I Sometimes Wonder about Quality Control!

The other day I was in our local hardware store - 100 km away in Christchurch - and I saw some reasonably priced LED lighting strip designed for domestic use, complete with transformer plug. You can guess where it's made .... a land of great population!

At home I opened it up an plugged it in - it looked great and would serve my purpose beautifully.  My plan, as you may have seen from my last post is to use it as the back lighting for the instrument panel. On unplugging the transformer, I wanted to know a bit more about the rating - voltage, current and power etc so I looked at the underside  and found this - scorch marks - how can something brand new have scorch marks on it - suspicions raised!

On further use and examination of the actual strip I found one place where a botched fix to the strip had been made.  Looking at it you would have thought this was something I would have done to fix/insulate a cut.  The air around me was starting to turn blue about a certain race of people.



By this time I was looking out for the smallest sign of fault and damage and this is  the next thing I found.

It's questionable whether this is acceptable or not?  LED strip light should come as one long strip that you can choose to cut at various points to meet your need.  In this case, it looks quite clear that in the manufacturing process short strips have been joined together to form the 5 m length that I bought.  If you look at this photo you can see the solder points where it's been joined - OK, one point throughout the whole length might be acceptable, but I found two of these within about 30 cm of each other.  What this means is there are inherent weak points built into the strip right from the start.  This is just pure, shoddy, cheap-skate workmanship being passed on to the customer with no evidence of serious quality control. The manufacturer is making a fast buck at the consumer's expense and not to mention the poor soul(s) stuck in some sweat-shop earning a pittance doing the soldering.

What is more important is this is being imported and accepted by our country's trade and industry department.

This is the product I bought - BEWARE!

Frustrations vented!