Button batteries burn kids from inside The next time you replace a button battery, do take care to dispose of it thoughtfully lest your kids swallow it and end up subjecting their innards to a damaging electrical current. So warns the journal Pediatrics, through a new study titled Battery-Related Emergency Department Visits in the United States, 1990–2009. The …
I've been doing it for years. Because the terminals have always been the same size and as their spacing has never changed, it's quite easy to calibrate one's tongue for 9 volts to within about half a volt.
I'm not the only either, for many electronic nerds, engineers etc. this has become an 'essential' skill. Why you may ask--well, almost all good multimeters, Fluke etc, use one of these 9 volt batteries to power them. Naturally, when you want to test the multimeter battery--Catch 22--with the battery in your hand you've no working multimeter!
Yeah, right--of course all you thoroughly organised people would never ever experience this problem as you'd have both spare batteries and multimeters to hand, but for the rest of us disorganised hoi polloi, acquiring a calibrated 9-volt tongue is a very useful attribute.
As brand new 9 volt batteries never go more than a fraction of a volt over 9V, it's always easy to calibrate the 'calibrated' tongue with a new battery. With a bit of practice, one can become quite expert. What's more difficult is to determine the exact voltage of a battery when it falls significantly below 8 volts (one knows it's low but as the 'flat' voltage can be anywhere, one's never as practiced).
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NOTE: I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO SAY THIS BUT NEVER TRY THIS WITH A BATTERY OF HIGHER VOLTAGE--YOUR 18V LAPTOP BATTERY FOR INSTANCE. AND **NEVER** DO IT FROM A MAINS OPERATED POWER SUPPLY: EVEN IF THE POWER SUPPLY IS FULLY SAFE AND WORKING CORRECTLY AND DELIVERING, SAY, EXACTLY 9V, SUPPLIES ARE OFTEN/USUALLY EARTHED WHICH MEANS THAT 9V ISN'T CONFINED JUST TO THE TIP OF YOUR TONGUE AND IT WILL RETURN VIA THE LONG PATH HOME--THE EFFECT CAN BE WORSE THAN A GRADE 10+ CHILLI.
"Accidents happen, but I know my kids won't try to eat anything thats not food on purpose..."
I think your thinking has just proven that this is NOT common sense.
I honestly hope that you never have to find out the hard way that you are wrong.
Kids change - that is actually one of their defining characteristics.
Your present experience seems to be that your kid won't eat anything that is not food, but that may change over time as well.
My 4-year old recently put a bead up her nose despite the fact that she perfectly understood why that is not a good idea - it just happened.
She is also frequently complaining about the toy phone she has that won't play sounds because I refuse to put the buttom batteries it came with back in.
These batteries can be deadly if swallowed and are easily lost, so take care.
"Accidents happen, but I know my kids won't try to eat anything thats not food on purpose..."
Oh dear, oh dear oh dear! If you do have perfect kids then you're a bloody rarity!
Let's look at what kids can get up to at this age: yours truly escaped out into the street and was found sitting in the gutter happily eating a large lump of dog shit! Mother, absolutely horrified by disgusting actions of No. 1 son, rushed me off to some medical facility. (BTW, there weren't any ill effects, and unlike 'cleanness' kids of today I've a solid immune system sans asthma.)
Next, I ate a complete dolly of blue--that's stuff you don't see much today but it's for whitening clothes during a wash. The effect was dramatic--especially when it came out the other end (even now I remember it well).
Then there was the time when I ate the poisonous Lilly in the garden next door--err wow. And the time when I put the a metal fork in the toaster with me still hanging off it; a similar thing happened when I poked a fork into a 240V power point. ...And then there was the time when I snuck behind an old valve radio and got belted by the DC high tension and landed half way across the room.
And that was just the beginning.
Sorry, most us aren't born angles.
The "Isn't this basic common sense?" question refers to the advice to adults to secure or dispose of the batteries properly so that their kids don't swallow them, and not to some hypothetical advice to kids not to swallow small objects, which if you RTFA you will see is not what is being suggested.
And yes, keeping small objects of easily-swallowable size tidied away where small kids can't get their hands on them is common sense. Or at any rate it should be.
There's a baby/toddler in the house ... stow all your dangerous gear out of reach! To do otherwise is the very definition of "child endangerment".
At Stanford Hospital, we used to recommend that all new parents traverse all the areas in reach on hands & knees and remove any potential hazards ... and repeat the scan on all fours every single day until your reflexes were set to stow your gear properly in the first place.
We do the same exact thing for households with new puppies, for exactly the same reason. As I tell folks before they bring the pup home "If the pup gnaws on your new $199 shoes, don't yell at the pup. Rather, yell at yourself ... after removing the inappropriate chew-toy & substituting it with something more appropriate. It ain't the dawg's fault. It's your fault.
Only stands to reason, innit.
Back when I was a kid in the early 80s I had some button cell batteries for watches/early electroncs (LEDs primarily) and being a kid in the 80s pocket money was almost non-existant, couple that with the high price of button cell batteries I found I could charge them up a little so they'd work for a few minutes.
Until I charged one up for too long with too high a voltage and it went BANG, exploded out of my hands and into my face, no injuries but did give me one helluva shock and I've never tried charging a non-rechargable battery again since that day... :)
If you are a kid: close your eyes, now!
Back in the days of 220 V mains, i.e. when I was a kid, the almost best toy, besides Lego, was the very thing out of the power socket. Cooking sausages, improvising flash lights with graphite, burning down TVs while playing some console games and later on extinguishing it with water while still on power... Yes, it gave me one or the other shock, too. And it's fair to say that my otherwise healthy life was saved more than once by the RCCBs, or rather I relied on them quite heavily. But I learned a lot (?) and it was fun! Even if it meant that I was shivering for half an hour afterwards.
And today's kids can't deal with 3 V cell batteries? Pha!
This is old news but it's well worth repeating. Some of those batteries are really tiny and very small children put everything in their mouths and new parents tend to be very harried and sleep deprived so it's easy to just put something down for a moment when you suddenly hear a crashing noise when they've pulled something over and then forget about it.
I've heard some of the outcomes before and on the list of "things I have to do to keep my house safe" this may well not come on peoples radars and it's a really serious and horrible thing to happen, so it's well worth highlighting.
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This post has been deleted by its author
You are half correct. Silver oxide batteries are alkaline batteries so, instead of a strong acid, they have a strong base (lye or caustic potash). It will still burn a hole in your throat (or so the MSDS tells me). That said, it is my understanding that main risk is actually the electrical burn.
There was a horrible case in Denmark a few years back, where parents were sure that their 14 months old boy had swallowed a button battery, and contacted doctors and ER 11 times. 3 separate doctors refused that it was possible for him to swallow such a large batter (2 cm diameter, 3 mm thick). He gets different symptoms over the next 14 days, and the doctors keeps giving him all kinds of medicines for various theories instead of listening to the parents.
14 days after, the kid starts bleeding heavily from nose and mouth, and dies soon after. The battery had stuck in his throat and etched through his Esophagus and artery.
http://nyhederne-dyn.tv2.dk/article.php/id-22985608:baby-slugte-batteri-og-d%C3%B8de.html
(Sorry, it's in Danish)
No laughing matter indeed!
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