Well, I put a fresh battery in my main DMM, which is a quite a good one, and all my numbers matched the original tests. (The original 9 v battery in the DMM tested 9.13, the fresh one tested 9.41.) Went out to the shop and fetched one of my other DMMs, and again, the numbers matched.
I think I just got unlucky. It’s understandable that out of thousands of copies of any product, a small number are bound to fail. That’s why there are warranties. Unfortunately, when the warrantor is on the far side of the planet it doesn’t really mean much. It’s really no big deal, they’re not a fortune to buy and my house didn’t burn down. At worst, I shortened the life of a couple of 18650s.
It’s too bad Canada Post is such a rip-off outfit, or I’d send it back. ( I don’t even remember if I got it from BangGood or Gearbest!) Postage from here is outrageous. It’s not that I can’t afford it, it’s just that it pisses me off to no end. My cheapest alternative is to just buy a new one. Everybody else seems to be having good luck with them, and the chances of getting two duds in a row are slim to none.
It did have me scratching my head, though. I just gave it a sniff, and it seems to have that lovely ‘cooked electronics’ fragrance to it, although it still lights up and charges. Basically, it works perfectly if it would just terminate when it was supposed to. Kind of an important part of the charging process, it seems to me. I’ll have to get one of my electronically minded buddies to dig around in this one and see if he can figure out the fault just out of curiosity.
The reliable old i4 will do the trick until I get a new bells and whistles ‘something’. I’ll be a lot more careful how and where I do my charging from now on, and there’s the lesson.