I received some LED meteor tubes in today's mail. They are a set of 8 tubes and come with a small mains plugpack.
The plugpack is marked as 4.2V 0.5A but measuring it showed more like 6V with the lights disconnected. While measuring the voltage, my finger touched one of the wires and I got a very unpleasant tingle.
Opening up the plugpack revealed the horror show below. There is no isolation between the mains and the DC output! It's a simple capacitive dropper circuit. This may be fine for fully enclosed lights, but not for something like this.
So, if you do buy lights like these, immediately destroy the plugpack and instead run them from a proper power supply or approved plugpack.
These light sets are cheap and the meteor tubes themselves are fine for the price but again, DO NOT USE THE SUPPLIED PLUGPACK.
The plugpack is marked as 4.2V 0.5A but measuring it showed more like 6V with the lights disconnected. While measuring the voltage, my finger touched one of the wires and I got a very unpleasant tingle.
Opening up the plugpack revealed the horror show below. There is no isolation between the mains and the DC output! It's a simple capacitive dropper circuit. This may be fine for fully enclosed lights, but not for something like this.
So, if you do buy lights like these, immediately destroy the plugpack and instead run them from a proper power supply or approved plugpack.
These light sets are cheap and the meteor tubes themselves are fine for the price but again, DO NOT USE THE SUPPLIED PLUGPACK.