This no name powerbank with solar charging came in for recycling and it is anything but powerful. The battery is swollen and the case is bowed because of it.
It is quite dishonest of the manufacturer to put such a small battery in a large enclosure. Not only could the battery be taller but it could also be thicker. There are two foam rubber spacers used to fill the empty space in the enclosure.
The purchaser would be quite unaware of the small battery size and would assume that a physically large enclosure would equate to a larger energy capacity than a smaller one. If I find a suitable battery I would be able to more than double the capacity of the powerbank.
Please everybody, avoid products that are of such bad quality that the manufacturer is too scared to put their name on it!
A Visione VISDVD5820 DVD player came in for recycling and since it has a HDMI output I thought I may as well have a go at refurbishing it. They are budget brand and as we will see you really get what you pay for. It seems to be a brand name used by Harvey Norman.
The batteries in the remote had leaked and caused really bad corrosion on one of the battery terminals to the point of almost completely rusting the retaining spring! Also, there were splatters of solder left on the circuit board from when the battery terminals were manually soldered in place in the factory.
A quick internet search showed that this fault has has happened to others. They sold for $29 and $18 and as low as $9! There is no point doing any repairs on it so off it goes to be dismantled.
It is a shame that this sort of poor quality equipment with poor quality batteries is being sold. This sort of stuff is short lived enough as it is because of the rapid change in technology.
Had a no name brand battery charger come in for recycling. I set it up on the bench to test it. It powered up but after a bit it turned off. I took the thing apart. Pretty easy to do. Four screws at each end holding the slit extrusion case together and one holding a couple of TO220 packaged devices in place. The earthing was far from ideal. It was just tucked under a self tapping screw and none of the paint had been removed.
So of course the thing will not play up with the covers off! I set it up with a battery to check the charging. That all looked good.
(I’d better not mention here that I put the battery on with reverse polarity and blew the output fuse. Hey, I blame the fact that I did not have a black jumper lead. Yeah right!)
I moved it a bit to look at the front panel and there was a spark and it stopped working! “Oh s**t!” I thought to myself “what have I shorted out?”. Powered it up again and it still did not work. Better do some fault tracing. And then it sparked again. Ha! It is sparking in the Faston style connector. I was lucky that it had one of the clear insulating boots over it so I could easily see the sparking.
The connector had been crimped but the wire gauge was too small for the connector so they just soldered them. In this case there is a big solder blob that got nowhere near the wire. So it was a very loose connection.
Not only did they cut corners with thin wires but they also threw these things together really quickly. The solder hardly melted before they moved on to the next one. And there was probably no quality control or burn in testing.
Such a shame.
I did a decent job of soldering it and then added some proper earthing.
A Philips 42TA2800 LCD TV came in for recycling.
“It works” the customer said, “It is just the power switch.”
The actual plastic power switch actuator was missing and you could see that the power switch circuit board was just dangling off the cables. It looks like they were poking the pcb mounted power switch (two in series) to get it to turn on. I don’t think they had the remote control for it.
After taking it apart I discovered this:
The power switch circuit board is positioned to try and show the lack of a second screw ever having been present in the plastic support.
There was ever only one screw holding the power switch circuit board in place. The other was never fitted! So the plastic support broke. Not surprisingly. This is a power switch. Something that is often abused. And in this case it had to do a lot of work because of the lack of a remote.
So what happened here Philips? Are these TVs not made in highly automated factories with all sorts of quality checking including the use of image recognition? So did this one slip past the inspections? Or is this inbuilt obsolescence? Or are you saving one screw and one extra assembly operation to save a fraction of a cent?
Get back to me on it please Philips. Thanks.
Anyway, talking about customers and switches and faults brought back some memories. When the customer said “It is just the switch” I was reminded of my days repairing the old school CRT monitors and the even earlier days of repairing CRT TVs. Customers would sometimes give their diagnosis as “It is just the switch” or “One of the guns has gone”. It got the stage where I thought customers think that a CRT TV or monitor only consists of a CRT and a switch! They don’t know that there are power supplies, HV stages, signal processing circuits all containing resistors, capacitors, semiconductors, wires, cables, connections etc and all of which can fail.
An Ozito OZCD12V1A cordless drill came in to us for recycling and it looked like it had hardly been used. Rather than recycling it I thought it might be a good candidate for repurposing or rehashing with different batteries.
Never been soldered!
On inspection I found that the NiCd batteries were leaking (this may or may not be an issue since I have no idea how old it is) but more importantly I found that a wire on the transformer in the power supply had never been soldered at the factory! It didn’t help that the circuit board on the transformer was only flimsily attached.
The drill was hardly used, possibly because that batteries could not get charged?
I don’t know how the mechanical side stacks up but the electronics is pared back to an absolute minimum. Firstly, there is no filter capacitor in the charger power supply. You can get away without one in some cases but it is usually good practice to have it. The NiCd charging circuit is really basic. Maybe even too basic to the extent that it may damage the NiCd cells. It consists of six components, and two of those are indicator LED’s. Having the two LED’s (one red and one green) is one positive thing. Sometimes cheap products only use one. Temperature sensing of the NiCd cells is also non-existent and that, coupled with the lack of battery voltage detection, means that the really basic charging regime will shorten the lifetime of the cells.
It is a real shame that consumers demand cheap products and manufacturers supply them. It is creating unnecessary environmental problems
Now look here Acer. I usually like your products. They are generally pretty well made (we’ll overlook that case in the late 1990s where the edge connectors in one of your laptops had insufficient gold plating causing a fault common to that model).
Anyway, I was not impressed with your model A2.1 multimedia speakers for a couple of reasons. Firstly, even though you gave it the nice design feature of supplying the mains power out on a IEC 60320 fly lead why on Earth didn’t you put in a current sensing circuit so that the speaker circuitry is only powered when there is a load connected? And while we are on energy efficiency, why did you use an inefficient main frequency transformer instead of a switching power supply?
Secondly, why did you simply glue the thing together? And weakly at that. It virtually fell apart when I showed it the spludger tool! Well not quite but you know what I mean. Now I am no health and safety Nazi but mains powered items that come apart easily are a bit of a electrical shock hazard.
Here is the insides of the Acer A2.1 multimedia speakers.
Yeah, I know the answer to these questions. It comes down to cost doesn’t it. But come on. Just how much market share will you lose if you made a slightly better product that costs a bit more?
The speakers came in for recycling but when I tested it the only fault was a scratchy volume control that sometimes caused the left speaker to cut out. All it needed was a squirt of cleaner to fix it, and I suppose I will just have to glue the thing back together.
