Fairphone 3 caught fire

My fairphone 3 was fully charged and I was listening to Spotify when it got extremely hot, the battery swelled up and smoked and within a few seconds the phone was melting and up in flames, I had to put it outside, I have tried getting in touch with fairphone via the website but it doesn’t let me submit the form it just simply does nothing and I can’t call as I would get charged for calling an international number, I am based in the uk and would like some help with this

That’s a lithium battery for you. It like the Galaxy Note 7 all over again. I hope you can get a replacement. As batteries age they tend to expand no matter the device in question due to the age. I had to replace 2 battery banks an a UPS unit recently due to this issue. The UPS unit was 9 years old before it started leaking. The battery banks were only three years old. It’s good to try to find a E-waste facility near you to recycle them before this happens. That’s my experience when it comes to batteries. But it’s also expensive to replace.

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Batteries that are swollen or that don’t pass the “spin test” (you can search for that in the Forum) should be withdrawn from service by the user and taken to an appropriate recycling centre.

Risks of this sort of thing happening, can be significantly diminished by avoiding regularly charging the battery to 100%, and by preferring slow charge rather than quick charge. FP5 helps with this with the possibility of setting a max charge level of 80%.

Some good advice from iFixit (read to the end)

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I did change my FP3 battery when it was 3 years old due to the fact it was a bit swollen. It was out of guarantee so I had to pay for the replacement. It was still working well but I did not want to take any risk.
As users of lithium batteries we should regularly check for any signs of degradation.

You might want to have another go at submitting a report to Fairphone through their web form. Fairphone acknowledged there was a temporary issue with the form that prevented submissions and has now fixed the issue, see

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My fairphone 5 has exploded too, and I was promised a replacement but they are unable to as my receipt doesn’t have the imei number on and I can’t get it from the phone itself due to being melted

Did you manage to get a replacement and if so what did that ask from you thank you

Um, they just shipped me out a replacement

They sis ask me for pfp and imei but I was able to provide that after the new phone came by ups

Overall the experience was quite good, they still haven’t sent me labels to ship off the old damaged phone back yet… intact they never even asked for pictures or anything. Was given an replacement straight away :slight_smile: hope you get yours sorted