It’s 11:30 p.m. and you’re in bed, doomscrolling your way to sleep .
As you go down a rabbit hole in search of Halloween costume ideas on TikTok — even though you know you’re going as Chappell Roan — you’re rudely interrupted by your phone. “Low Battery: 10 per cent of battery remaining.” You immediately switch to lower power mode in hopes of stretching out another 10 minutes of blue screen-induced happiness, but reality soon sets in: you need to plug in.
So you do, begrudgingly. But did you know that firefighters, battery experts and safety gurus alike agree that overnight charging — not just for phones, but other personal electronics powered by lithium-ion batteries like your company laptop, your kids’ tablets, the vape pen you don’t want your spouse to know about — should be avoided? It’s advice firefighters in Montreal were issuing following a port fire this week “fuelled by 15,000 kilograms of lithium-ion batteries” inside a shipping container. The noxious smoke from the fire led to a lockdown in one borough and air quality warnings for other downwind residents.
“We recommend folks get in the habit of doing it while they’re awake,” Matthew Griffith , section chief of prevention for the Montreal fire department, told The Gazette after. “That way, if something happens, you’re alert and can detect it quickly.” That’s included in the insight and recommendations offered by Dean MacNeil, a globally recognized expert on lithium-ion �.
