Digusting Practice - super rechargeable li-ion battery st-1218 pack

Batteries and Chargers Rechargeable Batteries
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Hey guys and gals,

I’m a long time lurker and first real post. I learned many things throughout the years on BLF/CPF and chose to sign up here at BLF. :slight_smile:

Anyway, I purchased on eBay 1.5 years (when I didn’t know much about lithium ion batteries and didn’t have my 18650 flashlights) ago something called “super rechargeable li-ion battery st-1218” for usage on powering a CCTV camera. I thought it would be a good solution for my CCTV camera, and possibly to power other devices. Similar items are easily found on eBay, DealExtreme, Alibaba, etc and range from “rated” specifications. Some come with USB output as well. My unit did not come with the USB option and the price ranges from around $15-30USD.

It didn’t work very well and the performance was super poor. I was mad that I bought this on eBay. I dumped it into a junk bin and never used it again.

So I decided to grab it out of my junk bin and see what was wrong with it after all this time. I dremel’ed the four corners to grab access to the philips screws, removed the cover, and found something so disgusting. These people in China (Im half chinese) doing and selling this should be ashamed of themselves.

I found three obviously salvaged 18650 cells together in this little plastic compartment. So apparently the tricks of the trade is to retrieve USED 18650 cells from dead laptop batteries, sell them as NEW, use masking tape to cover the hand soldered contacts with tiny dinky wires, and use some tar goop to stick everything together. Voila! Charge $15-30 and you would make a good money on scamming people.

Just look at it.

- The cells shrink wrap is bubbled, or ripped, they are in bad condition, this one has sony cells

- The cells still have the little tabbed contacts from ripping them from laptop battery packs

- Lets use masking tape to “protect” it

  • Lets hand solder tiny dinky little wires to the cells and add some cheap cheap protection PCB that probably doesnt work

Needless to say, this is garbage and is going to be recycled. Its a fire hazard.

Cannot believe people would do such a terrible thing. Disgusting practice.

AVOID anything like this product at all cost!

2

Definitely don't use that. A lot of ****fire batteries are the same. Here your pictures are.

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Of course, you do realize you voided your warranty by opening that up. :bigsmile:

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Sad part is those are sony made cells based on the #s on them. Had they used new ones instead of salvage that would actually have been a pretty solid choice.

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Welcome to BLF. Did you test those cells out individually?

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That's definitely a hack job.

But welcome to BLF!

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You say you are going to recycle it. There is a chance those same cells will end up back on EBay! reincarnated as something else

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Welcome to the party, mxelement!

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Disgraceful! |(

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Looks like Sony knions. Those are good cells! :smiley: :party: :heart_eyes: :8)

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Welcome to the BLF family, MXElement!!

You are correct, that is truly shameful practice especially considering how dangerous and potentially lethal it could be. :(

Johnny

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the irony is that those were probably from some laptop that someone in the West recycled, feeling good about their environmental credentials. It then went into a shipping container, landed in China, picked apart for every little salvageable component, which were then sold in huge job lots to the local electronics industry. It happens for a huge range of consumer electronics and is one of the major perils in outsourcing electronics manufacturing to China. It’s about as close to reuse as you can get though :slight_smile:

Find some old laptop batteries, salvage the good cells and replace those duff ones, then you’ll have a decent battery - cut out the middle man!