Power Supply goes up in flames

[CharlieWorton]

BigCliveDotCom demonstrates a lot of highly unsafe items, coming (usually) directly from China, via ebay. They either catch on fire, batteries smoke/flame badly or potentially electrocute the unsuspecting user, or maybe hide some other nasties.

Yeah, my favorite was the 'smokin pussies' doll - marketed to children - in which the female doll hid a huge fireworks sparkler in her vagina.  Clive lit it, and the resultant five foot long shower of sparks set off his smoke detector.  I showed the video to my sister, and she laughed so hard she couldn't catch her breath.

On a more serious note, I can remember the day when products marketed in Canada had to meet safety standards.  With the advent of internet fueled, direct to home marketing of products from a company located in a foreign country, those days are just a distant memory.  Now, it's buyer beware.

[Electro Detective]

Buyer Beware and...

Don't turn it on,

TAKE IT APART !!!      


then test to its rated specifications/blow up/catch fire,
upload to Youtube,
kick off an epic 1000 page thread on EEVblog   

and maybe the word will get around not to buy cheap OS sweat shoppe produced online 'click click' garbage   

[Red Squirrel]

What is the best way to test a PSU, can you simply apply a resistive load and slowly ramp it up to it's rated output, or is there more to it than that, like perhaps on/off sequencing of various types of load like inductive etc.  Would be interesting to build a rig to test various PSUs such as expensive ones and cheap ones from China to see how they fair out.

And for the explosions, of course.   Probably want to do that testing on some kind of metal pan lol.   I'm talking more about general purpose PSUs and not bench ones but guess it would work for bench ones as well.

[Electro Detective]

I'm no expert on testing PSUs, except if I have to really rely on one to deliver the good juice, I do give it a good thrashing under different/nasty loads
with fused and polyswitch protection, 
in case things go south and the notorious Magic Smoke Gang decide on another prison break !!! 

I watch proceedings on a oscilloscope, as multimeters can only tell you the first page of the story,
and let my ears and nose do the rest 

That said, there is NO WAY I would buy any of these crummy  -Made In Hu Knows Where - PSUs,
unless HIGHLY recommended by BRAVE EEVblogites  ,

and STILL I would take the sucker apart and FIX it first   
before thinking about connections to a sitting duck sucker DUT
and over-confident snafu switch-on