I know someone who was a volunteer fireman.  He sees potential causes of fires everywhere.  I have a mate who was a volunteer ambulance officer who is against decriminalisation of marijuana because of all of the call outs he had that involved people who were stoned.

So what has all of this got to do with this electronics blog you might ask.  But just hang on a minute while I explain.  As a technician I always see electronics stuff that is broken or blown up or somehow playing up so it is easy to start thinking that the products are unreliable.  The reality though is that I only see a small percentage of the products that are sold and without knowing the sales figures or the total number of products that have failed I have no idea how reliable they are.

The moral of this story is that the fireman and the ambulance officer and the technician have to rely on sound data rather than personal experience to make judgements.

While in the process of rejigging the multimedia equipment at New Zealand Vintage Machinery Club, of which I am a member, the DVD player (a Bauhaus model DVD-4900A) decided to stop working. When I got it on the workshop bench I quickly discovered that the power cord had an open circuit wire. There was no signs of physical damage so I tried to find out where it had failed by slitting open the sheath. Power cords often fail at the strain relief although that would not have been likely with this item given that the cord would have had very little flexing.

It turned out that there were actually two separate breaks in the one metre long cable, and all the evidence pointed to poor quality manufacturing. Incidentally, the colour coding was brown, black, and blue with the earth conductor being blue Now here in New Zealand I am quite sure that earth conductors must be the green or green/yellow colour coding, and I am sure that the regulation applies to cords as well. So I spent quite a bit of time poring of the legislation and the regulations but could not find a definitive answer. Even the experts at Energy Safe NZ and the Electrical Workers Registration Board could not give me a straight answer.

The cable, as with many others, had a long string of letters, numbers, and symbols along its length. I could recognise some of the information but the rest needed some research to find out what they meant.

• HO3VVF – an industry specification for cord sets
• 3G 0.75MM ² – this is quite obviously the diameter of the individual wires but the meaning of 3G is unclear (possibly something to do with three wires making up the cable?)
• VDE – Verband der Elektrotechnik, Elektronik und Informationstechnik e.V. (VDE Association for Electrical, Electronic and Information Technologies), a European technical-scientific association
• KEMA-KEUR – a European appliance safety certification
• Series of three “+” and sideways “S”s – unclear
• Series of symols and letter – unclear
• CEBEC – a Belgian rating label for the quality assurance of electrical appliances
• IEMMEQU – what this means is unclear after a short search but it is likely to be another certification.
• SABS 1574:1994 – it looks like there is a spelling mistake on this one and it should be SANS 1574:1994, a South African standard for flexible cables
• S N D Fi – these sort of look like country codes
• Baohing – the manufacturer
• LTSA-3 – a type number
• N14586 – possibly another type number
• 227 IEC CE – probably a reference to the IEC 227 standard

Judging by all of these markings you would think that the cable would be top quality but obviously not. So is the cord falsely labelled or all of these standards of no use?  Given the spelling error and the incorrect method of describing the standards I would say this is a cheap and nasty bit of Chinese manufacturing and all of the labelling is just there to make the cable look good.  Come on manufacturers – you can do better than this!

Anyway, I replaced the power cord and our club now has the DVD player back in action. According to a fellow club member there were quite a few of these DVD players with faulty cables. He had acquired them and fixed them up but somehow the one supplied to the club was overlooked or not fixed because it was not faulty at the time.

I am often banging on about the rubbish products out there on the market but there is a beacon of hope. Metabo. Mmmmm… Lovely German made products.  They cost up to four times as much as equivalents but they seem to be reliable and they are a joy to fix. Windings are all nicely sealed, brushes designed to protect the commutator, wires are nicely routed and secured, construction that is simple for ease of servicing, and parts are that readily available.

We do a bit of work for a company that gives their angle grinders a real hard workout. Usually it is only the switch or brushes or power cord that fails but I did have one recently that had a stuffed armature and field coil.  To be fair, and they do put in protection against it, what may have happened is that a stray metal fragment probably got caught up inside the angle grinder.  Anyway, the field coil was not to badly priced but the armature was expensive.  The repairs would have cost about two thirds of the cost of a new one.

I have not checked out how the switches actually fail but they have rubber seals all over them to keep out dust.  I was not to keen on the push-in method of connecting solder covered wires to it.  Solder and connections is often a bad match but in this case it seem to be reliable.

Metabo. Mmmmm…

I was sitting at the dining room table a few weeks back when the light level changed a bit.  I did not think anything of it at the time but a little bit later there was that distinctive smell of overheating electrical equipment.  After checking out all of the electrical things in the area I remembered the change in light level.

Yep, sure enough, another one of the CFLs had failed in the dining area lamp and emitted the electrical stench.  I have blogged about these things before and this time it is an Elite branded lamp.  It is not as if the lamps are in an enclosure that causes the heat to build up.  I think that they are just really crappy products.

It is disappointing that RCN may default on its contract with the New Zealand Government on the TV takeback recycling programme.  RCN is the leading e-waste processor in New Zealand and if anyone could make it work it would be them.

Ecotech Services supports the concept of Product Stewardship for electronics and electrical goods with the best method being a Deposit Refund System (DRS).  It is a well established fact that the voluntary measures preferred by the government are not effective in reducing the rising volume of e-waste.

In Christchurch Ecotech Services staff have noted a rise in the number of the older analogue televisions discarded on the roadside around the city.  This is without a doubt happening as a direct result of both the switch off of the analogue television transmission service and the cost incurred to recycle the obsolete televisions.  If there was a refund made available on the televisions that could be claimed at the end of their useful life we would not see this sort of litter and they would  be diverted from landfills.

In order to prevent the newer electronics products from becoming part of some future e-waste crisis it is imperative that the Minister for the Environment uses his powers granted under the Waste Minimisation Act to declare all electronics items as priority products.

In Europe and some of the US states there is a more responsible attitude to addressing the e-waste issue.  Why does so called “clean-green New Zealand” lag so far behind some of our major trading partners?

My phone started playing up earlier this week.  Every time I tried to make a call or check my voice mail the phone would shut down.  As a good technician I did some basic tests.  I tried rebooting it (removing the battery) and  I gave the battery a good charge up.  None of it helped.  It was almost as if the transmitter output stage had a short and when it powered up it caused an internal supply voltage to dip below the reliable operating voltage.  Anyway, as much as I  would like to repair it and discover the failure mode I decided to replace it.

It so happened that my partner, my one and only, and my favourite person at the moment (actually these are all the same person and I think that those descriptions have applied for quite some time!) had a spare smartphone.  She was only using it as an alarm clock.  Gee!  And I was only recently blogging about consumption!

So I now use a smartphone to take my calls.  I am glad that at least my phone is smart!  Maybe it help me get through the day a little easier?

The old phone will go off to the Starship Foundation mobile phone recycling programme, a worthwhile cause for many good reasons.