There has been quite a bit of news recently about the Battle Born LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries and how they are dying in droves if not outright melting their plastic enclosures. Although the subsequent autopsies show molten plastic spacers on the bus bars and discolored metal in addition to very loose wiring, it can be educational to see exactly what is happening during repeated charge-discharge cycles at a fraction of the battery’s rated current. Thus [Will Prowse] recently sacrificed another Battle Born 75 Ah LFP battery to the Engineering QA Gods.
This time around the battery was hooked up to test equipment to fully graph out the charging and discharging voltage and current as it was put through its paces. To keep the battery as happy as possible it was charged and discharged at a mere 49A, well below its rated 100A.
Despite this, even after a mere 14 cycles the battery’s BMS would repeatedly disconnect the battery, as recorded by the instruments. Clearly something wasn’t happy inside the battery at this point, but the decision was made to push it a little bit harder while still staying well below the rated current.
This led to the observed failure mode where the BMS disconnects the battery so frequently that practically no current is flowing any more. Incidentally this is why you need to properly load test a battery to see whether it’s still good. In this failure mode there is still voltage on the terminals, but trying to pass any level of current leads to the rapid disconnecting by the BMS, even while as in this case the plastic spacer on the bus bar melts a little bit more.
Despite these very rapid disconnects and observed thermal issues, the BMS never puts the battery into any kind of safe mode as other LFP batteries do, leading to the melting plastic and other issues that have now been repeatedly observed. The discoloration of the battery terminals that originally started the investigation thus appears to be a result of higher charge currents and correspondingly higher temperatures.
Worryingly, Battle Born recently put out a statement – addressed in the video – in which they completely disavow these findings and insist that there is no issue at all with these LFP batteries. Naturally, if you still have any Battle Born LFP installed, you really want to test them properly, or ideally replace them with a less sketchy alternative until some kind of recall is issued.
One lesson we can all take from this: no thermoplastic parts in the compression path of a fastner, because it gets soft and the compression is lost when it gets warm, and even if it doesn’t get warm, material creep is another issue, which most thermoplastics are susceptible to.
This 1000%
Also worth adding that fr4 is also subject to creep; it might be tempting to bolt a ring terminal directly to a PCB plated hole, but your clamping tension will drop over time.
There’s soldered in inserts that fix this issue, by giving a full metal path (threads or through hole exist) to clamp into
As a workaround for one-off personal prototypes, I’d guess a pair or more of Belleville washers could work.
But yeah, I’ve seen the “cable lug bolted to tinned bolt-hole in PCB” waaay too much in cheap welders, who presumably all originate from the usual eastern sources.
Lot of knowledge about this topic in 3D printer community. For example there is very good reason why you should not make your Voron out of nylon even if it may look like a good idea at first. ABS can last for long time without problems at temperatures up to 60C (you need to print ABS in heated chamber or it warps too much – so you enclose the printer and try to keep heat inside), nylon on the other hand creeps even cold and after short time, all screws becomes loose.
TLDR; there are big differences between various plastics when it comes to reaction to heat and creep under compression load. Of course this applies if you don’t push the plastic beyond glass transition. Than it just melts.
Battle burned. Once again. But marketing keeps wanting you to believe they produce quality assemblies. I hope their sales will drop to the point they will make engineering progress…
I have been hearing bad stuff about these battery’s for years.
I’ll take my chance with China(half the cost/or loss)
This was my take. The whole “Buy USA made” loses its appeal when it’s going to burn down my RV.
Beyond the engineering ignorance and corporate failure, I’m very curious WHO is at the top of this disaster pyramid. What human attributes and their mindset to have egregiously ignored all the warnings and continued their merry way.
I’ll take “Greed” for $600, Alex.
Everybody’s greedy to some extent. That doesn’t explain it.
The denial of fault and the callous indifference to basic design errors speaks of malicious incompetence. The whole “battle born” brand seems like posturing, which is another clue. It’s probably and Elon Musk type of a person running the show.
Go be an armchair psychologist elsewhere
Elon musk fanboy spotted
They’re just stealing and reusing the nevada state motto.
The potential cost of lawsuit hasn’t crossed that magical threshold of the cost for a recall. Typical corporate behavior.
With hundreds of thousands of these batteries sold over the last decade and Will now asking for over 3 months for people to send their own reports of issues, why do we only have a couple dozen complaints? Looking over Reviews across several sites, they are overwhelmingly positive. Shouldn’t we see far more negative reviews if this was such a widespread issue? Most the people who reported issues never even attempted to get the warranty covered, and Will took a 2000 mile road trip to collect bad batteries and came up with a whopping 15, not 150 or 1500, literally 15.
Maybe there is an issue in some of the batteries, but Wills forums show similar issues with batteries from every brand, but his focus has only been on BB batteries so obviously thats what the bulk of the posts are about. Its probably coincidence that Battle Born Ended their Advertising contract with Will Prowse after 2024 and in 2025 he started spending a lot of his time bashing their batteries. I wonder if its possibly a small percentage of every battery brand has bad batteries? Maybe after a year or 2 of requesting people post issues maybe he will get up to 100 complaints, out of hundreds of thousands sold at least that would be something!
You seriously expect that guy to collect 150 or even 1500 batteries to then disassemble and later dispose of them? That is pretty absurd. What would you expect out of doing that? To expose the design flaws of those batteries, 15 are more than enough.
Do you remember that scene in the beginning of Fight Club? The one based on the Ford Pinto recall?
Maybe the build quality was good to start with but they have started costing down their products
If you watch any taredown videos it’s clear they are cutting corners on safety.
I have a couple of these that were manufactured before they got bought out. Maybe I’ll cut them apart now that they’re not in regular service to see if similar issues exist.
It’s interesting to look at the price and churn for Battle Born’s parent company stock.
It has dropped to less than 0.2 percent of its original IPO price, 0.1% of its peak in 2022.
More interesting, though, is how much stock churn happens coincident with Prouse’s video releases.
From a background noise of a few thousand shares per week to millions per day recently. That’s a few million dollars of stock changing hands, with price jumps of tens of percent.
After his damning Dec 11 video release their stock dropped by almost half, with large volumes changing hands. The same thing happened just before and after his recent release a couple of days ago, with multiple >$1M transactions.
Somebody is doing very well indeed on this churn.
Battle Born was the battery to get for your boat. Will blew that name up. Kaboom. Now, perhaps they deserved it, but this Youtuber guy is a bit too gleeful about it. It’s raking in views for him, and he loves it. I’d perfer if he remained a little more professional about the topic.
He’s not “gleeful”, he’s tested these batteries numerous times and they keep denying the problem. He’s said this is a very serious problem and maybe nervously laughs at how ridiculous their responses are to his videos.
ekkk. Fanboy are mad :) You guys have fun, to each their own.
You whine because you dont like the fact someone is relishing in uncovering a piece of shit…..?
Prowse is pretty damn professional. Professional does not, and is not supposed to, extend to covering up incompetence…
Additionally, this is easily reproducible by any other competent professional, certification lab, or regulator. Silencing Prowse won’t do much to slow it, presuming the regulator isn’t captured.
I never said anything you are insuating. If you want to have a discussion, that’s fine, but you can’t make stuff up that another person siad. That is not how adults talk to one another.
These batteries are WAY over priced anyway. And they keep denying there is a problem. I trust Will Prowse, the guy is very thorough in his testing.
I’ve got 15 of their 24v batteries powering my off grid house . I had one BMS destroyed itself because of a short, It didn’t disconnect just went up in smoke. I guess you could call that a disconnect, but I thought it was supposed to be a safety feature. I replaced the BMS and it now works fine. I have another battery that has failed, bought in 10-21. It won’t do any more that two amps charging or discharging. Most of the time it won’t connect at all. They are asking me to run all these test on the battery. If I tap on the battery post the voltage goes away. How can you test it when it won’t connect most of the time….I’ll never buy another Battle Burn battery that’s for sure! I’m ready for the law suit !!
BattleBorn has always been garbage.
Marketing got morons to buy their equipment.
It was never as good as what you could build yourself, for a fraction of the cost.
It was never as good as some of the other stuff you could find.
My Dumfume batteries run circles arpund Battleborn.
Know who thought these where awesome? Idiot preppers.
I will never buy a battleborn!!!