Almost burnt down my house

I was thinking my ITP A3's contact was quite dirty and sprayed some contact cleaner into it to clean it. Turned out I sprayed too much into it. Didn't wait for it to dry completely and popped in my RCR123. Left it facing down on my wooden table. After some time, I prepared to go to bed. Since few days ago, I had this weird habit of toying with a few lights before I sleep. I never had this habit. Same weird habit kicked in on that night. Picked up my A3 and found it was burning hot and found out it had turned itself on. Thought I didn't turn it off so tried to turn it off. It couldn't turn off. Realised it might be the un-evaporated contact cleaner and so opened up the light and took out the battery before it burnt my table and the pile of paper stacked next to it.

The next morning, I checked on my A3 and found out this was what happened to it.



Reflector was toasted and LED glass dome shattered or burnt (basically dome was nowhere to be found), light was official dead :huh:
Pls don't make same mistake as me. Somebody up there was looking after me with the six sense thing and the habit of toying with lights coincidentally went away after this incident

Glad your house didn't burn down and the damage was limited to your table area. Lesson learned. Its a shame that ITP is toast, those older models with the XP-E can really throw considering the relatively small reflector.

Edit: Next time if you need to use contact cleaner use a q-tip to apply the contact cleaner.

I don't quite understand why/how you sprayed so much contact cleaner directly into the light housing?

Wouldn't you mainly use it to clean the contact points (i.e. the threads and MAYBE the springs if they somehow got dirty)? Also, I spray it an let it sit a minute and wipe the areas clean, which is how I always was taught to use it..

Not trying to be annoying, I'm genuinely curious as to how this occurred.. I myself clean/lube me lights quite often (b/c of high usage) and would like to avoid a similar occurrence!!

Thanks for your time and advice!!!

Actually. Now that I've re-read your post a couple of times, it kind of makes sense:

If you sprayed that much contact cleaner into the light and soon thereafter re-assembled (assuming it was watertight/airtight at the time) the cleaner did not have enough time to evaporate and acted a a conductor AKA short out.

Good to know.. This should be re-directed to the "Smoke and Fire, Hot Cells and Close Calls - The dangerous side of batteries" sub-section of the forum IMO.

Thanks for the info my friend!!! Could have happened to any of us

1pt21 said:

This should be re-directed to the "Smoke and Fire, Hot Cells and Close Calls - The dangerous side of batteries" sub-section of the forum IMO.

Click to expand...

This thread doesn't relate to a battery failure, so it's fine right here.

Norm

I can add to this. Even if you do leave a light long enough to let all the contact cleaner evaporate it might cause a tint shift in the LED - I now have an A3 EOS with a sickly yellow tint.

Moral of the story is: use contact cleaner sparingly and try not to let it get on LEDs.