Why did I buy China made junk again?
I bought two of these 300V AC digital displays on Lazada, they looked cool as an addition to the household UPS I am building, to monitor the grid voltage and the inverter voltage.
Today I wanted to do a quick measurement of the voltage of the grid. When I connected the first of these two showy instruments, several segments in the 7 segment displays did not light up (see photo). When connecting the second one it went „BZZLLLZONKA“ and never lit up. Brand new – Chinese made junk. No quality assurance, testing or pride in producing something good.
And in another, not totally unrelated event, yesterday I got a message from a job hunter who saw my profile on LinkeIn: “Would you like to work from home? You can make 500 to 1,500 Pesos per day by doing some reviews for companies on Lazada to boost their products. Contact me if you are interested.“ “And what, post fake product reviews boosting shitty or low quality products?” I wrote back, “…that is not only unethical but probably also violates laws and regulations.” I got unfriended very quickly.
Lessons (probably not) learned:
- Avoid cheap Chinese made products, pay twice and get some good stuff, it also helps protect the environment and climate. The carbon footprint of those two devices per minute operating time is going close to infinitive.
- Minimize using Lazada. In addition to the carbon footprint of production of the useless devices, Lazada causes lots of pollution through the tons of bubblewrap and other plastic everything is packed in.
- If you have to buy on Lazada, ignore the bubblewrap fetishist reviewers giving 5 stars for how the product was packed but don’t review function. They got the same job offer I got and never saw the product they are rating.
An immediate real result from my learning: I proceeded to buy an old fashioned analogue multimeter made in Japan.