Clock Radios

And yet Youtube is full of videos of exploded and charred wall warts and phone chargers!

Unless I can vouch for the brand, for a homebuild I'd MUCH rather have a

That's a major problem in bedrooms.

I put spacers on the bed legs as ours are on hardwood floors and can easily slide about - the spacers guarantee that the bed leg can never collide with a 13A plug in the adjacent socket - it will ride over and past it with clearance.

Now stick a wall wart in and you have a way to dish that and damage the socket. Unless I make the spacers oversized. How oversized???

The big red LEDs on the 1989 clock radio on one side of the bed are still clear and easy to read. The backlit LED one on the other side doesn't have the contrast required to be readable yet not be too bright. (ie I agree with you)

Now consider how many are in daily use...

Also, when heavy iron was in vogue, what percentage melted after a while? From personal experience it was a higher percentage than the number of SMPS wallwarts that fail nowadays.

For homebuilding, yes, but then you have the choice of unregulated with a ridiculously high output impedance, losing a lot of energy in a passive regulator or building your own SMPS to do the job.

The point that seems to have been misses is getting CE approval. If the equipment has a mains supply then th whole device needs to be submitted, otherwise it's only the pwer unit. In addition different power units can be suppled for different countries without changing the whole device.

That's not a problem for the end user apart from checking the label, that's a problem for the maker. Home build devices don't need approval.

Ah - the worthless CE mark...

What testing of the product is done for that? None is what I heard from an engineer - the complete opposite of FCC certification.

Considering the billions in use, not surprising.

Transformers can and do burn out too. Especially cheap ones driven hard.

I had a Trio FM tuner (1960s) where the mains transformer burnt out. Went to Laskys and sked for a replacement. "You don't expect us to sell spares for things we sell?"

There are 2 CE marks. One is a European Community approval scheme where the manufacturer certifies that the item meets the appropriate European standards. They can be prosecuted of it is found out that it does not comply. Most of the universal wallwarts also have FCC approval according to the labels I've checked.

The other, which is only very slightly different in the layout of the letters stands for China Export, and is put on stuff they have permission to export from China.

Yep - so completely meaningless then - I'd like to see any mount a prosecution against a random chinese manufacturer.

I always thought that was a joke meaning of CE :)

It's recently dawned on me that wall-warts don't have replaceable fuses, or maybe they have no fuses at all. That is not in the spirit of 13A plugs which all have fuses. Granted they're to stop the wire burning up, but it doesn't surprise me that some wall-warts burn. It would be prudent not to have them powered up when unattended.

You refer I assume to 80 kbps mono?

You what??

When we bought our DAB radio it was the future. DAB was going to be better than FM. Now it's about like AM.

And DAB+ won't help. They'll cram even more stations in with an even lower bitrate until the man in the street starts to complain.

Or switches to internet radio...

Andy

It will also probably fail completely after about a year. Morphy Richards is just an old obsolete brand name on a bit if chinese tat. Ditto Goodmans.

Try the Roberts Radio Website

Had the mains transformer on a (valve) Quad II burn out too. An expensive fault in the day. It was the one of the pair which powered all the other bits, pre-amp, AM and FM tuner.

But what do you do with things that need to be powered up 24/7? Surely a PS with a load on it is more likely to fail than one where the load is unplugged - like say a charger?

If your DAB really does sound like AM, you need to buy a decent DAB receiver.

It is still working in my garage right now as you can see here and it is -5C.