Earlier this year a filmmaker posted a video that blew up for the worst reason: his MagSafe battery pack went up overnight and set his bedroom on fire while he slept. His warning afterward was simple — if a battery starts to swell or get puffy, get rid of it.
Now think about your own junk drawer. The retired phones in there aren’t doing nothing. And doing nothing is exactly the problem.
Batteries don’t need your permission to go bad
Lithium batteries degrade on two clocks: the one that counts charge cycles, and the one that just counts birthdays. That second clock — calendar aging — keeps ticking in a drawer. The electrolyte inside slowly breaks down, gas builds up, and the pouch swells. Three to five years of sitting is plenty. Heat makes it worse, and junk drawers are heat traps: right next to the stove, above the dishwasher, in a sunny hallway.
And here’s the part that gets people: a swollen battery in a drawer is more dangerous than one in a phone you use daily. In your daily phone, you’d notice the screen separating or the back panel lifting. In a drawer, nobody’s watching. Pressure builds against whatever’s piled on top of it — scissors, keys, a metal tape measure — and all it takes is one puncture.
The airlines figured this out before the rest of us. The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority now calls lithium batteries the number-one safety risk to aircraft, and US incident reports have more than doubled since 2019 — portable chargers recently overtook e-cigarettes as the top cause. Same chemistry, same failure mode, smaller box.
Go check right now. Seriously.
Pull out every retired phone, tablet, and power bank you own and look at each one:
- Screen or back panel separating, even slightly? That’s swelling.
- Device rocks when you set it on a table? Swelling.
- Case feels tight, buttons harder to press than you remember? Early swelling.
- Any sweet chemical smell? Stop handling it.
If you find a swollen one, treat it like an emergency, not a chore. Don’t plug it in “just to check if it still works” — charging a swollen battery is one of the fastest ways to trigger thermal runaway. Don’t throw it in the trash. And don’t drop it in a retail store’s battery bin, either — those bins are for healthy batteries only. A swollen battery goes to your county’s household hazardous waste drop-off. This week, not eventually.
For the ones that are still fine
You’ve got two good options. Option one: keep them properly. Power them down at around 50% charge — not 100%, not dead — and store them somewhere cool and dry. Check them every six months. A battery stored right can sit for years without drama.
Option two, and honestly the better one: get rid of them. That iPhone X isn’t worth the $40 you’d get for it. It’s worth negative money if it burns your house down. Apple, Samsung, and most carriers take trade-ins for ancient devices — sometimes for a few bucks, sometimes just for recycling. A factory reset plus removing it from your iCloud or Google account takes five minutes, and then it’s someone else’s problem in the best possible way.
I know there’s sentimentality involved. Everybody’s got the phone they took their kid’s first photos on. Back the photos up — which you should’ve done anyway — and let the hardware go. The memories are in the cloud. The fire risk is in the drawer.
Dealing with a swollen battery in a device you actually still use? That’s a different walkthrough — here’s what to do before it gets worse.
Before that old phone goes anywhere, back it up
Photos, messages, the stuff you’d actually miss — get it off the device before you wipe it and recycle it with a clean conscience.
And if your current phone is showing any of the warning signs above — screen lifting, running hot, dying fast — run the 60-second diagnostic before it becomes the next drawer phone.
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