Test/Review of USB charger 30W 5 port

30W 5 port



Official specifications:

  • 5 USB outputs
  • Input: 100 - 240V 1.0A 50 - 60Hz
  • Output: DC 5V 6A
  • Transfer efficiency: More than 80 percent
  • Cable length: 130cm
  • Color: White


I got it from gearbest sku:130867901



I got this charger in a cardboard box.



The box only included the charger and a main lead with US plug.








Measurements

  • Power consumption when unloaded is 0.22 watt
  • All outputs are in parallel.
  • USB Output top is coded as USB charger (DCP)
  • USB Output #2 is coded as USB charger (DCP)
  • USB Output #3 is coded as Apple 0.5A
  • USB Output #4 is coded as Samsung
  • USB Output bottom is coded as Apple 2.1A





Output voltage is fine, but there is no individual port overload protection. The specification about 80% efficiency is rather optimistic, 70% would be more correct.





For some reason the overload protection tripped when I used all ports in parallel.



I decided to do a one hour run at 4.5A, but after about 45 minutes it quit.



For some reason I could not get it to run at 4A, instead I did a 3.5A run and it worked for one hour.

The temperature photos below are taken between 30 minutes and 60 minutes into the one hour test at 3.5A.



M1: 60,9°C, M2: 61,0°C, M3: 50,7°C, HS1: 68,8°C
HS1 must be the single rectifier diode.



M1: 58,7°C, M2: 50,7°C, M3: 35,3°C, HS1: 66,8°C
Again HS1 must be the single rectifier diode.



M1: 62,5°C, M2: 58,2°C, HS1: 64,6°C



M1: 66,9°C, M2: 119,8°C, HS1: 126,4°C
The outside temperature is acceptable at 3.5A, but when looking through the cooling holes some very hot parts can be detected. This is the heatsink for the rectifier diode, the diode will be even hotter. This high temperature is bad for the capacitors mounted just besides the heatsink.



At 0.5A the noise is 41mV rms and 1350mVpp, that is a lot of peak noise.



At 2.5A the noise is 80mV rms and 2000mVpp



At 4A the noise is 40mV rms and 980mVpp, at full load the noise is a bit lower.



Tear down



It was fairly easy to open in my vice, but it had been even easier if I had removed the screws under the label!



It looks fairly simple, on the mains side there is a fuse, a bridge rectifier and a mains switcher transistor that is sharing heatsink with the rectifier diode. There is also an empty space for one more rectifier diode. It has an inductor on the low voltage side and opto feedback and a safety capacitor.
I do not like the shared heatsink!



Here is a better view of the fuse, the opto feedback and the safety capacitor.



Between the two capacitors the inductors can be seen. From the mains side the fuse and the bridge rectifier can be seen.



This side only has the USB connectors.



From this side the mains switcher (U1) and the feed back controller (U2) can be seen. Between the usb connectors are some resistors for coding.





The distance between mains and low volt side is about 2.5mm on the circuit board. From the legs of the mains switch transistor to the heatsink is minimum 2.55mm (Datasheet value). Both values are way below the required distance for 230VAC and CE marking.

The charger passed an isolation test with 2500 volt, but failed a 5000 volt test, this makes the charger acceptable for 120VAC usage, but doubtful for 230VAC usage.


Conclusion

The output power is not the rated 6A, but more like 4A and only for a short time. It gets very hot and output has a lot of electric noise.
For US/120VAC it might work, but it is marked 240VAC and that is NOT safe.



Notes

The usb power supply was supplied by gearbest for a review.

Index of all tested USB power supplies/chargers
Read more about how I test USB power supplies/charger

Thank you HKJ for the usual great review and tests. Unfortunate they dropped the ball on what is otherwise a beautiful looking USB charger that I would have loved to have on my desk. I’ll be passing on this one.

Thanks for the review! Hopefully Gearbest listen and learn and stop selling crap chargers.

Question — when you get a product that failed a 5000 volt test — is the result something you can photograph?
Does it arc over, leave a scorch mark, melt something, short directly to something a person could be touching?

I ask because that looks like a CE mark

I ’oogled and find that doesn’t have a simple straightforward meaning:

from CE Marking – IBEX Resources

Riii-i-i-ight. They can “ensure that you are fully complaint” and “authorities can force you to recall your products if it is discovered they are not complaint.”

Complaint, eh?

Yep, I have a *complaint *for sure, there. It looks like they’re gambling that it probably won’t cause a fire or directly kill anybody, and if it does, they probably won’t get caught.
And if they kill somebody, the injured party apparently would have to sue … somebody ….

You mean like this (I am usual to lazy to do it):

The heatsink is directly connected to the usb connectors.

I can see on that photo that I missed a place with very short distance between mains and low volt side (Holes in the circuit board). One of the sparks comes from a small hole in the circuit board.

I do not believe it is illegal to write CE on stuff sold in China, but if anyone imports it and sells it in EU it is illegal. Some people will tell you a story about Chine Export mark, but anything resembling a CE mark is also illegal in EU.

> like this

Yes. Wow. I see the short circuit sparks in two places — were you using a flash to take the picture?

Ya know, I’d bet that right there is sufficient —- if the “CE authorities” (whoever they may be) wanted to rely on it — to order a recall.

I wonder if they wait til they have a corpse, or if they act on evidence that a device fails the 220v test.

Do you just pulse the 220v once, or do you leave the power on?
I’d like (heh, not in MY yard …) to see if you would get a weld — dead short — across the gap as metal melts and flows, and possibly a fire if the components and/or plastic case catch fire.

(In the US for quite a while, a fire marshals group tried to get a rule that plastic be sufficiently fireproof that a flame the size of a candle flame would not start a plastic case on self-propagating fire.
They lost and that’s not a rule. That was because of fires started by “power strip” shorts in flammable plastic cases, and computer/monitor/printer fires.

An electrical short — even 110v — is quite a bit hotter than a candle flame. But that kind of fire likely destroys the evidence of how it started.

No, that would kill it.

You just have to hit the release at the right time

Just joking, it is easy to do, but you have to know the technique.

There is no CE authorities in China and it is at 5000 volt this happens, not 230VAC (The 5000 volt is above what CE requires, but not by much, the distances it jumps is way below CE requirements).

If I ever got around to sell these charger, you could sue me as an importer, but the tear down usual destroy the charger, so there is no risk of that.

My opinion (Very much affected by the tests I do) is that you generally cannot trust mains powered equipment bought directly from China (There are exceptions), but when it has been through a careful importer it will usual be acceptable.

A significant fact is that the CE regulations are rather strict, they are not designed to accept that a few people dies due to accidents with mains voltage. They usual requires that products stay safe, even if you forget your head or there is a serious fault with the voltage. I like this approach, I usual know what I do, but I would prefer not to be killed (Or get a nasty jolt) just because I am sleepy or drunk.

Yeah, in the US where the fake science called “social Darwinism” has convinced some regulators to think of normally risky situations as “evolution in action” — risk is a bit harder to anticipate, and the public health folks don’t have much influence on policy, as for example.

I much appreciate your continued testing.

P.S. — seems to me that even with 110v, knowing how dust accumulates inside anything over time, since these things are going to be handled a lot, carried around, and have plugs in and out over and over — there’s eventually going to be a chance of enough dust accumulating to allow a short at those spots. That’s where I’d wonder whether a persistent arc could be sustained to cause a fire.
Not to mention that some USB plugs fall apart or sockets come loose, leaving loose metal bits.

This seems to be an unfortunate fact. It almost seems pointless to continue looking for cheap banggood/DX/FT…etc, supplied device. :frowning:

Due to the lower voltage the safety requirements are lower in the US (just about half).

China can make good stuff (Just look at Apple), I just hope (Probably in vain) that the good stuff will be more common in the Chinese warehouses. Anyway I did not select this usb power supply for review, a Chinese warehouse did.

I do have a suspicion that the warehouses do not even know what they are selling, they just ask the supplier for specifications and then accept them. Something like:

Supplier: I have a line of smart usb chargers, do you want to sell them?

Warehouse: Maybe, are they safe and cheap?

Supplier: Yes, as you can see we have a CE mark on them and the price is low!

Warehouse: That looks fine, I will sell them.

The only way to accept a CE mark is to ask for the full test report and get someone with a bit of technical knowledge to look at it. This is impossible to do when you buy a single device, but serious importers must always do this (Or I would not call them serious). A Chinese warehouse do not have to do this, because they are outside the CE area, but it would be nice if they did.

I’m not sure that’s the case. Analysis of how fires start is pretty sophisticated. I have a friend who worked in the San Francisco crime lab and he said it was almost always possible to tell where and how a fire started just by residue evidence (fire pattern, etc). For example authorities can usually tell how forest fires started (lightning strike, camp fire, candle, intentional acts, etc) even though many acres can burn and with intense fires on top of that.

Thanks for the review. It’s a device I’ll make sure I avoid buying