Have you had components explode or catch fire?

[Tamesh16]

After seeing this tweet 

It seems like a nightmare, especially since i leave my Pc on all the time, wondering if anyone else had horror stories like this 

 

[Tamesh16]

One time in Elementary school, my teacher had laptop that only worked on 110v (before 220-110v became common) and the school was 220v so she plugged it into a small transformer correctly and it didnt work, so she flipped the connections and realized she didnt turn on the switch at the outlet and when she did  440v went surging through and blew up the power brick

[Touch My Hamm]

Never seen this happen. I am not too scared as power is pretty much standardized in Canada. I remember when the Note 7 was doing its exploding recall and in the store I was at I had a box of note 7's to return to Samsung. they didnt care about the condition and 1 day I jokingly tossed one at a friend as a joke as a explosive... nothing happened but the screen shattering. 

[RollinLower]

i once had a VRM pop because of extensive overclocking, but that was no fire. just a pop and a whiff of magic smoke.

 

seems like he did a pretty crap job of building a PC if it literally caught fire tough. or just bad components?

[Tamesh16]

1 minute ago, RollinLower said:

or just bad components

it was an ssd that caught fire, if you click on the tweet he show shows the ssd, 

he mentions that all the other components were fine it was just the fire from the ssd that spread to the side of the case that caused the damage, but he used water to put out the fire so everything else is destroyed too 

[Tristerin]

Ive had the sound "Pop" let loose and PSU's go down the drain (and take no components with them), most recently being an EVGA 600B.  Nothing else however.  

 

Id be curious what brand of SSD.  

 

Im more inclined to believe it was the SATA Power cable that caused this fire.

[Xiee]

13 minutes ago, Tamesh16 said:

it was an ssd that caught fire, if you click on the tweet he show shows the ssd, 

he mentions that all the other components were fine it was just the fire from the ssd that spread to the side of the case that caused the damage, but he used water to put out the fire so everything else is destroyed too 

This is why you should have a CO2 extinguisher nearby. Something I learned from my dad (who's a safety freak). We have several CO2 extinguishers near electronics at all times.

[TempestCatto]

We had an old Dell prebuilt, back when Vista was a thing. The machine ran great for years. But around the time MS announced Windows 8 is when this happened: It was early morning like usual. I had school, and my dad had work. He would unsleep the computer and check news while he ate his breakfast. He finished eating and went into the kitchen to clean his bowl out. I sleep in the living room (small mobile home) where the computer also is. I was half awake when I heard a loud electrical "pop" some fizzing and sparking sounds, and then I smelled burning electronics. I sprung up and ran over to unplug the machine, which was smoking. I caught it just in time. It killed a very heavy duty surge protector, along with every single component in the pc. There was a mini fire in the psu that, thankfully, put itself out. It was one helluva way to wake up.

 

I still have that machine sitting next me, just because I horde. But to this day, I have no idea what caused it. There was very little plugged into the same circuit as the pc. Just a printer, monitor, and a floor fan. Those all remained perfectly fine too.

 

~

 

Here's another one: I was using a 3M anti-static vacuum to clean out a laptop for a friend. I was doing this at school. I went to vo-tech where I took a computer maintenance lab course. I did stuff like this all the time. We had a pile of standard "pc" power cables that we'd pull from whenever we needed a power cable. I pulled one for the vac because someone else decided to take the cable out from the vac and use it (vac used the same kinda cable). Well I plugged into an outlet, flipped the switch and went about my business. I was most of the way through when POP! The power cable literally exploded in two pieces. I was fine, the vac was fine, the laptop was fine (it was a top of the line Asus gaming laptop. Hella nice). The cable I was using was 18 AWG. I guess too little for that vac. Our instructor decided to take this opportunity to teach us about crappy cables and using the right cable for the amount of power draw. From then on, no matter what it is, I use a minimum of 14 AWG on everything (unless whatever I'm using requires something even beefier).

[viking_power]

I had a Corsair power supply that was smoking and starting to light on fire when I caught it.

[Yogi_DaBear221]

I mean not PC components, but one of my Genesis 3s spit smoke because young and dumb me thought that since the adapter fit, and the power seemed right that it would be fine. I plugged it in, flipped the switch and POP and smoke started rolling out of it.

[steelo]

No, and I hope I never experience that!

[Mitko_DSV]

I don't have first hand experience of this kind and I hope I don't have, but two of my cousins had their PSU literally explode (both had pre-built PCs with very cheap PSUs). How it happened? Well in both cases actually it was pretty similar - they're using their PC normally and suddenly the PSU explodes and has a small fire wich goes out by itself. In both cases putting a different PSU in the PC was enough - nothing else was damaged, they got lucky. This happened a few years ago and the two were a few years apart.

[Yogi_DaBear221]

Oh I also had a friend in middle school who tried to OC their Alienware and it actually caught fire.

[Godlygamer23]

Just a cap pop on my graphics card. Never a fire from any electronics.

[Godlygamer23]

1 hour ago, Tristerin said:

Ive had the sound "Pop" let loose and PSU's go down the drain (and take no components with them), most recently being an EVGA 600B.  Nothing else however.  

 

Id be curious what brand of SSD.  

 

Im more inclined to believe it was the SATA Power cable that caused this fire.

It was an ADATA drive per the tweet.

[D4Rk_PhE0NiX]

Had a psu explode when i first got into building becuase i changed the red switch on the back, the bang was quite savage lol, also overclocked an old board and cpu without heatsink on purpose to watch it destroy itself, that was pretty insane, it put a hole through the board and the desk.

[Pickles von Brine]

I had a GTX 260 a while ago have a spectacular VRM failure and shoot flames out the back of the card. EVGA has awesome warranties. I had a 65nm non 216 core they sent me a 55nm 216.

I had customer's battery experience a thermal runaway at a previous job. 

[Bitter]

Had a 4GB Maxtor 3.5 ATA66 drive experience a head crash and the spindle motor MOSFET caught fire from the high motor load.

[NineEyeRon]

Had an old TV catch fire as a kid, it was a massive thing that weighed a ton and was a big screen for the mid/late 90s too.

 

Couldnt play my PlayStation for a couple of weeks.

[EL02]

Yes, when i was younger. I had a pentium 4 pc with a generic psu. The psu would get hot as hell every time i turned the pc on(used the hot air coming out of it to warm my feet xd). I heard a pop sound and saw smoke coming out. Turned it off and on again. Proceeded to function great up until a year later.

[Tsuki]

none of my personal machines, but when i was building servers, i had a few caps blow and let out the magic smoke.  and once we got a bad power supply catch fire on a switch. that was fun

[Guest]

PCs at colleges around the UK went through a spate of catching fire years ago. Technicians struggles to work out what was going on. They knew the disk drives were often the seat of they fire. Event it was discovered some disk tampering had been going on. What students were doing was cutting the heads off swan vestas (non safety) matches off and dropping them under the covers of 3.5inch floppies. The disks were then left laying around or partially inserted in the drives. When someone else put them in and it spun up the match would strike. 

[atxcyclist]

Just last year an LCD monitor I'd had since roughly 2002 caught fire. It was a monitor for my secondary computer but it worked fine until then. The only reason it really cheesed me was that it was a gift.

 

I had a power supply let out some magic smoke several years back, but it just smoldered a little not a real fire. It unfortunately was in a computer I'd loaned to my office as a workstation, and it took some other hardware with it: An LGA775 Pentium-only board, one of the DDR2 RAM sticks in it, and a perfectly good IDE DVD-burner. It spared the hard drive, passively-cooled Radeon X550, and a Pentium 524 3.06ghz with hyper-threading. Some of that got re-used but it was pretty obsolete by the time the PSU died in the original build. The Pentium is still in a box in my closet, though it's completely worthless now.

[Pickles von Brine]

I had a hard drive on friday have a PCB failure and let out the blue smoke. Luckily it was for a data destruction job! w00t I get to crush it!

[Kisai]

On 3/13/2020 at 11:28 AM, Tamesh16 said:

After seeing this tweet 

It seems like a nightmare, especially since i leave my Pc on all the time, wondering if anyone else had horror stories like this 

 

The worst I've ever personally had happen was a CRT (I think it was goldstar, which is the current LG electronics) in the 90's going *bang*. This is how I've always referred to electronics dying instantly ever since. Oh but there was the 8-bit I/O card in the 486 that started to burn because the gameport cable got severed by the chassis, and then there was the IDE cable that got severed and the PC poured out white smoke (not my PC.) So in both of those cases, were 5V to ground.

 

Just based on the tweet, gonna say that it was something in the front of the chassis, the smoke poured out the back of the desktop, and the temperature inside the chassis got to a point where it melted the glass on the side of the desktop and the LCD. Based on subsequent tweets, it was the hard drive, a SSD no less.  

Some further tweet responses suggest it likely was a molex to sata connector. Which makes sense, the pins on a lot of these cheap connectors easily come loose. So my guess here is that the ground pins either shorted or became disconnected from the drive and it caused the drive to combust.