short-circuiting of a battery for a long time...

gerty said:
Or, if it's a big high current battery and you use a small wire, the wire will burn.
As a child I abused my train set transformer that way - top fun making my own brief-lived light bulbs, but it didn't do my transformer any favours, and it buzzed horribly thereafter.

Short a battery and it (assuming it doesn't explode and/or catch fire) what you'll get is a flat battery. But one time I did have a situation where I came across two cells connected in series to a load, and the load had shorted. One cell was very flat, and held a small positive voltage, while the other cell had flipped polarity and was showing a small negative voltage.
 

GooglePlex

Joined May 14, 2009
2
This is really dangerous, as cjdelphi said if you don't have any resistance it's possible that the battery could explode.
I would not try this at home, please.
 

bobbyrae

Joined May 14, 2009
42
There was an episode of Breaking Bad (on AMC) where the star of the show used a squeegee to short the battery terminals on a BMW. It burst into flames a few seconds later. Frankly, I just don't believe that would happen. They can explode, but it is very rare as you have to generate some Hydrogen gas AND have a spark right there at the same time AND this is pretty much impossible on an AGM battery (which is getting much more common).
 

David Bridgen

Joined Feb 10, 2005
278
Discharging thru a load and then shorting terminals is an approved long term storage method for NiCd batteries.
I did some work on satellite electronics. We built a charger/discharger for one satellite's NiCd battery. During discharge the voltage of every cell was monitored. When its voltage reached 1, a short was placed across it.
 
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