Amazon has turned into "Aliexpress but more expensive and faster". Look up almost anything on Amazon and the results will be a made-up brand attached to a trashy product which costs 1/10 the price directly from China.
Even with reputable brands on Amazon I’m wary of getting counterfeit products. I recall back in the day the good feeling of ordering something on Amazon, knowing you ordered exactly what you wanted and it would arrive quickly. These days I trust Ebay more and never buy on Amazon hah
Yup, wouldn't want to buy anything on Amazon that I haven't thoroughly researched prior to visiting Amazon. Their search algorithm is worse than useless, it's predatory. Much better to buy directly from a reputable store if it's expensive/important.
Even something you research is not guaranteed to match your order due to comingling. I personally stopped using Aamzon altogether even if some things are okay, this company does not deserve my trust at all..
Unless I'm specifically looking for cheap Chinese crap where quality doesn't really matter (e.g., clothes hangers), Amazon's main use to me is to price-match at brick-and-mortar stores if the online price is miraculously lower than in physical retail.
Prime shipping hasn't been worth it for years, and Amazon often has higher prices than at other retailers or direct from the manufacturer. Their business model is just extracting dollars from people who have been conditioned to default to Amazon as their first choice for shopping.
Are you saying they were fake? I've started getting all power electronics from Digikey, Mouser, RS, Pollin etc. because of paranoia over a crap power supply or SSR.
Likewise. A friend was almost killed a few years back by a counterfeit SSR purchased on Amazon. I would love to see them take some legal responsibility for the lethal garbage they let onto their platform.
Nah, I'd say in the 2010s, Amazon was just a competitor for regular brands you could find in any store here in the US but since around 2015-2016, you seem more DINGPOW equivalents.
At one point most of their items were from brands that cared about their reputation - the manufacturer and the third-party seller. It took a few years for the third-party seller program to become a laundering program for no-name low-quality goods.
Amazon sells so much crap. All those companies with nonsense names selling the exact same products with the the same verbage and photo spreads and only a few dollars different in price should tell you all you need to know.
Quality issues apparently have become so bad for them that they no longer want the defective item to be returned. It is yours to dispose of in any way you see acceptable. They will refund your money or ship a new product but they don't want the failed item. This has been true for me with garden planters, electrical components like pliers, crimpers, and lugs, automobile parts, and solar installation components. Every item that has failed or been found to be unfit for the purpose yielded a refund and a note that it is not necessary to return the failed item.
I review many of the products that I buy and give honest reviews. I also answer customer questions about items I have bought even if the answer they need is in the product description. I think so many people have lost trust in Amazon that they need to know whether descriptions are accurate or hype. It is impossible to tell just from reading reviews and when Amazon shows multiple <3-star reviews for a product I read all of them so I can decide whether user error caused the bad review or whether the product is probably not worth buying.
Amazon is broken and I am trying to get my wife to quit buying so much shit from them. I buy most auto parts, hand tools, etc from their manufacturer sites. I can trust things to be fit for purpose and durable.
For the love of god, do not buy any line-voltage electrical equipment/devices from Amazon. I wouldn’t even buy 12v/24v/48v electrical parts from Amazon. It is not worth the risk of a house fire, no matter how much money you save. I don’t care if it claims to be ETL and UL listed, buy it elsewhere.
Amazon’s supply chain cannot be trusted when life safety is a factor.
Please buy electrical material/electrical devices from a retailer or supply house with a trusted supply chain, it isn’t worth killing your family to save a few bucks on an extension cord.
Several years ago I noticed that the motorcycle oil filters I was receiving from Amazon had changed- much lower construction quality, less filtration material, and didn't include a crush washer. I double checked that I was buying the same product on Amazon as previously, and then bought the same SKU from a different store to compare. Apparently, Amazon was mixing counterfeit items in the same stock as the real stuff.
After that I stopped buying safety critical things from Amazon.
> After that I stopped buying safety critical things from Amazon.
Why would you buy anything from Amazon after that experience? I personally stopped buying things on Amazon when they gave up on having a trustworthy supply chain.
I'm always amused at how petty trillion dollar companies can be. Amazon killed his 7yr old affiliate account days after his first video critical of them. [0]
There's a reason retailers have buyers who are experts in their domains and try to buy the best products optimizing for quality/reliability/price. I much prefer to buy things from stores like Target and Lowes now, because I can't rely on any reviews on Amazon anymore. The reviews are all fake.
For reference twice rated current is usually supposed to make the automotive fuses blow in some seconds or less.
The worst thing is that Amazon is threatening to pull Home Depot et al. down with them in the race to the bottom, unless they are shut down hard. Quality control costs money and Amazon got zero.
I understand that people are under cost and time pressure.
But if you buy a fuse set on Amazon to save $10 off what a fuse assortment kit costs on Digikey, you are getting exactly what you paid for.
The signs are obvious: a nonsensical name like HOODOOVOOKOO, sold by BLXXYUSA a seller specializing in children's socks and fuses, quantity listed in "pieces", an obviously cheap plastic box, a ludicrous quantity at a per-unit price that is absurd.
Amazon is giving you what you want: the absolute cheapest possible item in the fastest possible time.
You cannot be angry at them for giving you exactly what you want.
If you cannot be bothered to spend more than 4¢ per fuse or spend more than 15 minutes researching the product, is the device you're protecting even worth replacing the fuse on?
A lot of people trust Amazon and expect them (or their sellers) to sell a fuse that works. A lot of us make a dozen decisions about what to buy every day, and sometimes you don’t have time to do a bunch of research. This isn’t a problem that should only be pushed onto the individual buyer. There should be some required testing on safety critical products. It wouldn’t even cost that much to have an electrical engineer spot checking a few of the products.
Just a shred more empathy please: These are automotive fuses being bought and installed by normies, not geeky tinkerers. Most normies have never heard of digikey and, if not for PSAs like this video, wouldn't know to avoid Amazon until they get burned.
> You cannot be angry at them for giving you exactly what you want.
What they want and were sold is a working fuse... which this is not. If I starting calling myself a medical doctor and advertising cheap surgery I would hope someone would try to stop me.
You can't claim to be empathetic and expect everyone to be a domain expert in absolutely everything to avoid getting poisoned, burned or killed by sellers lying to people.
You do not need to be a domain expert to understand that fuses sold with a per-unit cost of 4¢ are barely better than paper clips in a plastic housing.
Reminds me how Amazon is fundamentally a logistics company. Their merchandising is basically non-existent. Pretty much indestinguishable from AliExpress + fast shipping.
No. Cloud hosting (AWS) provides the substantial majority of the profits (and all the profits some of the time), but only a small fraction of the revenue.
Amazon is a gamble. Buying (and returning) is very convenient. But the goods are sometimes not very good quality. I wouldn’t buy food or critical installation parts from there. Some weird brands are totally fine for consumables. Others are obvious scam and can be returned. I see a trend, that consumer must think more and more what and where to buy. Analyze sellers, look for their addresses in the map. Even search for financials.
Returning isn't even convenient these days. I've been in the process of moving away from streaming services toward physical media, and Amazon is often the only place that carries certain things on disc. Unfortunately, the failure rate is pretty high. Trying to return some DVDs to Amazon is like pulling teeth. Either you have to drive across town to a Whole Foods to drop off the package, or you have to pay $10 to return a $15 DVD and then you have to make sure you are around at whatever time the UPS driver shows up to pick up your return. They won't even give you the address so that you can ship a return yourself, or allow you to print the label so you can leave it on your porch.
It's so painful at this point I've just started building in a 30% markup in the price mentally to account for things I'm going to have to buy an extra copy of. Returning things isn't worth the hassle it except for with very expensive boxed sets.
As a "bonus" amazon has also removed my reviews on things that I've had a particularly high error rate with, since the poor quality is apparently not relevant to the thing they are selling.
Amazon should reverse the changes it made to the reviews and let people respond to individual reviews again. Self-policing will improve the value of reviews as fake and biased reviews will be more easily identified by the community. When Amazon got rid of that feature (for cost savings presumably), it marked the beginning of the downfall of Amazon as a source for reliable product information and quality.
For the record: Some of these are a bit over-the-top, and Amazon is trash for anything safety-related, but for the record, virtually all fuses have a pretty significant margin before they blow. The risk here is very limited:
- A 2A fuse needs to conduct 2A, no matter ambient temperature, manufacturing variation, age, etc.
- 95+% of the time, what you're protecting from isn't a minor overload condition but a short.
This means a reliable fuse purchased from the best manufacturer in the world won't blow at 2A. Something like 3-4A is perfectly reasonable. 5x rated current is not okay, but 2x is well within norm.
Even at 5x, though, the risk here is not huge:
- You've caught shorts which is the most common failure mode.
- Everything carrying current typically has a ton of safety margin built in, so even 2x isn't really a big deal.
- There's a fairly narrow set of failure modes which (1) won't blow the fuse AND (2) will still be small enough to be less than 5x.
- Those failure modes still need to occur near something flammable.
The key reason why there is a risk at all is that power is a square law of current. If this was 5x heat / power, I wouldn't be worried /at all/. 5x current is 25x power and 25x the heat, which is more of a problem.
These are not slow burning fuses or whatever. In their product video 6A blows a 5A fuse in like subseconds. However 6/5 rated current should probably blow slower, like days, or not at all? The 2A fuse is probably just made faulty.
Edit:
Of course, the Amazon seller could be a counterfeit of "Nilight", which might be a proper brand?
Proper brands are not "Nilight" but companies like Vishay, Littelfuse, Eaton, Bel, Bourns, and similar.
Those brands can be found on sites engineers shop on, like Digikey, Mouser, Newark, and similar (which also lets you price / order by the thousands, and feed into manufacturing channels, rather than by boxes of random parts). They will have datasheets, rather than Youtube videos. Better datasheets will often show:
* Typical and worst-case behavior
* I²t, which is used to compute how long it will conduct a given current
Some of these are more complete, and some less. That's a fact of life. I can buy a fancy fuse which specs and tests everything for a bit more $$$ for a medical or military application, or one which doesn't for $ for e.g. a toy. If all I'm worried about is a short, that's good enough.
A Youtube video which shows a 5A fuse blowing at 6A means either:
1. The video was baked for Youtube.
2. The fuse will blow at 4A on a hot summer day, running in an even hotter enclosure, and you've bought a bad fuse.
In the line voltage (120v and up) world, fuses are made by Mersen, Littelfuse, and Bussman. Mersen owned Ferraz and Gould-Shawmut and sold fuses as Ferraz-Shawmut until a few years ago when they rebranded to Mersen. Bussman is owned by Eaton, and Littelfuse is an independent company.
Those are the only three manufacturers I ever see specified by electrical engineers in construction specs.
In addition to other things I am certified electrician in Germany. Your claims are wildly oversimplified. Every fuse has a type, rating and trip current. I pick them by planned application, installation type and cable length. Copper cables cost money, the safety margin is THE fuse. Otherwise cable insulation gets too hot and wears too fast.
Is English your native language? You might be confusing fuses with breakers.
Fuses aren't typically used to protect copper runs; breakers are. Fuses are used inside of electronics. Breakers are rated as you describe, to protect copper runs.
For fuses, this is a data sheet of a random fuse (first one on Digikey search; I didn't pick anything special):
The fuses are used in older installations. 25 A 500 V rated fuses are absolutely normal parts. They are usually slower than breakers. Breakers came later. The “normal electrician’s” fuses: https://ep-us.mersen.com/sites/mersen_us/files/2018-11/TM-10...
* A 25A fuse will conduct 52A-110A for 5-10 seconds, which is about the 2x in my original post.
* For shorter time periods, this goes up a lot (150-260A for 100 milliseconds).
I'm getting down-voted, but no one is posting contradictory information. This discussion feels more like reddit than HN.
As a footnote, at least in the US, in the 21st century, I've never seen a house with fuses rather than breakers. As you point out, copper is expensive, and a breaker is $10-$15. It's not only more convenient, but saves more money elsewhere.
And just to provide some perspective… typical household breakers work very similar to this.
If your 15A breaker tripped instantly when the current exceeded 15A, you’d be resetting a breaker every time you turned on a stand mixer or something.
Instead they have two mechanisms of action—thermal and electromagnetic.
The thermal trip time varies depending on how much you’ve exceeded the rated current, but for a typical household breaker could be a couple of minutes.
The electromagnetic trip is the “hard cutoff” where as soon as you exceed that limit the breaker trips near instantly. Depending on the type of breaker this is usually 5-10x its rated current. So your 15A breaker may allow you to briefly pull 75-150A through it.
So while these fuses are mislabeled and should not be sold, it’s not as much of a death trap as it might appear on first glance from what it sounds like.
> Everything carrying current typically has a ton of safety margin built in
The thing that worries me is what happens when everyone is cutting corners because they're relying on someone else building in safety margin. Where's the tipping point when everything becomes unsafe?
My suggestion would be to travel the world, and see how people live in places with different margins. Life is sort of okay. Look at Soviet-era Eastern Europe, India, the diverse approaches across Africa, China, the rest of Asia, etc.
People get by. There isn't a sudden collapse or implosion.
It's also easy-to-manage. If there are suddenly a lot of electrical fires, regulators will step in before it goes out-of-control.
For my personal tastes, the US is too liability and safety-conscious on a day-to-day level, and not nearly safety-conscious enough on a system level. Risks like fires, where I live, are small enough that I'm not worried about them.
Antibiotic-resistant super-diseases? AI apocalypse? Thermonuclear war? Cyber-Armageddon (where every network-connected device is maximally bricked in the span of 30 seconds)? Climate change? Some weird super-pollutant? Systemic economic collapse? Civil war? Genetically-engineered super-bug? Running out of water in Arizona (or your other local issue)? ...
We have major disasters typically around once a century in any given location (WWI/WWII/30 years war/Bubonic Plaque/hurricane/etc.). It's hard to predict which one will happen; some are very unlikely, and some are pretty likely. If something hasn't happened in 50+ years, we stop worrying about it, and we completely ignore future previously-impossible risks.
I'm much more worried by those sorts of things than by fire safety.
Some are slow burn fuses and don’t pop until you exceed the rated amperage for a long time and by a lot of amperage. Not really what I expected. Some of the fuses do work like you’d expect and pop when they exceed the amperage by a minor amount.
When I was a student, my lab professors had a saying: "Sometimes a fuse will blow to protect the circuit, and sometimes the circuit will blow to protect the fuse."
One problem is that fuses are thermal devices. They break due to overheating. They take a while to warm up and blow. If a fuse overheats at 2A at 100ms, it will get that same amount of energy at at 20A over 1ms, which is an eternity by the standards of transistors.
Most silicon devices can destroy themselves in milliseconds or microseconds.
> 95+% of the time, what you're protecting from isn't a minor overload condition but a short.
But these fuses aren’t labeled “fuses that will blow when there’s a sorry but not when there’s an overload condition”, they’re labeled simply as “fuses”, which should blow over their rated limit, full stop.
It violates separation of concerns if I have to think not only about the fuse itself but also the rest of the system that it’s plugged into.
You're mixing disciplines. Separation of concerns is a computer science principle.
It very much doesn't happen much when one is designing analog electronics, which is where fuses come up. If I'm designing a piece of medical equipment, it cannot kill a patient with any single point of failure. That's a systemic design issue, and any device, including a fuse, has to be seen in the context of the system it's plugging into.
It'd be possible to separate concerns, but it would result in grossly inefficient, over-engineered systems.
You do get a bit more of that in electrical (rather than electronics) work, since you need to count on idiot contractors who will screw everything up.
