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Comment by quickthrowman | Hacker News Reader

Please do not save money by using unlisted electrical equipment. Spend the extra $20 for a product that is tested and listed by UL/CE/ETL, it’s not worth burning a building down over $20.

You couldn’t pay me enough money to plug this into a building’s electrical distribution system, it’s drawing ~3A at 120V (60W at 5V plus inefficiency) and in a very small form factor, I sure hope the engineering and QA of that $5 charger is up to par. Did they include an internal fuse or did they forego that to save $0.03? Who knows!

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OP is in the UK where every circuit has a GFCI, making it pretty much impossible to get an electrical shock due to isolation failure (in a typical year, not a single person dies from electrocution in UK homes).

Fire is more of a concern, but this is indeed internally fused and the IC has both overcurrent and overheat protection - both of which are effectively 'free', so there are no cost savings to not include them.

Gotcha, there are still locations where non-GFCI receptacles are allowed in residential homes in the US, they’re required in basements, garages, exteriors, and within a certain distance of a sink/plumbing tap but not in bedrooms or general ‘living space’. AFCIs are required in most areas but don’t protect against ground faults, which aren’t as concerning with a device that is injection molded plastic anyways.

The triple built-in protections alleviate the rest of my concerns, my apologies for overreacting but I’ve seen people plug some scary things into receptacles.

In the last 4 years china has really cracked down on dangerous products, so anything newly made will generally have at least the basics of protections. For example all products with batteries have over and under voltage protection with a dedicated chip rather than some microcontroller hopefully stopping the charge at the right time as used to be done in 2018 to save a few cents.

Diodegonewild might disagree with you.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfUGOPyKWwiriWhjmdtvjBw_J...

Only relatively new (past 20 years or so) buildings in the UK are required have GFCIs (called RCCBs in the UK) on every circuit.

Older installations can be retrofitted but there is no requirement to do so.

Not seeing UL or ETL or FCC certification on those Apple A3365 chargers. Not finding Apple's own Declaration of Conformity for that product.[1]

Anyone know the switching frequency?

[1] https://regulatoryinfo.apple.com/en/eurocompliance

You can see the UL logo on the label of the charger on the first picture on the product page. I have no idea about the EU version, I live in the United States.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MGKN4AM/A/40w-dynamic-pow...

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