atoms, are going to jump between the cathode and the anode. They jump back and forth and that movement is how we have stored energy inside of the battery. Electricians, don't come for me. This is way oversimplified, but that's the basics. These jumping atoms and that movement per se. Usually in normal operation creates a small amount of heat. Almost all electricity creates some small amount of heat. Okay, that's really normal. It's just usually so small that it's negligible and we don't even worry about it. But in our batteries, if something were to happen to that separator and for whatever reason that cathode and that anode touched, then the atoms would be able to jump between the two way faster and the amount of heat created in that battery would rise pretty rapidly. That rapid increase in heat in a battery is called thermal runaway. And you may be like, Emily, how does that separator get damaged? Do I need to be worried about my separator getting damaged? There's sort of four main ways that something can happen to that separator. The first one is mechanical. Just you damaged the battery in some way. You dropped it, smashed it, beat it, mashed it, put it in a stew, and you just physically broke it. You could also be using this battery in wicked, wicked high temperatures or wicked, wicked low temperatures.

[00:02:46]batteries just tend to not like that.

[00:02:48]Massively overcharging the battery also can damage that separator. And then sometimes if you're getting really cheap or knockoff batteries, sometimes the battery could just be poorly made. But that's the concept of thermal runaway.

[00:02:59]It is something that can happen in almost any type of battery. Lead acid, AGM, lithium, they all could have thermal runaway. But the consequences of this happening in some types of lithium batteries can be pretty catastrophic.

[00:03:14]So, heads up. This is where we're going to start talking about like the woo scary stuff about lithium and we're going to show the scary videos and we're going to talk about the scary stuff and then we're going to loop back around and talk about why you shouldn't be scared.

[00:03:29]So, the next 5 minutes or so, we're just going to put on our big girl pants.

[00:03:32]We're going to be very brave and then afterwards I'm going to explain to you why you don't need to be nervous about this really at all. Cools? Cools? Stick with me. So, in some types of lithium batteries, if thermal runaway were to occur, the temperatures inside can get way hotter than they would for AGM or lead acid and they can get there very fast and eventually that battery can either explode or catch fire. And yes, that is scary. Another big component to why these lithium fires are so scary is because they are considered self fueling. What does that mean? Come along, folks. Well, if you are in the Boy Scouts, the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts. One of these is the Hunger Games and one of them is the Boy Scouts. And one I think I'm just making up. Let me know which one. You can tell I was never in the Boy Scouts. But if you were in the Boy Scouts, you would know that in order to start a fire, we need something called the fire triangle, which basically the three things that fire needs in order to occur. We need fuel, we need heat, and we need oxygen. So, when you're starting your little campfire, your fuel is going to be your log or whatever wood you're using to make your fire. The heat is initially going to come from a match or a spark off of some flint and a machete if you're on Survivor. And the oxygen is just going to come from the air. And then as that fire spreads and gets bigger, the heat is going to come from the fire that already exists. It's going to move on to the next piece of wood. So the next piece of fuel, and it's going to continue to grab oxygen from the air.

[00:05:12]That's how a fire spreads. That's how it gets bigger. That's how you eventually get your roaring campfire or unfortunately your big house fire. Now, to put that fire out when a firefighter shows up at your house, their goal is going to be to remove parts of that fire triangle in order to put that fire out.

[00:05:31]Now, it's usually going to be difficult to take away the fuel, uh, specifically like in a house fire because the fuel is all of the wood and materials that your house is made up of. So, they're mostly going to be concentrating on the heat and the oxygen. So when you see firefighters putting water on a house fire for instance, the cool water is going to act as a heat sink to try to lower the temperature of the fire and to try to get it low enough that it isn't hot enough to catch the next piece of fuel on fire. So that's how they remove the heat. And then that water is also trying to smother the fire and deprive it of oxygen. So that's how a traditional fire works. And that is how we would put out a traditional fire.

[00:06:17]Now, let's talk about lithium battery fires and what makes them different from a traditional fire. So, in a traditional fire, if we're trying to remove the heat from the fire triangle, we'll just lower that temperature of the fire and eventually it will be cool enough that it isn't hot enough to catch the next piece of fuel on fire. Unfortunately, in lithium fires, those atoms are continuously moving back and forth between the anode and the cathode, and they're continuously creating more and more and more heat. So, just cooling it down once, isn't going to be enough because it's still producing its own heat inside. And that battery, if it's in thermal runaway, is going to continue to produce heat, often for hours, if not days. So reason number one that lithium fires are scary and hard to put out is they produce their own heat. Reason number two that lithium fires are scary and hard to put out is they also produce their own oxygen. This is why lithium fires are considered self fueling. So here is the chemical molecule formula if you will for a common type of lithium batteries that we put in electric cars.

[00:07:30]It is lithium, nickel, manganese oxide.

[00:07:34]So the oxide part, those O's, that's oxygen. The heat from the thermal runaway eventually breaks down this molecule. And those O's, that oxygen is now just out on its own, free to fuel the fire. So, lithium fires do not need to rely on oxygen in the air in order to continue being a fire. They have their own source of oxygen from the battery itself. So, unfortunately, you cannot smother a lithium fire. That is not a way that you can put these fires out. So if you ever see firefighters putting water on an electric car fire for instance, they are not trying to smother that fire or really necessarily put that fire out. They are just trying to cool down the fire uh to just try to mitigate harm. And they're really just stuck babysitting this fire until that chemical reaction just finishes itself out. They are coming up with more ways to fight these fires. But that's the highle basics. And these type of fires can often rekick uh hours if not days after they have died down. What happens is that fire, that big scary fire breaks down the separator in another cell of the battery and then like a day later it disintegrates enough that the anode and the cathode in another cell all of a sudden start touching and boom we jump start and restart this whole process over again. Ah, all right. So that's why people are afraid of lithium fires and why lithium fires are hard to put out and why all of these people in my comments keep telling me why we should be afraid of lithium. Now let's move on to why you person watching this video who's now well informed is not going to be afraid of lithium and is going to feel totally fine putting lithium into their RV. The main reason why is that not all lithium is created equal. And the type of lithium batteries that we are putting in electric cars are a different type of lithium battery than we are going to put in an RV to power your lights and your slides and your leveling jacks and all that good stuff.

[00:10:01]This is sort of an all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares situation. And I can see where the confusion comes from because as someone in the industry, we use the term lithium pretty liberally liberally. We call the battery that we put into your RV lithium and we call the battery you put in the electric car lithium. But they are two different types of lithium battery. The type of lithium that we're putting in the electric car is usually a lithium nickel cobalt aluminum oxide battery or NMC battery or like the one I talked about earlier, the lithium nickel manganese oxide battery to make sure I get these names right. And the type of lithium that we put in RVs is usually a lithium ion phosphate battery. Now, you probably have seen on the side of a lithium RV battery, it usually says like lifepo or you've heard people call these batteries lifo or lifepo for batteries.

[00:11:03]That's actually the molecule for the makeup of the battery. Does that make sense? It just happens to spell out a word that you could pronounce and so people do, but that's not always the case. Like here's the one for lithium, nickel, cobalt, aluminum oxide. You're not, this isn't a word. You're not going to say this, but the one for lithium iron phosphate is lip po. So, it's fun to say. The LI is the periodic table we've all seen. That's the symbol for lithium. Fe is iron. I know that one's weird, but don't shoot the messenger.

[00:11:39]And then PO4 is phosphate. So lithium iron phosphate battery lifepo lifepo 4 it's all the same thing. You can think of the lifepo 4 as like H2O. We know H2O is water. We know LIFO 4 is lithium iron phosphate. Okay. So what makes lithium iron phosphate batteries different that we're less concerned about lithium fires with them? I'm going to put up a graph.

[00:12:06]Bing. Don't be afraid of the graph if you're not a graph person. We're going to explain the graph together. We're going to understand it. If you're not a science person, don't worry. You and I, we're going to get through this together, okay? We got this. This graph is just us looking at different lithium batteries and what happens to them as they go through thermal runaway. Okay, for those you are more sciency inclined.

[00:12:28]The xaxis is temperature. So as we increase the temperature in the battery and the yaxis is just the rate of warming basically how fast did we get to that temperature during thermal runway.

[00:12:41]Okay. If we were looking at different batteries on this graph and we wanted them to be safer the thing we'd be looking for is number one we wouldn't want to see a big blip in the graph.

[00:12:53]Basically what's happening is as the battery warms up a bit which is going to happen if thermal runaway occurred. We want that warming to happen very slowly.

[00:13:03]This way, it's giving the battery time to try to dissipate that heat in a safe way. If we get to a high temperature very quickly, that's when you can have big fire, big explosion, big pressure all at once. It doesn't have time to try to mitigate that problem. Okay. So, if we're looking at this graph and it has a big blip, it's telling us that we got to a high temperature very quickly and that's when we're getting that big explosion or big fire, big scary. Ah, now let's look back at this graph. So, I'm looking at this graph with you, okay? I'm not just throwing it on screen and I haven't looked at it. If we look at the NMC battery, which is again that lithium, nickel, cobalt, aluminum oxide, what a mouthful battery. You can see why we just call it NMC. Has a pretty big blip. It's not the biggest blip. There are other types of lithium that do a bigger blip. Like, oh my goodness, lithium cobalt oxide.

[00:14:01]Oh wow. But yes, what you're seeing in that blip is the battery exploding, catching on fire. Ah, scariness. A car fire has occurred. Now, let's look at lithium iron phosphate. Where is it? Oh my goodness, it's so hard to find. It's down there at the bottom. You can't see it cuz it doesn't blip at all. Okay, the blip. The blip is the blip in the room with us. No, doesn't happen because these batteries, while they can get hot, they don't do the big scary explosion crazy fire thing. That's that's what this graph is telling us. While it can rise in temperature, it does it slowly enough that the case and the internal mechanisms of the battery can dissipate that heat and keep it from doing this crazy big explosion fire thing. Yay!

[00:14:54]Huzzah! So reason number one why we are less concerned slashnot concerned about fires when it comes to lithium iron phosphate batteries is that they don't explode and catch fire if they have a crazy thermal runaway event. They increase their temperature slow enough that the battery can dissipate that heat and it doesn't explode and catch fire.

[00:15:20]Yay. Reason number two that we are less slashnot concerned about lithium iron phosphate fires is about the chemistry of lithium iron phosphate. So if we look at lithium nickel cobalt aluminum oxide for instance that molecule makeup is just holding on to its oxygen less strongly than lithium iron phosphate is.

[00:15:50]Okay. Lithium iron phosphate just has a much stronger hold on its O's than lithium, nickel, cobalt, aluminum oxide.

[00:15:58]So let's say a fire were to occur near.

[00:16:01]So we're not even worried right now about the thermal runaway and the battery exploding thing. Instead, we're just worried about, hey, if we get these two things really hot, are they going to start releasing oxygen and fueling the fire that's happening near it? Well, the lithium, nickel, cobalt, aluminum oxide battery is much more likely to release its O's and release its oxygen and help fuel that fire than the lithium iron phosphate battery, which just has a much stronger bond with its oxygen and is much much less likely to release that oxygen and help fuel a fire.

[00:16:37]Hypothetically, if a fire did occur in your RV from like your oven or your refrigerator or something and eventually got to your battery compartment and it lasted for long enough, yes, eventually your lifepo battery could catch on fire just like this chair in this RV could eventually catch on fire and my driving steering wheel could eventually catch on fire just like any other part in the RV could eventually catch on fire. But my lifepo battery is not going to fuel that fire with oxygen the way that a lithium, nickel, cobalt, aluminum oxide battery would. So we could put out that fire using traditional fire suppression techniques and we are much less afraid of that fire than we are in those scary electric car fires. Okay. Woohoo. So that's where this big confusion comes from. There are different types of lithium out there. I'm part of the problem. As a person in the RV industry, we use this term lithium interchangeably. So we don't have to say lithium nickel, cobalt, aluminum oxide every time we're talking about electric cars. And we don't need to say lithium iron phosphate every time we're talking about RV batteries. But now you person watching this video know there's a difference between the two. And it's a pretty big difference. So, a couple caveats just to put on this. Cover my butt, yada yada. If you have lithium batteries in your RV, there's a very good chance that you have them because you have like a big solar setup. So, you probably have solar panels and lithium batteries and an inverter and a whole bunch of other like extra wiring happening in your RV. So, you are at an increased chance of having an electrical fire, for instance. And that's just because you have more electrical happening in your RV. And because the amperage going through those particular wires is higher than the amperage that is going through like the usual wires in your RV. So you add on an increased chance of an electrical fire. That's again just because you have more electricity happening. And the biggest way to prevent that is just making sure that all of your connections stay nice and tight. Okay. The scare from that is not because the batteries are lithium.

[00:18:55]It's because you have more electricity happening. Caveat number two, my firefighter friend who I consulted with when I was writing the script for this video did want it to be known that if you ever see smoke coming out of any type of battery, but even more so for a lithium battery, you do not want to be breathing that smoke.

[00:19:14]Think about how scared you would be breathing in just any smoke from like a house fire and how bad we know that is for your health. And he was like, "Think of that level of yucky and multiply it by 11." We're making these numbers up, but that is just bad, yicky, gross chemicals that you don't want in your body. Not all chemicals are bad. Those are the bad chemicals. Don't want them inside you. So, if you ever see smoke coming out of a battery, you and your family should go elsewhere. And you can call your fire department and they can help you deal with that dilemma. I even was like, "Is that something you should call the fire department for?" and he said, "Yeah, if is smoking, don't hesitate to call." But that's it, guys.

[00:19:55]That's why people are afraid of lithium and why you, as an RV owner specifically, shouldn't feel the need to be afraid of lithium. If you learned something new today, let me know down in the comments. I'm sure all of the discourse on Facebook will be very civil and kind. And in the meantime, this has been RV repairwoman. You got this.