Can your laptop fry an egg from its heat?
QUINCY, ILL. -- A recent house fire in St. Louis sparked our interest once we found out it was caused by an overheated laptop.
"I was sitting on my bed doing homework, and then I heard a popping noise and there were these sparks that came from the ground, and the computer like blackened the carpet and I ran outside and told my mom," says 15-year-old Connie Shen.
Connie, her mom and her 13-month-old brother got out of the house safely. Fire investigators say they believe the problem may have been the computer's lithium battery that overheated. They say they've never seen a case like this before.
We spoke with Jerry Smith with the Quincy Fire Department. He showed us just how hot a laptop can get if it's not getting the ventilation it needs.
"With the laptops, obviously the undersides of it can get very warm and usually, it's not the computer that catches fire itself, but it gets hot enough to ignite other products it's sitting on," said Smith.
This is especially true for soft surfaces like your couch, your bed or carpeting.
"Laptops are designed to sit on a hard surface. That way it'll have the ventilation underneath. Sitting on your lap is basically smothering it," said Smith.
But we wanted to know just how hot these laptops can get when those vents get covered. We asked Smith to take a thermal reading of a laptop within minutes of it laying on a soft surface.
"114, 116, all the way up to 123 and that's just been blocked for about two minutes. Wouldn't take too long to ignite something," said Smith.
And that's just a couple minutes. Think of how high it could spike if you'd been working on it for hours? It'll make you think twice before keeping it plugged in through the night.
Jerry Smith says another thing to look out for is a heating pad. People can easily fall asleep with one heating under the covers. That can easily cause burns to the skin or could start a fire.
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