Sad case of what happens when you get cheap "electric" stuff from importers selling dodgy stuff.. Warning over USB chargers after woman dies from apparent electrocution.
Am I missing something...
The report said she was found dead with a laptop and headphone on. If the head phones were? Connected to the laptop, then what has a USB device charger got to do with it?
The report said she was found dead with a laptop and headphone on. If the head phones were? Connected to the laptop, then what has a USB device charger got to do with it?
Maybe she was listening to a iPod that was charging, from the dodgy charger? The report never mentioned an iPod charging, connected to headphones. ? Tragic.
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The price of the genuine chargers is too high due to greed by the manufacturers. The fakers will make big bucks out of the cheap ones. Here in Europe we had a car manufacturer that charged £400/$570 for a brake pump. Another manufacturer charged £200/$350 for the same thing sealed onto the alternator. With the life of the alternator part being shorter than the brake pump. Pump failures were very rare indeed. I will leave it to you to work out whom is putting us in danger with these overpriced replacements.
Well, I guess I'll rethink buying that Dollar Store USB charger and look for something that is formally approved. Electronic devices are so ubiquitous in our society now that you sometimes forget about the dangers of this kind of thing. The approved chargers may indeed be overpriced, but I'd never forgive myself if my kids got hurt just because I was trying to save a few bucks.
This is what happens when you trade the safety of an isolation step down transformer for the light weight, efficiency, and variable input voltage of a switching power supply. Switching power supplies offer no isolation from mains.
I check with an insulation tester and return the item if it fails. Quite a few of the cheap ones do have an OPTO isolator in the regulator and will be all right for a slightly shorter life before they fail to a black internal mess. I bought one form a well known British supplier that failed to a black internal mess and when I opened it some extra sleeves had been added to insulate things like the soldered in fuse and so on. It was otherwise the same as a cheap one from the flea market.
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