TheBatteries
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- Joined
- Oct 8, 2016
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I opened up my Foxnovo Digital Charter 4s earlier this morning to require the power input. I noticed what I consider really dumb design flaw. In the pictures you'll notice the black negative wires are running in between two soldered posts on the circuit board. These posts attach to the positive terminal of the cells. And of course those posts are going to heat up as the cells charge/discharge. Now regular charging shouldn't heat them up enough to cause any issues, but the problem comes when we are testing cells and we get those bad cells in that get hot.
The first picture shows how the wires lay in a relatively new charger, only a few cycles on this one. The second picture shows a charger that has been though probably several hundred cycles. The negative wires actually started to melt from the heat of the positive terminal and being pushed up against the metal solder points. Two of the 4 wires are bare and had to be within a millimeter or two from shorting out. If they were to touch, not only will it blow your charger, but it will dead short the cell connected. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Why the hell would you design a charger to run the negative lead between two positive sharp hot posts?
If you have these chargers, I highly recommend opening them, checking, and rerouting the wires. I pushed mine to the side so they go around the soldered posts and do not touch. I opened 5 chargers (including the almost new one). All 5 had the wires routed like this. Of the 4 that are several months old, 2 of them had one or more negative wire melted and bare wire exposed.........
The first picture shows how the wires lay in a relatively new charger, only a few cycles on this one. The second picture shows a charger that has been though probably several hundred cycles. The negative wires actually started to melt from the heat of the positive terminal and being pushed up against the metal solder points. Two of the 4 wires are bare and had to be within a millimeter or two from shorting out. If they were to touch, not only will it blow your charger, but it will dead short the cell connected. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Why the hell would you design a charger to run the negative lead between two positive sharp hot posts?
If you have these chargers, I highly recommend opening them, checking, and rerouting the wires. I pushed mine to the side so they go around the soldered posts and do not touch. I opened 5 chargers (including the almost new one). All 5 had the wires routed like this. Of the 4 that are several months old, 2 of them had one or more negative wire melted and bare wire exposed.........
