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[Jimmy-T]

Should strata schemes consider installing dedicated charging stations on common property to reduce fire risks?

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[Bannermans Lawyers]

I’ll just do a bit of a background on lithium battery fires. I think it was 2025, two people died in that from a lithium battery. There’s countless strata fires caused bylithium batteries and countless other fires as well. It seems to be the riskiest are the ones with the bikes and where they remove the battery and take it inside and charge it.

What’s quite good is the owners corporation can register a bylaw and when they register a bylaw, they can set out the rules that are suitable for that building. If they’ve got a separate charging area, they can direct people to use that. They could have CCTV footage to ensure compliance and have people checked it if they’ve got bikes. being parked or other items that they’re concerned about, such as scooters, bikes and scooters are the two main issues, that then people can go and have some comfort about these potential fires being mitigated.

If somebody does not comply with the bylaw and they’re negligent in the way that they manage their battery, then they could be liable for the losses that are associated to that. which can be very, very severe. That action would probably be an action in useless because they allowed the fire to spread throughout the building.

To the extent that there’s strata insurance though, as far as I’m aware, strata insurers will still continue to cover for those fire events. I’m not aware of a practice where there’s certain sort of exclusions for that, but that’s a policy by policy basis.

So it may well be that your building had a fire and then as a result of that fire, there’s now an exclusion for fires related to lithium batteries. But you need to just check the policy.

So you do have the comfort of insurance, but you just don’t want to have the fire because the comfort of insurance just puts people back in a monetary position and it doesn’t give peace of mind to people. So the bylaw is good. It sets up the rules.

What’s also good is the New South Wales Fire Brigade Service. They’ve got some really useful printouts that you can print and put around in notice boards and things like that to explain to people how they should um charge batteries like you know not near exits not where people sleep all these sort of safety suggestions that they have if you’re going to be having people charging lithium batteries in their apartments .

Bannermans Lawyers
www.bannermans.com.au

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