Bought a cheap 6/12V 'smart' battery charger the other day from a well known auction site. Unfortunately it went 'pop' with a lot of smoke when switched on. The company sent another one which I tried this afternoon on a different battery and, guess what, it blew up as well. Taking them apart it's obvious that the big capacitor has exploded in both chargers. The brand is 'Katbo'; maybe should be 'Katpoo'?
How discharged was the battery ? I'm asking simply because I had a toasted leisure battery and tried to revive it with a low amperage (5a) CTEK which got scaryily hot for the first 3 hours... Sent from my SM-G960F using Tapatalk
Good point. I used the first one on a fairly fully discharged 6V battery and it blew within a couple of seconds. The second one I put on a good, fully charged 12V battery and it went pop in maybe 5-10 seconds.
I watch a youtube chanel called my mate Vince . He repairs allsorts of stuff that he bought from ebay then re sells them. He is very open about what he does . He recently rejigged his site abit and in explaining why, he used a brilliant term about eBay . "Its a race to the bottom" saying theres no profit in eBay anymore its a too crowded market place and you need to be the cheapest to sell anything thus the quality of almost everything has gone down to a dangerous level. Speaks volumes to me . I can see the same will happen to Amazon in near future as eBay fails completely .
That's bad . I won't buy any electrical appliances from eBay these days ... Sent from my SM-G960F using Tapatalk
Can you get a picture of the side of the capacitor with its rating? The capacitor should say something like 100uF 400V .. If the voltage rating is less than that the power supplies are 110 volt rated, not 240V rated .. The bursting top is indicating too much current leaking through the capacitor causing heat. It is only steam, not fire, still some way off burning down the house. As it is in the mains supply side, and it failed very rapidly, its almost certainly nothing to do with the battery load. It would have blown without a load on it. It must be said that my quite high quality Taiwanese charger started going bang last week. It was the surge suppressor (which would go in the empty VR position on your power supply near the top edge). Surge suppressors do eventually go short and blow fuses. Then you replace them and everything goes on for years. All those empty PCB positions are for interference suppression components that would have had to have been fitted if sold legally over the counter in a British shop - its possible that if it was still working, it would knock out DAB or TV reception..
I have extractor fan in bathroom that kept blowing the same resistor on each of my replacements. I bought a good quality resistor from Maplins and fitted it myself. Been going for years with no problems. I put it down to poor quality original materials
Its amazing you found a good quality part in Maplins It was probably a fusible resistor, and it was popping because of slightly high mains voltage or marginal design. (and an arcing wall or cord pull switch may also be a factor)
Thanks, yes it's 100uF but only 200V. One might naively think, as I did, that as I searched for UK only item location then the goods would meet UK standards. I know the seller is in China but if the charger is already in the UK then something has gone wrong with our consumer protection processes. I guess if it doesn't declare that it is CE marked then that's the clue.
I bought a cheap convector heater that went up in smoke...it was wired partly with speaker size spade connectors.
