Why cheap car chargers are dangerous

  • Dec 11, 2020
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This car charger of the well-known Orico brand ended its life very effectively - a capacitor exploded inside (its lumps are visible in the photo), and the smartphone and action camera that were connected to it, burned out.


If you use car chargers, this can happen to you.

Car chargers are much more dangerous than network chargers and there are much more cases of combustion of equipment because of them than because of network chargers.

Any mains charging contains a transformer that lowers the mains voltage to a sufficiently low value. The probability of mains voltage hitting the output (breakdown) is certainly there, but it is quite small.

Car charger lowers 12 or 24 volts to 5 volts using a special microcircuit - stepdown converter, while the input voltage can go to the output and burn the connected devices.

If the manufacturer saved on protection elements (and he certainly saved if the charging is very cheap!), the input voltage can go to the output of the car charger and burn everything that comes to it connected.

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Chargers produced by large smartphone manufacturers are most likely safe.

Surely, Chinese brands also have car chargers with output protection, but it is absolutely certain that they are not cheap. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend any specific models.

© Alexey Nadyozhin
The main topic of my blog is technology in human life. I write reviews, share experiences, talk about all sorts of interesting things. My second project -
lamptest.ru. I test LED bulbs and help figure out which ones are good and which are not so good.