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What went wrong inside recalled Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks?

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Re: What went wrong inside recalled Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks?

#271

Post by geocrasher »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #157
lyrrad wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only buy portable Li-ion batteries from manufacturers with a history of product recalls in my country or directly from major retailers that regularly recall defective products. I also only buy portable battery models that I believe will sell or has sold many thousands of units so any widespread manufacturering defects should become apparent sooner.

Yeah, I see your point, never thought of it that way. Just also darkly hilarious — “I only buy with a history of product recalls”. There was a time in which we used to avoid such things…

Reminds me of the survivorship bias exposed by Abraham Wald:

https://medium.com/@christian.dobbert/the-missing-bullet-hol...

Re: What went wrong inside recalled Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks?

#272

Post by acdha »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #235
acdha wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your house especially warm? I’m not doubting that it happened but I’ve had very different experiences (one battery problem in a couple decades) and am curious what might explain the difference other than bad luck.

I live in India, both in North and South at different times of the year and yes it does get extremely hot during summer but I've been very careful and monitor battery temps at all time. My theory is just I've had a bad luck with batteries.

Interesting, that does sound like terrible luck.

Re: What went wrong inside recalled Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks?

#273

Post by rincebrain »

electroglyph wrote: post #202
rincebrain wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel used to be infamous for doing this, if you'd like a western example. A number of the integrators I worked with added rules banning customer-supplied CPUs because Intel would give away "working" product to educational/other institutions that, uh, did not POST, and it was such a headache so often that they banned using the product.

what? that makes no sense, why would Intel do that?

I can't speak to why, but I can promise you firsthand that both of those statements were true and not things I simply heard about.

My old workplace received such donations, we had to pay to replace a number of them that were DOA in the resulting systems, and the VAR we were using to build our systems for us informed us they had added a policy forbidding BYO for that reason between our failure rate and others who had used them.

My assumption would be that they were only slightly more carefully managed than things that "fell off a truck" - that is, they were probably given away internally because they were nominally cosmetically unsuitable for sale and not easily salvageable by binning, but you got what you paid for in terms of warranty coverage.

Re: What went wrong inside recalled Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks?

#274

Post by anjel »

acdha wrote: post #148
bboygravity wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get how it's possible that nobody (other than Tesla) can manufacture batteries in the West? It a glance this feels insane. Batteries are in everything and such a basic need. How is it possible that buying through known scammers with tons of QA is still cheaper than manufacturing in the West? Obviously for Tesla it isn't cheaper to buy from China, so why is it thought to be cheaper for the rest of the West? Is…

Tesla buys most of their batteries from Japanese and Chinese companies like Panasonic and CATL. Some of those are assembled in factories like the Nevada gigafactory where Panasonic runs part of the factory. They’ve struggled with quality and capacity issues, which I think really just hits the idea that China spent decades on infrastructure and it’ll take similar amounts of time to catch up.

Meanwhile the Chinese Economy has (a dif't set of) infrastructure deficiencies of at least the same magnitude as the US so this world dominationation trip Xi is on is no less egotistically delusional than MAGA such that China needs the US as much as the US needs China. Leaders will always play the violin while the town's aflame.

/Games Without Frontiers

Re: What went wrong inside recalled Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks?

#275

Post by Pxtl »

Zak wrote: post #47
turnsout wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%... I'm seeking products that take AA or AAA batteries instead of built-in lithium batteries, for the same reason.

I wish more devices took field-replaceable cylindrical Li-ion cells. They're pretty common in flashlights and rare in other products where they would be advantageous.

A fun trick is that if you're sure the batteries are in series you can sometimes swap out a pair of AA batteries for a 3.7V 14500 Lithium rechargeable and a fake AA battery (just a wire in an AA-sized plastic shell). Drill a hole in the battery-cover of the device where the 14500's USB port is and now your device is plug-in rechargeable, assuming it can handle 3.7V instead of the normal ~3.1V that comes from a pair of AAs (which isn't a huge stretch). Worked for my old Logitech game controllers.

Downside is that you've got parts in your bin that are dangerous because they look like AA batteries but could cause damage or even fires if somebody put them into the wrong AA thing. Make sure to mark the batteries loudly. I've electrical-taped the pairs together to prevent this problem.

Re: What went wrong inside recalled Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks?

#276

Post by Pxtl »

homebrewer wrote: post #197
Clamchop wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know many were still buying alkaline AAs in large quantities. I've been using LSD NiMH AAs and AAAs for I think more than 15 years and haven't looked back. They seem to work with everything.

There's still lots of poorly produced electronics that treat NiMH that is within its normal operating voltage as being out of juice, and either nag you or shut down completely. My supposedly high quality Logitech mouse is one example (probably not buying anything from Logitech ever again, they're one of those brands that are coasting on their old credibility).

If it runs on two batteries in series and you're willing to take a risk, you can get a 3.7V 14500 battery and then a dumb fake straight wire battery in there. Gives you 1.85V per-slot instead of the normal 1.5, which might be too much for the device, but beats the pants out of the 1.2V you get from NiMH AAs.

I got 14500s for my Logitech F710 game controllers, and then drilled a hole in the battery compartment of the controller to make them plug-in chargeable. I've only just played with them a few times - no guarantee this is a long-term solution, but it seems to work well for now.

Note that this does mean you'll have a bin of things that look like AAs but might cause a fire or melt if you put them into the wrong thing that accepts AA batteries (like the just-a-wire-fake-batteries have allcaps warnings about never ever putting them into a charger).

Re: What went wrong inside recalled Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks?

#277

Post by Pxtl »

ajolly wrote: post #239
Zak wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A device that won't work with NiMH due to voltage will also only use about a third of the energy in an alkaline. Poorly produced is an understatement. My Logitech G604 works fine on NiMH. The calibration for reporting battery charge as a percentage is off, but it runs for months.

As an aside, pretty much all the g604 is will end up with double click reliability issues or an inability to hold down the mouse button and drag. But you can easily replace the switches or there's vendors on eBay and AliExpress that I'll sell you a circuit board with the switches pre-soldered for replacement. Logitech no longer makes the g604 :(

I have a g302 sitting in a drawer on my to-do list for similar double-clicky switches replacement.

Re: What went wrong inside recalled Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks?

#278

Post by mac-mc »

maxglute wrote: post #80
nomel wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in manufacturing in the US. Incoming quality control, for Chinese vendors, is necessarily set up with zero-trust. This isn't a "trust but verify" sort of thing, it's strictly "do not trust". Assume that, at every step of the chain, there will be a lie: change of process, material change, collected data, and that the product being given to you is even yours (delivering a knockoff at the final step, and resellin…

>Chabuduo mindset [1] is a very real thing IMO high tech cost optimization is like the opposite of chabuduo - it's not half-assing, but over value engineer under pressure. The PRC's "amazing" manufacturing system fosters adversarial competition down the supply chain because there are so many competitors, packed with technical talent incentivized to value-engineer the shit out of everything to squeeze out fractions of…

Does this also partly explain why appliances don't last long, there is no margin of durability for anything?

Re: What went wrong inside recalled Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks?

#279

Post by [deleted] »

electroglyph wrote: post #202
rincebrain wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel used to be infamous for doing this, if you'd like a western example. A number of the integrators I worked with added rules banning customer-supplied CPUs because Intel would give away "working" product to educational/other institutions that, uh, did not POST, and it was such a headache so often that they banned using the product.

what? that makes no sense, why would Intel do that?

[deleted]

Re: What went wrong inside recalled Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks?

#280

Post by nomel »

Chachichichi wrote: post #146
nomel wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in manufacturing in the US. Incoming quality control, for Chinese vendors, is necessarily set up with zero-trust. This isn't a "trust but verify" sort of thing, it's strictly "do not trust". Assume that, at every step of the chain, there will be a lie: change of process, material change, collected data, and that the product being given to you is even yours (delivering a knockoff at the final step, and resellin…

To me they're still doing a "trust but verify" system. Zero trust would mean not trusting them with their products at all and moving manufacturering elsewhere. It sounds like Anker skimped on verification and they're paying the price.

> would mean not trusting them with their products at all and moving manufacturering elsewher

That's not an option. There's usually nowhere else to go that makes financial sense. So you work in the cheap zero trust environment, and pay a bit more to verify everything.

Anker skimped on verification because there was non-zero trust, and they're paying the price.

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