ALDI Lightway Rechargeable Spotlight

I think this is one of the Lithium Things that might burn your house down – I shall do this point by point - with the pictures, rather than weaving a wonderful tale with attachments. 1. SOME of the stuff that Aldi is getting is actually really good - without extensive field testing - getting dropped onto rocks or overboard and the rough and tumble of rural life.. and 5 to 10 years of regular use, up front and fresh from the packet, it SEEMS to be quite good. The on off trigger feels a little bit cheap and light weight, and the instructions about lubing the seals are lacking, but I like it.

HOWEVER - this product has a dangerous fault and like much of the very limited technical perceptiveness of Aldi's management - there is a couple of genuinely dangerous faults - but as to how dangerous they are, or if it's the odd one in a million that passed testing and then failed a month later.... And what causes the fault or chain of faults... it remains to be some kind of speculation.

BUT there are a few technical anompolies that the generally clueless and completely unhelpful management at Aldi have left in the "system" of a rechargeable battery and the lighting circuit.

They also play the tiny little bit of writing here, and nothing about it THERE, and if it is what I say it could be, it's a DANGEROUS fault...

It's a systemic dangerous fault - a combination of negligence, bad design and poor instructions.

However I, with my spiked bat of wrathful legalese vengance, am coming to your rescue - partly because this torch COULD BE a real risk to life and limb - as it bursts into flames and incinerates your car, house and home.... and partly because I just do not like the management of Aldi - at all, for a number of really serious reasons, over a quite a number of issues.

Into action:

Photograph 01:

Here is the product in the box.

Photograph 02:

The not particularly useful or technical features - OK it's a 5W pencil beam rechargable spotlight - quite good for poking out the car window, looking for things within 300 meters of the road...

BUT the 12V cigarette lighter plug and cable, are designed to put out, and transfer 5V at 1100 milliamps.... This is an important point - both for a fundamentally retarded and outdated USB standard and level of charging.

In 2023, all USB chargers - should be 2200 milliamps - a minimum.

Photograph 04:

Is the Battery Replacement Instructions. A 3.7V 2200ma Lithium Ion Battery...

BUT they do not say anything about DISCHARGING the old battery fully, first. And they do not say anything about charging the battery to 100% before using the torch for the first time.

AND - most importantly - they say NOTHING about the charging system NOR the battery type - being a self regulated battery - that has the charge controlling circuit in it, or a plain Lithium Ion battery that NEEDS a regulated charging supply... that ought to be on the circuit board, that the plain lithium ion battery clips onto.

This is very important... without going scientifically spastic about the issue, lithium batteries have some of the tightest tolerances on charging circuits and voltages I have ever seen... Like generalising a little bit here, say a car's lead acid battery charges at 14.3V for the surface voltage like + 0.5 V volt over 13.8V, but a lithium ion battery charger is held to within + 0.05 V over 3.7 V.

Photograph 05.

This is the specification about the unit, and again they say nothing about the battery type - with or without the charge controller in the battery or on the attached circuit board in the torch. And they say nothing about the charging rate.

I recall the really lame USB chrargers were USB 2.0 and could manage I think 500 milliamps. I think the later versions could manage 1100 milliamps, and now because everyone uses devices with Lithium Ion batteries in them, and they can have very large storage capacities, the ability of the chargers is now 2.2A or 2200 ma.

This is an important consideration - the matter of USB chargers being bog stock 2200 milliamp chargers - is most or less universal. This means that ALL devices must have their own internal charging regulation. This issue and it's implication and the way that Aldi's inept and dishonest management have handled it, is a key point of interest.

Also they wrote in it has a charging adapter that runs of 240V AC - there is NO charging adapter with the unit.

Photograph 06.

Well I opened the packet within a few K's of leaving the Aldi store, hoping to have a bit of a poke through the darkness in the paddcks on the way home...

Pencil Beam spotlights are good like that.

And usually these sorts of things are sent out fully charged... but apparently is was stone cold and dead flat. So I plugged it into my handy dandy power bank - with 2.1 A on the USB A port and 3A on the USB C port....

Well the cable wasn't so good...a bit loose - and I tried turning it on after 5 minutes - and it ran for about 30 seconds until I switched it off....

I left it charging for an hour or so, and then just tried it to see if it put out any more light with more of a charge.... Nope didn't work.

However the power bank was 10A or 10,000 milliamps - and allowing say 10% or so for ineffiencies, technically that should be enough to give four full charges to a 2200 milliamp battery... But over time it had drained the 10A battery down to about half, and it's used up ~2 x what it can store - something is very wrong. You know you cannot fit 100 liters in a 50 liter tank...

It was then that I noticed that the charging port on the torch, looked rather cooked and sort of burned / over heated.

Photograph 07.

I opened the torch to examine the battery etc., as per the instructions AND the back of the circuit board was BURNED.... Very Bad. The heat had soaked through to the charging port.

Photograph 08.

The plastic wrapping around the battery had overheated, split and shrivelled up around the battery.

Photograph 09. Ditto. Same battery, different angle.

Photograph 10.

And on a tiny little sticker, in infinitely TINY writing, on each side of the torch, was the specifications.

818845 (battery type) / Input: (how to charge it)

5V DC. Or 5 volts Direct Current. (period / full stop)

max, 1100ma. Or Maximum amount of current or rate of electron flow (comma) 1100 milliamps.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The pencil beam spotlight is quite small, the stickers on each side are very tiny - some 5 cm long by 1.5 cm high, and the writing is max, in lower case is ONE millimeter high and the 1100ma, is 2mm high - for the numbers.

People in common parlayance, should not need an engineering degree, and a set of strong reading glasses, to read these figures, and as they SEEM to be the issue here, there is no matter of this apparent charging limitation in the instructios or on the box, AND worster of all, in the days of "Oh here is a USB port - just plug it in, the dirty dealings and uncouth antics of Aldi's reprehensible product design and specifications and FINE PRINT trickery - that it can only be used on a very limited and low power charger, in the days of devices carrying their own charge rate limiters, that plug and charge from any USB port - which in charging up the torch as any average consumer would, in available USB port, could result in the house and home or car being burned to the ground.

Despite my offers, they are not smart enough to engage me as their head of product quality and testing, and they are a very shonky management team, and they continue to dump unfit for purpose and outright dangerous garbage on the market.

I have had very serious fights with them over the phone and I can tell you I would not hire any of them.

The torch almost catching fire because of peculiar charging limitations, that no one would ever expect, is another case in point.

https://freshsourceeurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Rechargable_Spotlight_AU_Manual.pdf