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Portronics Power Plate 7 with 6 USB Port + 8 Power Sockets Power Strip Extension Board with 2500W, 3Mtr Cord Length, 2.1A USB Output(Black) : Amazon.in: Electronics
www.amazon.in
This thing caught my eye a few days ago. 8 sockets & 6 usb ports at Rs 900. It sounded too good to be true, but I thought maybe it's a new product so it's heavily discounted to encourage sales and adoption? Portronics is a respectable enough brand, I've been pleased with their bluetooth speakers and usb chargers in the past.
But yeah, it is a little too good to be true. The plastic enclosure is entirely uninspiring, reminiscent of a cheap china bazaar plastic bucket that folds in to half if you try and lift it when half full. It's thin and flexes way too easily at the sides. Inside, there's a modern design with brass strips but the wiring and soldering is suspicious to the point of being a potential fire hazard.
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The usb charger board is also disappointing, based on a chinese PL3378 chip overvolted to 5.5v with the entire 2a spread across all six ports with no intelligent balancing or switching:
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This is at best a Rs 300/400 power strip dressed up to look like it's worth 1500 or more. The Gongniu/Bull power strips have several orders of magnitude better build quality .
While it may work for innoculous uses like routers/massagers/lamps/fans and maybe even laptops, it's a bad choice for anything pulling more than a couple hundred watts.
I'm keeping this, in part to see if it will actually catch fire someday. My use case would be for lamps, chargers and a test bench where I run memtest every now and then.
For me to trust this with my personal devices, I'd have to redo the wiring with proper heatshrink and tidier soldering. The USB ports are a bit of a waste, but I guess you could use them for mood lightning strips or slow charging portable devices like bluetooth speakers. Funnily enough, slow charging helps with better battery longevity.