bigclive
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This year's crop of "power saving plugs"
🕑 Added 2025-10-15 00:26:52 +0000 UTCOn a plus note, they've stopped putting crappy fan capacitors in these, so the chance of them exploding in flames is greatly reduced.
They've also cleaned up the LED circuitry a bit, and one of the units actually looks very stylish when lit, with Tron-like lines. One even has a flashing LED in it!
The circuitry has been streamlined to simple resistive droppers (very cheap) and one capacitive dropper for the Tron style unit. The unit with the flashing LED has a few "theatre" components including pointless little capacitors and zero ohm links in series with the fake sand-filled box capacitor. It also has a weird extra diode that might have been intended to be a zener to cap the voltage, but is just an ordinary diode.
So how long will it be before all the Facebook and TokTok adverts start popping up hawking these to non-technical people?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9oy0aMhqsI
Comments
Suschman
Regarding the Fab, i think its more likely dozens of backjard shops throwing these together by hand, reusing random avaliable plug housings. I would expect from one fab to save cost with one common pcb, but they all look different it seems.
Jeff Larson
Those new silicon capacitors are so efficient that the LCR meter can't pick it up. 😉
