Prices for a 33V 1A psu as used by stairlifts to charge the battery.
Typical Amazon price: £18 Farnell: £26 Medical grade item: £76 Quoted by a stairlift supplier when a replacement was needed: £181. Item is tiny and in a plastic case, and appears to be poor quality.
Price for a carbon brush, ditto: £25.
Bill
I agree completely. For larger equipment of a specialist nature one can understand the economics of the cost of manufacture being higher, but when it comes to off the shelf items it does seem a bit like they are just making money at the expense of disabled people. For example, when I could still see enough to use a CCTV for reading, the unit, a black and white rostrum camera looking at a mirror with an x/y table and a 21 inch monitor cost over 1000 quid, but since access to work paid for it, then the government footed the bill. When the two fluorescent lights failed, an engineer looked inside and found the electronic ballast which drove them had died. It was a normal item, branded at the time Philips. Asking Tiemen, who made the unit for a replacement was according to them going to cost 120 quid. Go down to the local electrical wholesalers, and the exact same item costs 14 quid. Now its not going to cost all that extra to get it from the Netherlands to here, which is where Tiemen were located is it?
This sort of thing happens an awful lot.. Indeed inside that unit in order to stop people just buying the rostrum camera unit they had not reversed the line scan on the camera electronics, instead had reversed the connections to the scan coils on the monitor, meaning that the monitor could not be used as a monitor elsewhere and the camera unit would not work with a tv's video input, as either would result in mirror image pictures. Brian
You have to count your fingers before and after every encounter with disability equipment suppliers. They sell some useful stuff not available anywhere else and a lot of overpriced tat to the unwary who don't know where else to buy it. Replacement wheelchair/stairlift batteries and chargers being some of the most spectacular ripoffs.
The same happens with batteries for burglar alarms. Mine needs "replacing" periodically. At service, they offer one for £x. Looking online, I find an identical one for £y. Guess the differential and in whose favour :-)
We attended a "Vision fair" a few years ago. Most stalls were trying to flog stripped down android handsets with a stand as "readers" for £300- £400.
Wasn't there a company a while back that was flogging some device to help communication which was effectively a single purpose iPad for $4,000. I only know when they sued (or tried to, I think Apple stepped in) a gut who wrote an app for an iPad (for his kid) that did the same thing for free ?
Yes I have a few apps for my Iphone. Voice Dream Scanner just six quid, is an amazing OCR device that converts any printed document to text almost immediately and does this on the phone without needing to send personal data to a server somewhere. Previous to this there was a free one not as good, called Seeing AI from Microsoft, but it was in fact sending your documents to Microsoft for processing. This has security implications as well as a delay, and frankly its nowhere near as accurate, but then if something is free you get what you pay for.
Brian
However that sort of thing is not just on disability items, is it? Look at spare parts for cars from the manufacturer, indeed most things tend to have a huge mark up. Somebody commented that if you had to build a car from the bits it would cost quarter of a million quid. Brian
One of the big issues I have with very cheap power supplies are that they leave vital parts out of them to stop radio interference and to protect things if the device malfunctions. Several people I know bought a 5v usb psu from a now defunct supplier, which had all the right markings but the top cover was held on by screws that were about as good as those in a cassette housing, just two of them. Some simple cam apart exposing live connections while others due to the poor internal protection melted in use as there was nothing to stop it if a component failed. Even worse during such a fault it could trash an expensive phone in the process. This is one reason why I'm extremely reluctant to fit mains sockets with usb chargers in them, who knows what the quality of the modules inside is? Brian
one of the problems with spares is they need to be stored,. Storage costs money and tehre is an investment involved, too. Dennis, the fire engine people, went bust because of the money they had tied up in spares.
But why is a Ford alternator three times the price of one exactly the same (except for the Ford badge) made by the same manufacturer, on the same production line?
Why does a simple rubber elbow (intercooler to intake manifold) come attached (just by a Jubilee clip) to a complex metal pipe, with various bends, a bracket and a mounting for a temperature sensor?
The worst - why does a position sensing potentiometer for an EGR valve only come attached (by 3 screws) to the gearbox, motor, valve and entire intake manifold, at a cost of around £900 ?
SteveW
Probaby for the same reason that the starter for the Ford Anglia was significantly cheaper than the starter for the Mini - they had the same Lucas part number.
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Why does a dog lick it's balls ?
In those days, you could buy direct from a Lucas agent. Did the same apply there?
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