Vapcell S4+ burnt itself out. Anybody ever been successful with a warranty claim?

Batteries and Chargers Chargers
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Welp after almost 3 months of dedicated service my vapcell S4 plus v2 is kaput.

Didn’t happen while I was trying to fast charge or fast discharge 4 cells at once. Wasn’t charging anything. Wasn’t even plugged in.

It was when I was trying to use the powerbank function. Had 2 cells in the charger, a 30q and a 35e 18650. Both around like 3.9v. Disconnected from the mains. Plugged in the usb, wasn’t plugged into anything else yet. Screen kinda flickered and turned off. Unplugged the usb, plugged it back in, screen came on really dim for a second, I think I could make out it was just showing ‘Err’, then goes out again and immediate smells like an idk what is burning.

No sound no smoke or anything. Just definitely something burnt in there. Can’t quite make out the smell but man is it bad. This was almost 24 hours ago, charger has been in my garage since then because it smelled so bad in the house, and still if I go out and pick it up it smells like it’s still burning and the smell sticks to your hands, like you can’t get rid of it. Man it’s bad.

Cells are fine btw. They weren’t even warm to the touch when it happened. I’ve cycled them since and used them and they’re fine. The usb cable is fine, it wasn’t warm either. I’ve tested and used to charge stuff since and it’s fine. Not sure what happened. Charger just decided to end it I guess.

Anybody ever have success trying to get a warranty replacement from vapcell? Bought it off the sofirn website.

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The question is , is it a fluke or is it indicative of poor construction and engineering.

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I’ll say this. I think i treat this charger pretty gently. I only use manual mode because i find auto charges way too fast and it gets hot. I rarely go over 1000mah per slot and never go over like 3000mah total across all 4 slots combined. I don’t slow charge anything for hours either though. I do like .3C or .5C charging generally. Even my Molicel 21700s I don’t use 3a for.

Ive never done a full capacity test because I don’t like how hot it gets. I don’t discharge cells at higher than 500mah total across all 4 slots for the same reason. I unplug it when not in use. I even gave it s self-imposed duty cycle so for 2 hours on, I’ll give it 1 hour off or something similar. Like I never pushed this thing hard. If that means anything.

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Was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get a warranty replacement, so with no warranty to void I opened it up to see what got fried.

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Pretty safe to say it’s that thing.

Heres where that is in the bigger picture.

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I guess it’s the boost converter for the usb power bank? Anybody know what causes these to fail like this? I’m 99.99% sure I didn’t have the cells in backwards, I put extra +'s and -'s on my cells in sharpie just in case lol. But you never know.

The rest of the board looks undamaged. You think it’s still usable, minus the powerbank feature?

I also took a few more pictures of the inside of the S4 plus for my own reference but if anybody wants to see them they are here

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Yeah, it’s the boost IC. Part number: FP6276B

Here’s the datasheet: http://www.feeling-tech.com.tw/km-master/ezcatfiles/cust/img/img/24/fp6276bv066-g1.pdf

I suspect it should work fine as a charger. You could always snip off the boost IC to be safe.

I see a little hair or something over the top pins of the IC. I hope this isn’t a little strand of wire. Looks like it’s across the output and voltage feedback pins which could cause issues.

Doing some calcs on the resistors around it looks like it’s set to 5.1V output (to account for some voltage drop when outputting 5V for USB), and the over-current-protection is set at 4.4A. The Vapcell doc says 5V2A USB output limit so they should have probably put the boost IC limit a bit closer (2.5A for example). Looks they just copied the value from the reference schematic from the datasheet.

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Oh I never even saw that. Without opening it back up to check, it looks like one of my dog’s hairs. She’s black and white and sheds a lot. It’s in every picture i have though, who knows. Thanks for the comment

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If its only 3 months old and you have the receipt or they have the purchase history I would have went back to the supplier for a warranty claim. I’m not sure of their history on warranty claims but you need to at least give them an opportunity to respond to the faulty item.

Even now with the case opened it wouldn’t hurt to go down that track as its obvious its failed and really there is no conjecture if its just a user issue, battery issue or an actual fault with the charger. Just be concise on what happened, include your photo’s and see where it goes…yes you’ve opened the case and by doing so you may have voided any warranty but in hindsight unless it was opened, no one will know why its not working properly.

I’ve done the same with a flashlight from a well known budget brand, included a video at their request and they were more than happy to replace the faulty part.

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That’s what I did, and why I waited 3 weeks before I opened the case up. Still waiting on a response. If I ever hear back I’ll update.

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Thought I should update this.

Nothing from vapcell yet, but I did exactly that ^ ^ Just snipped it off after it had been sitting in my garage for a month or two and the burnt smell had gone away.

Then it sat a little longer cuz I wanted 4 cells i didn’t care about to test the thing, just in case, I had taken the thing apart and it had been sitting in the garage awhile. Found a decade old laptop battery that had never been used with 4 old, pre-NCR Panasonics that were tragically discharged, and had been sitting deeply discharged for years. So perfect.

And it works! There’s no end of charge alarm anymore for some reason, when charging is over the screen just goes black. Same thing if you unplug it while it’s charging stuff. Usually it would default to powerbank mode. Just goes black now. But everything else works. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, all good.

Btw, the Panasonic’s- 40-50mohm IR, 100% of their original capacity. Actually over 100%. Like… how? So sad I cant keep them.

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Hello guys, I have a similar issue with my Vapcell S4 plus V2. I had charged my 21700 battery and plugged in a USB cable to charge my power bank.

Nothing happened, so I took out the battery, and then smoke came out of the device and the display showed ERR. The device is 5 months old.

I contacted Vapcell, and they told me to contact the seller, which in my case is Wurkkos. Surprisingly, they responded quite quickly and sent me a new device

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It’s nice to see you, diggerbarnes!

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You got a new one? Lucky. I didn’t even get a reply lol

Sounds like the same thing that happened with mine. Now that you have the new one anyways you should open the old one up and see if it’s the same thing

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It’s been some time (busy with real life) since I visited BLF…

I’ve exactly experienced what you experienced on the Vapcell S4 Plus charger, not once, but twice.
Although the one I had this issue is the newer v3.0 and not v2.0

(I’ve used the powerbank function of the Vapcell S4 Plus v2.0 a number of times before, and so far didn’t have problem yet, fingers crossed)

Late last year, I saw that there was a Vapcell S4 Plus v3.0, with added “Storage” mode, so I decided to try it out.
(v3.0 was released sometime late last year. It appears to be mostly the same as v2.0 other than the added Storage mode)

Anyway, back to the “burning out”.

I was testing the new Vapcell S4 Plus v3.0 (I tested only charging/discharging/capacity test/storage mode) on lithium-ion batteries (mainly a few 18650 and 21700 batteries).

All functions appeared to be normal (not much difference with v2.0, other than v2.0 didn’t have Storage mode.

Now, I decided to try out the powerbank function. I had 4 fully charged batteries on the Vapcell S4 Plus, and decided to try using the powerbank function. I tried charging a 10000mAh Xiaomi powerbank to the USB out of the Vapcell S4 Plus v3.0. Almost immediately, the USB out started having a little white smoke and burn out smell. I quickly pulled out the USB plug.

Upon plugging the Vapcell S4 Plus v3.0 charger to an outlet (to check if only the powerbank function doesn’t work).
Turns out the charger now only displays “Err”. and doesn’t work anymore.

I returned this to the seller and just indicated the unit was faulty (I didn’t explain how it became faulty).
The unit was refunded.

I thought maybe I got a ‘fluke’ unit. So I decided to order another unit again.
Once more, I put the new Vapcell S4 Plus v3.0 to test its various functions, again, everything appears to work normally (charging/discharging/capacity test/storage mode).

Now, I decided to test the powerbank out function.

I had thought maybe my Xiaomi 10000mAh powerbank might be pulling too much power from the Vapcell S4 Plus v3.0 “USB-out powerbank” last time, which caused the previous unit to burn out.

So, this time, I decided to plug a USB meter (specifically, the Power-Z KM001) into the USB-out of the Vapcell S4 Plus v3.0 charger. Lo and behold, magic smoke appeared again (with burnt out smell). NOTE: I just plugged in the Power-Z KM001 USB meter by itself (no other load attached) to the USB-out of the Vapcell S4 Plus v3.0 charger.

When I plugged the unit back to electric outlet, the display shows “Err”.

Since I had been busy this time, I hadn’t tried getting it back to the seller, so this faulty unit is still with me.

CONCLUSION: Has anyone else tried using the USB out function of the new Vapcell S4 Plus v3.0 charger and make it function without problem?

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Ya sounds a lot like what happened to me. If this was a design flaw you’d think it would’ve happened to everyone by now though. Weird it’s just us.

I got the error message to go away by just removing that burnt chip, has worked fine since. I’m actually using it right now. It isn’t a powerbank anymore obviously, and the display screen is a little odd when turning it on and off because it’s missing that ‘powerbank screen’, but it charges and everything fine.

Either way, open the faulty one up!

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Hmm…
I’ll have to remember not to use my Vapcell S4+ chargers as power banks. :thinking:

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My device has arrived, even the 3.0 version. The damage pattern on the defective V2 device looks identical. I desoldered the component, works like described and will never use the power bank function again.
I absolutely cannot understand why this problem has not been noticed yet and is still present in the V3

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Damn look at that eh, so I’m not crazy after all. No hair on yours or anything either, failed in the exact same way. Except yours got it way worse than mine did! Ouch

I think R81 is different on yours than it was on mine. That’s interesting.

That sucks. But it’s very useful information for anyone with an S4+. Thanks for the confirmation.

I’m officially moving this from ‘isolated incident’ to ‘known issue’

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Shame this seems common, the S4+ was the go-to budget charger recommendation for a fast charging, feature-rich device. Has anyone reached out to Vapcell Dennis with this? I can’t seem to tag anyone when on this site using my phone browser.

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Ya, couple times. I can’t remember the exact wording, I’d have to go find it. But I think the last thing they said was that ‘they would need to inspect my charger to determine what went wrong’, and then I said ‘ok let’s set that up’, and I don’t think I’ve heard anything back yet.

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Tick-tock. Keep us ‘abreast’.

This is a feature I would be most unlikely to ever use; but that said, I also would not buy any charger if it had a known / documented failure of this type using any advertised feature, whether I use that feature or not.

Regardless of what one does, product issues can occur. The manufacturer’s response will be the real story.

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