When Power Supplies Are Not As Labelled

­One of the areas that GaN technology has had the most noticeable adoption is in the charging market for mobile devices, particularly using the USB-C charging standard. As well as enabling more efficient designs, the wide bandgap material has enabled higher and higher power throughput. It has now reached the point that USB-C products are actually being advertised as having GaN technology inside as a selling point.

That market for USB-C charging has grown tremendously over recent years after the EU mandated it for charging the vast majority of mobile consumer goods. This has led to manufacturers to standardize on the protocol. At the same time, many OEMs have actually stopped including chargers in the box along with their products. This has given third parties a huge incentive to target the market, differentiating themselves by their innovation, and they have grasped that opportunity. Those manufacturers, who are predominantly based in China, have introduced chargers with multiple ports, and ever increasing amounts of power. Personally, I use a UGREEN 65W GaN charger with 2 USB-C ports and a USB-A one. It also has interchangeable mains connectors, meaning that it takes a few seconds to change from UK to EU to US connections. These attributes make it the only connector I need for my laptop, cellphone and other electronic devices when I travel to exhibitions or on vacation. At the time I purchased it, 65W was pretty much at the top end of the power scale. Now, there are options with several hundred Watts.

But as with most things, along with the good, also comes the bad. There are many companies that are not so ethical targetting this market, and their products can be downright dangerous. Recently, I read a review of an 8-port, 600W charger that cost only $99. What the author, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, who is Senior Contributing Editor at ZDNET, found is quite incredible. Initially, he tested the charger to its specifications, and found that he could get nowhere near the claimed figures. He wrote, “I could get 140W out of one of the USB-C ports, but the other 140W port seemed to be stuck at around 65W. To make matters worse, one of the 100W ports appeared to be completely dead.”

Worse was to come when he removed the cover and found that a lump of a window putty like substance had been inserted in the case, and presumably used to make the product seem better quality and more substantive. The build quality was very bad, risking the exposure of high power circuits, and there also seemed to be insufficient isolation between the high-power and low-power sides. These faults combine to make the charger a potential death trap for users. Sites like Temu allow the ordering of goods directly from China, and these goods often do not go through the full range of testing that is usually required for the devices to be sold in the west.

You can read the full article here. Be careful what you order.