Be careful charging stuff….

Goes without saying, but plugged my Wahoo Roam in to charge it this morning with the generic charger cable I usually use.

About an hour later a very strong burning smell revealed the charger and cable port were happily overheating and beginning to melt.

Don’t leave stuff unattended when charging, folks!

I’m surprised we don’t see more of this.

There’s a lot of junk chargers out there.

I tend to stick with ANKER unless it is the original charger that came with the device.

You just can’t trust Amazon/ebay if you try and order a genuine Samsung or Apple charger – 99.9% are fake.

Rather than ordering cheap of eBay and getting an unknown piece of junk, just grab the IKEA ones when you’re passing. Saw a tear down of the latest ones, and they are right up there with the decent big brand names as far as quality/feature/materials go.

Same with their cables.

Absolutely.

Only Anker or  pukka  Samsung USB charger plugs for us, that either came with devices or bought from Samsung’s own website.  Or real Bosch ones for the power tools.   Hope one for the bike lights.

Dodgy cheapo ones just not worth the risk of burning the house down, potentially with us and the dog inside at the time.

And NEVER leave on charge when going out of the house.

You just can’t trust Amazon/ebay

No, but you can trust John Lewis – where I have bought all my Apple chargers. Even my refurbished MacBook Pro came with a noname charger – which I replaced. Some are surprisingly hard to spot as not official, and that includes the little plug devices.

Be careful buying cheap chargers.

I refuse to use unbranded chargers or cables now.
Even my travel adaptor is a branded Belkin one now.

Anker, Belkin and UGreen are all decent and have a UK presence with a degree of aftersales care and a brand to protect.

The Ikea ones are very good for the money but as far as I know they don’t do a higher wattage one that’ll power/charge a USB-C laptop so I just bought a UGreen Nexode for travelling.

The Ikea ones are very good for the money but as far as I know they don’t do a higher wattage one that’ll power/charge a USB-C laptop

They top out at a 45W model in the euro plug style, not sure if that’s enough grunt for your laptop, but works ok for mine.

All of our many and various chargers have come with something ‘proper’, usually a phone, so I think we’re alright there.

Cables though, we’ve got quite a few eBay specials, is that a problem?

Cables though, we’ve got quite a few eBay specials, is that a problem?

Rubbish connectors that aren’t very robust, thinnest gauge wire that can barely take the current, terrible grade of plastic for the cable outer.

I think poor manufacture aside theres a problem with USB-C as a ‘standard’ in that its a whole bunch of standards both in terms of power and data handling, but they all use the same form factor. There have so far been 4 generations of USB-C, each of those generations has a range of data and power capacity and yet externally they all look the same.

So by looking at it you can’t tell if a USB-C cable is capable of carrying 15W or 240W, 5 Gigabits or 80 gigabits. And the devices don’t typically display on the port what power they require and the chargers don’t typically show in the port how much power they deliver.

So you could have a device that draws 100w, and charger that is delivering that and unwittingly stick a 15w cable in between the two (and thats assuming the off-brand cable is even capable of that)

So you could have a device that draws 100w, and charger that is delivering that and unwittingly stick a 15w cable in between the two (and thats assuming the off-brand cable is even capable of that)

Hmmm, that’s worrying given how no-one thinks about all that and tends to just grab whatever fits. It would be much better to make a usb standard that could handle the upper limits of usb charging.

all our chargers are apple, Anker or UGreen, however we have a number of aftermarket Amazon braided cables…. no idea what they are rated for..

however we have a number of aftermarket Amazon braided cables…. no idea what they are rated for..

Not a Wahoo Roam apparently

^^^ yeah, but was it the cable, or was it the charger that failed, to cause the overheating and melting ?

So by looking at it you can’t tell if a USB-C cable is capable of carrying 15W or 240W

thats not the whole story. You can’t tell by looking at it, but the charger can. Cables rated above 15W are equipped with a chip to inform the charger how much it can take.

Cables rated above 15W are equipped with a chip to inform the charger how much it can take.

Your trusting your amazon market place seller, of items branded with what looks like a string of random characters, to be acting in good faith when they pair those chips with whatever bit of wire is in the cable.

Theres and interesting story about why those brands have such gobbledegook names

If your seeing lots of seemingly identical product all with nonsense names thats a fairly good sign its junk in one way or another – just rubbish at one extreme, dangerous at the other, and that maker is just churning its way through Amazon’s Brand Registry (which Amazon uses as some sort of proxy for due diligence) flogging a few goods with fake reviews and jumping to the next made up name before the one star reviews and and houses catch fire.

Also u-green USB-C cables have the power rating marked on the connectors!

Don’t leave stuff unattended when charging, folks

Or get the hell away from them!!

^^^ yeah, but was it the cable, or was it the charger that failed, to cause the overheating and melting ?

Cable out of a USB socket.

USB-C is a great idea, but very poorly executed – as maccruiskeen says, there are a whole raft of different formats and features with identical connectors, some just charge, some just carry data, some do both, but at different speeds…

Look up the USB -C standard chart, it’s not just your cables and chargers that’ll melt…

TBF, even the “brands” have problems. Just be sensible and leave charging stuff in range of a smoke detector and your hearing

LG Energy Solutions had problems with various EV batteries leading to the recall of tens of thousands of cars https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/04/multiple-recalls-spark-fed-investigation-of-lgs-electric-car-batteries/

+1 Don’t leave stuff unattended when charging, folks!

So, quick update….

I contacted Wahoo, said I thought I’d used a dodgy cable so I doubted it would be covered by warranty or replacement scheme.

They asked for a pic of the damage, decided they couldn’t  rule out a hardware problem and a new Roam was delivered this morning.

Huge shout out to Wahoo customer service for going way beyond.

Not yet experienced this phenomenon.

Cables though, we’ve got quite a few eBay specials, is that a problem?

Can be – I was driving to work charging something from a a 12V to USB device. Noticed a hot plastic smell, realised it wasn’t outside and saw the cable casing had overheated, it was beginning to melt and had shorted out. Could have cause a fire in time if unattended.

One way cheapo suppliers make money off less diligent buyers is selling an item that meets spec for testing and the first delivery then cheaping out on materials on later orders.

Have to admit I’ve got very blase about charging- I’ve got a charging box for my rc car lipos and a quality charger and storage bags and all that, which I use religiously, but then I go off and charge my chinese head torches which are also lipo, with cheap random chargers, and knock the lights about (and then strap these small bombs to my head!). At some point in the last 5 years “this is basically a little incendiary device” turned into “this is normal” in my head even though there’s lipos in all sorts these days. But of course for most people it never even made that journey and just go “this is a battery”

Quick resurrection for owners of battery packs that may pose a fire risk due to a manufacturing defect:

Anker 334 MagGo Battery (PowerCore 10K), Anker Power Bank and Anker MagGo Power Bank

https://www.anker.com/a1642-a1647-a1652-recall