Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/12/13/usb-battery-and-car-jump-start.html
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Or, portable torture device.
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I got one of these for my electric car, connected it to the battery and plugged it in to the cigarette lighter, tearing the very fabric of reality itself and ensuring our agonizing doom.
President Trump’s already let loose a Twitter tirade on me, as the cornerstone of his administration was going to be tearing the very fabric of reality itself and ensuring our agonizing doom.
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Oh so that’s what the kids call it these days…
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Thank Zod for one of those personal-experience product endorsements that actually seems signed by a verifiable, communicable human being for a change.
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USB battery? Why not USA battery!?
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How do I connect those giant alligator clips to my iPhone?
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@jlw, can I ask what led you to buy this particular model and not one of the thousand other ones that look identical at Amazon? (Probably not the Finnish-sounding name?-)
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That I’d never heard the brand actually helped. It had enough reviews to suggest it might work. It was cheap and had very few features.
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Because your new energy source is carbon neutral and likely to threaten the livelihood of hundreds of billionaire energy industry investors, Donald Trump now wants your name, latitude, longitude and altitude.
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I’m gonna go ahead and guess this will be no good at reviving a frozen car battery in a Canadian or Midwestern winter.
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Thanks; that was oddly useful.
[quote=“Lookmanospaces, post:12, topic:91109, full:true”]
I’m gonna go ahead and guess this will be no good at reviving a frozen car battery in a Canadian or Midwestern winter.[/quote]
It probably would if the car itself wasn’t cold; our experience when we lived in northern Minnesota was that when the engine got cold enough the viscosity of the engine fluids made it much harder to turn over. When we installed a block heater for the engine the battery would start the car far more easily
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We are always told to make the negative connection to the car’s frame, well away from the battery, and to break the connection there. This is to avoid the danger of igniting the hydrogen produced by the dead battery as it charges. The cables shown aren’t long enough for that.
Does the power switch on the device interrupt the flow of electricity, so that no spark occurs when the clips are removed?
edit: Actually, I still wouldn’t trust it not to arc.
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I would assume you are talking about regular jumper cables and two cars. With this unit, connect negative, then positive cables. THEN you power on the battery. When done, power off the battery unit. No sparks right?
This is my assumption anyways - have not used this unit or looked at it’s instructions. The concern I have about these random brand units are the battery quality and risk of fire. Do I really want this sitting in the trunk of my car?
That was my question. I haven’t found a definitive answer as to whether there is a power switch.
That’s one of the convenient things about the lead acid car starter I have. It does have a switch. Being able to hook up directly to the battery posts is so much easier than trying to get a good connection on the car.
That’s a big concern for me given that USB/car starting units tend to have bigger batteries than the regular USB batteries. While I suppose they probably aren’t actually made of recycled hoverboard batteries, I don’t have a good way of telling a “good” high capacity battery from a “bad” until it spontaneously combusts.
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Button.
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This one is pretty small, 8000mAh.
Yes, I was surprised by that. Given the heft of the “traditional” unit I have now, the size difference is pretty stunning. Absent reliable statistics, I just don’t know how big a problem spontaneous combustion of lithium ion batteries is, but we know it can happen even on high end units, as Samsung and Boing have shown us.
