I put it on the charger and then left for work last night. I remembered to check it this afternoon when I woke up. Below is what I found. I think that one of the three cells were bad/shorted in the pack. I think that the unbalanced charger just proceeded to charge the other two to ~12.5 Vdc, about a 33% over charge. The programmable charger had a port for a temperature sensor. I really should have used one, it might have avoided this.
Final death toll-- I can't find any remains of the battery at all. It was immolated. The multimeter that was sitting on top of the big charger is pretty charred. It may still work, but I couldn't get the selector switch to turn on my initial try. The big 12V charger is almost certainly a total loss. Not only did the top melt in and all the controls are destroyed, but it seems to have kept burning down inside the charger. I'm hoping to salvage the big transformer, but I'm not holding my breath. At first I thought the programmable charger was a write off too, but I pulled the charred plastic off it and hooked it up to my good DC supply and it fired right up and ran. It needs a new fan and some kind of end caps, but it looks like it will still charge batteries.
The funny thing is, I had a premonition when I put the li-po on the charger. I had 4 NiMh stick packs sitting on the top of the charger with everything else, and I thought, I better move those just in case something goes wrong... I should have set up a camera to catch the carnage
Luckily no one was hurt and there is no huge loss here. Later,
Jason