Not So Well Made in Taiwan

Life Technology
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Battery charger seems to be failing. Hit and miss output, and its charging level lights don’'t very often show. Up till now its seemed OK. No choice anyway, since it was the only one I could find when I bought it…

The metal case isn’t earthed, but that is only disturbing to foreigners. Maybe earthing the case is bad luck in Chinese Culture, attracting ghosts and such through grave association.

Anyway, opened it up to look for obvious loose wires/popped capacitors/burnt things. Nothing obvious, but there seems to be provision for a case fan, though none is fitted.

Note that QC A sticker.

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More annoyingly, they’d put a sticker over the case slots, cutting the ventilation. I cleared them, but wish I’d noticed it earlier.

To be fair, they had revised the QC level appropriately.

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That thing is a lead acid battery charger that could very well be up to 20 years old.

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No.
It isn’t

WTF are you on about?

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image

These are its years of purchase, of which one would be stamped. The latest year it goes up to is 100. 100 is 10 years ago in two weeks. It’s either the battery charger was made 10-15 years ago or the company is so cheap that they didn’t bother to update their stickers in TEN years… both not good signs.

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I just found this. It’s QC date is 26 September 100. It’s a ten year old battery charger. It’s at the end of its life.

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Ah, I see your problem.

You are trying to make sense of Chinese.

Try and make sense of English instead. Or images. The odds are much better.

I wrote its a battery charger because its a battery charger.

The pictures are of a battery charger. No lead acid batteries were harmed making these pictures, because there are no lead acid batteries in them.

It is used to charge lead acid batteries.

I can’t remember when I bought it, but whenever it was, the people who made it put a sticker over its case cooling slots.

Its age doesn’t alter that fact.

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I forgot to write charger in my haste. I am at work.

Anyways, my point is, it’s old. It’s likely at the end of its life and you need a new one.

A decade of use is money well spent.

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And I thought I’m the one with serious problems to deal with. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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:smiley:

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Could it have been two decades with better cooling? I’ll never know.

But I’ll know to check behind the stickers on the next one.

(I hate bloody stickers. People kept sending me them when I was on LINE.

A word is worth a thousand meaningless cutesy pictures.)

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Perhaps, but the sticker is covering a fan hole, not an actual fan. OEMs often reuse the same casing for a variety of models and a higher end model may use a fan where one does not exist on a lower end product. Tooling, moulding and creating new cases can cost hundreds of thousands of US dollars.

20 years for a power supply is possible, but not that common and power supplies (or chargers) are one thing that often break in my experience.

As someone who likes to rebuild computers, finding compatible power supplies for vintage PCs over 20 years old can be hard. Fortunately, many PCs are compatible with modern standards, but finding AT PSUs is a nightmare. Anything 1980-1997 that was used heavily is likely dead and the few live ones are still inside working PCs. In my books, after 10 years of continuous usage is good value. Over 20 is a miracle.

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Its had intermittant use, but more sustained use recently.

Its apparently possible to mod a PC power supply as a battery charger, but it seems to be non-trivial, so as you suggest, I probably should just go and buy another one.

Before I bought it I used a couple of old PC UPS’s , but they didn’t work for very long. I suspect the transformer in them is just intended for maintenance charging and was probably over-worked.

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New ones are definitely going to adhere to higher standards as well. Building codes were significantly strengthened in 2005ish to end the ungrounded crap. I only live in buildings that are after the 2005 building code.

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Taiwan makes a lot of stuff nobody thinks about though.

Springs is a really big industry here, as are screws…

And turns out they’re really high quality too.

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Sorry. I only read taiwan made and.saw the QC/F sticker and nodded and laughed.

There are quality stuff made here though.

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Sure.

I have some Black Hand brand spanners that I like, for example, and, as was pointed out above, the charger did last 10 years (though I don’t feel it should be expected to fail after 10 years, even if that is the current (fnar, fnar) reality).

I had one in the Yook that was a lot older than that, but admittedly it wasn’t “smart”

No case earth and covering up ventilation slots is, however, pretty ma fan/ chabudou (or words to those effects) and not too hard to avoid.

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Have to add a confession. I found a melted spot on the battery lead insulation of the Mashin (Made in Taiwan) charger, probably from hot exhaust contact, so it MAY have been intermittently shorting internally.

The charger has short and reverse polarity protection, but might not be expected to put up with that long term.

I cut that bit out and soldered the ends together again, but that didn’t correct the problem, so perhaps permanent damage was done.

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OK, I need a new one.

I could have had the same again Mashin Made in Taiwan model for 1500NT ish, or a fancy one with pulse and rescue charging and a battery test function for about 4000 NT.

www.mashin.com.tw/#/product/detail/112

OR I could get a Made in China (almost certainly) pulse charging model for 400NT online (or 2000NT from the battery shop I got the last one from, who are apparently 'avin an inscrutable larf)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zSlP27b2uY

Much as I hate buying Chinese, I…er…bought Chinese, a global weakness that should be addressed internationally, but evidently isn’t going to be.

Gets good reviews on the Internyet under various names and seems to be working OK,

Doesn’t have a “dumb mode” for recharging a flat battery (I think the “rescue” mode of the fancy Mashin model may be essentially that), but I usually have another battery I can use for voltage spoofing. Dumb chargers seem to be rare, big and relatively expensive these days.

Early days, but so far pretty impressed with it, apart from being Chinese. .I THINK it does constant current, then constant voltage, then trickle) . According to the manual (only slightly Chinglish) its not suitable for long term maintenance charging, and pulse charging can only be manually selected, but for about 10 quid thats OK.

Not a direct copy of anything else I’ve seen, since its fan-cooled, (which I suppose is a potential failure point, being a moving part.).

Plastic body so the apparent cultural aversion to earthing isn’t a factor

One oddity I’ve noted is that when you power it off the temperature display(kept alive by the battery its hooked to) starts going down from zero. Think I’ve had it down to about -40C, which would be a pretty good trick if it was true.