Posted by Time for another important safety tip from Home Rental Services!
(The idea for this post was brought to us by Joshua, one of our property managers!)
Many homeowners have 9 volt batteries in their homes for smoke alarms. The recommended best practice is to change those batteries every year when Daylight Savings Time occurs. If this applies to you, you may be shocked to hear the story about a home that went up in flames because of the way the 9 volt batteries were stored!
If you think about it, most batteries have the positive and negative posts on opposite ends, making it harder to create an electrical connection. Keep in mind, when you make a connection to the positive and negative end with ANY conductive material, electricity will flow. This becomes especially dangerous with a 9 volt battery because the positive and negative terminals are on the same side and close together.
We strongly encourage you to watch the 5 minute video below about how a home was seriously damaged by fire… all caused by a sack of old 9 volt batteries in the garage waiting to be recycled properly. Crazy, right? The homeowner sat a laundry basket on the shelf next to the sack of batteries and two of the batteries shorted against each other. Over time, the batteries heated up and then burst into flames, causing an uncontrollable fire that burned their house down.
The simple remedy is to put a small strip of electrician tape over the positive and negative posts of 9 volt batteries for storage. This applies to NEW and OLD batteries as well because there can still be sufficient charge in an old 9 volt battery to cause problems if the terminals are shorted.
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