All plastic 150W eBay desk mini-heater. (With schematic.)

let's take something to bits and I think this mini heater looks good because it says the newly designed unique mini heater mini heater allows you to enjoy the infinite pleasure and I want infinite pleasure albeit that is from a heater the label looks as though it's been peeled off because I have peeled the label off to see what's underneath the dimensions have changed apartment the new label has bigger dimensions it's a deeper heater and a mix Monday if they've had a little thermal issue with a previous thinner version do not get too close to the fire or heat Everywhere's other things multicolored optional enjoy the fun and one of the best bits patent product no copy a lower so don't copy it its patented it's a heater so we'll pop the case open the box and of course I chose the pink one I don't know if it yeah it certainly shows a range of colors but you only get one it's not like you can commit yourself I don't think and seem you know there's nothing in the box it's good instructions and Chinese which show pretty pictures and give the data with the old dimensions on it so this thing is supposedly rated 130 watts we'll test that by the look of it and I can see if we look at the end here that you can see that slights of zigzag a metal strip that suggests PTC heating element so sort of self-regulating that's portable and safety features and a little axial blowers that the correct term for these things actually I can never remember snail Bloor say to blue or whatever it comes to the cable in a slightly grubby box and it's a two pronged cable which is kind of noticed the problem is the same size this I believe is a popular Chinese cable so before I plug this in I really suppose I should get the power analysis equipment set up so I shall grab the pocket if I shall also grab this meter because this meter has the advantage that you can set it to log maximum power so I shall plug the hop into it first and it will of course read the hoppy zone power consumption that became Dresden see actually let me just move some of this stuff that is wanting to join us on the bench here so at the moment at one point one watch the hoppy does not draw a lot of power at all 244 volts as our supply 11 milliamps current that's really little and here is the high setting which is contrary 1.1 so when I plug this in is it gonna purr straight up nope have to push that button so it peaked at 1000 watts one kilowatt when it was actually in its cold state and what is it currently running at the power is shown here it is gradually creeping down as it warms up and because it is one of those PTC heating elements point seven amps they said point six of perf actress point nine five that's because it's mainly e resistive heating element or a slight vibration office plus still be a power supply for the fan itself so how is the heat community of it settle down a bit 100 and well 160 watts I guess that the temperature of the room will affect that it's pretty out quite a bit heat it's actually not too bad that's okay I mean it's not something that you'd heat the room with but if you're at your table and you just wanted to heat your hands I don't think it'd be any good for a heat shrink here is heat shrink I don't think it's gonna get anywhere near hot enough for heat shrink no I don't think so well actually you know what the heat shrink is starting to go but really it's not the sort of thing that you're going to get much done in a hurry hmm is having an effect in it though um there is the phone running underneath it's got a little red LED to show you that it's on me as if heat come here the front wasn't bad enough what happens when I just place it straight down and block the air intake which it says you've not to do the perk assumption is dropping rapidly it's ninety one was eighty eight eighty five hated to theoretically as this air the PTC heating element heats up it should serve stabilize seventy one marks is still quite high for something that's unventilated I wonder if the plastic would malformed after a while it does apparently have heat resistant plastic inside look in instructions everything's cut out the heating element has cut out completely now the fans still running though is it going to cut back in or have I killed a thermal fuse let's let it cool down by running it's fine for a while and see if that kicks back in it may not I may already have killed this product or it may take a while for it to reset it's still quite warm maybe there's a thermal fuse hopefully it's a bimetallic strip that just cuts out but if it's not then we're screwed it's dead but it doesn't really matter I'm opening it anyway I could always change the thermal fuse of a thermal fuse has gone I heard a click and it suddenly peaked and the power is back up and running so it has a thermal cutout and mechanical one inside okay that's fine let us turn it off and open it up I should get rid of her paraphernalia here no I don't see screws but I'm guessing open the top and the fact that the cover can have its colour changed I wonder if this pops that I should point that you know the way is this gonna pop out revealing oh it's sticky oh it's just a sticky label that's not covering screws okay that's not nice oh let's just peel it off that's a bit tacky but hey it doesn't really matter I got this to take to bits so we could see what's inside its base colour is apparently black here's the screws six screws I was really just expecting when it each corner no is it gonna be capacitive dropper that's powering the fan it's not super high power or is it going to be a little switch mode power supply hard to say um when it cut out thermally that power really went down very low that's quite a tricky one I'm going to guess the positive dropper but I could be wrong it's a capacitive dropper not much to it there is the biotite cutout is there also a one-shot thermal fuse is this red hot it's yet pea hot let's slide this little copper out or this is all built into one little module there is the biotite cutout I do not see a one-shot thermal fuse they've hedged their bets there I recognise that style of motor yeah this looks like the standard little dinky Cassetti take motor oil or CD tape motor suppose I should say and they're usually very low-power I wonder what it would actually take to power that we know roughly what it sounded like I could I could Hotwire this fun and I should could power it from the bench power supply and we could see what's of voltage and speed gets involved sultanas we don't about two volts stick that one there soon that's the correct polarity because you know what these Chinese manufacture like sometimes they aren't yeah let's put this circuit board out first then before I do that that very good idea just in case they've told it all polarity pork is red isn't always red black is not always black never trust anything like this particular when there's a fat electrolytic capacitor they were just waiting to go kaboom sir is this gonna come out it's the LED that's stopping it from coming out does this fun no this fan housing is pretty much permanently and this is not wanting to come out that LED is being particularly something there we go red is going to pass it her negative and black is going to positive so that would have blown up that capacitor if I just hot water there in a way I should just have done that shouldn't I but not to worry so is there also a possibility that this capacitor is charged up to a very high level I see a discharge resistor across it let's test that by giving it the finger test know which discharge that's the drop capacitor there it's rated 1 micro farad okay that's what you'd expect I don't see a bridge well I do see a red direct father there's a big Rick bar there's a big director fire there's a little resistor there for the LED what's that other a big diode for the diode is oh it looks like as you know it looks like a big fat Zener diode or Zener diode if you prefer just to clamp that voltage down okay so that gives us something to hoop our meter on our power supply onto some pit there positive out of there Oh screw I'll just go straight onto the fan mumble mumble ramble ramble pork fumble fumble actually that's that's a 2 vols I think that's a 3 volt phone that only takes about 80 milliamps I wonder what the Zener is rated at hmm not an awful lot in sight a walk I shall pause momentarily I shall reverse-engineer this I shall try and work at that Zener voltage rating as by possibly just turn the voltage up to see what it Aurra powering this up I'm just seeing that and then again there's a hit he's her fruity about here but it will give me an indication of what that is one moment please reverse engineering is complete list or the circuitry so it starts off with the incoming supply it can be either polarity because it's not a polarized plug goes through a fuse then it goes to the switch this simple click on and click off switch and then it splits two ways one side of it goes down to the heating element which is a PTC block it's the classic thing that has the it's got a ceramic block in the middle with the surf fins neither side and the fins actually make electrical connection one Whoville I have want to be the neutral and they go on to either side of these metal ice faces of these ceramic blocks and those there are PTC positive temperature coefficient blocks as they heat up the resistance rise isn't this a self regulate that's why it starts off a bit for peak of current it also has the little thermal switch in line with that the bimetallic switch so that's sure and here it sure does this resistor with the little radiator fins on it and it's shown as the thermal switch here that's a sort of safety cut out then it goes through this big red capacitor here which is 1 micro farad 400 volts and there's a 2 mega ohm resistor across that's quite high unusually high it's absolutely fine for that though technically speaking it's also got this heating element across it's the only point you'd ever get a tingle off the plug if that resistor wasn't there is if the the unit overheated and the phone was still running but this air dam will switch opened and then the reload across and you get a slight tingle and the supply then goes the current limited by that tech posture people ask her the capacitive dropper works it allows a certain amount of charge on each half cycle to be transferred so that serve has a set of time it has a shuffling effect and that gets rectified so on each half wave it just basically pumps a little bit of current to the sac pasta and it just the value of that capacitor there determines how much current gets through on each half wave so on the output of that there is a 100 nano farad little ceramic disc capacitor tucked way down in here and that is just for noise suppression it's right across that hope of the bridge rectifier just the diode switching noise not there's gonna be an awful lot although it also has the advantage that it's across the fan so that's also going to reduce the brush nose there is an electrolytic capacitor the 470 volt 35 Florence M 2 microfiber T 5 volt then there's a little red LED token gesture of course it's got a 1k resistor and it turns out that although this is a big chunky 12 volt Zener diode or Zener diode one n 5 3 4 9 B it's a quoit that's rated for 5 watts I don't actually see that given its size but it's a 12 volt Zener diode it's never going to conduct unless this motor here goes open circuit the fan motor which is tucked into the casing it just sits in the back here and it draws enough current that the it balances with this capacitor letting through just enough current that this will sit down to about 3 point 6 volts that fan will draw as much as it can so the voltage it starts quite slowly and then comes up and it's levels off about three point six volts the polarity was wrong for a reason the party is the party markings for direction in the motor and the opposite wanted the fan blade to go in the other direction so that as it spins around it throws the er out from this blade if it was going off the opposite direction the pulling air in the way instead that wouldn't be too good given it's a heater that's fundamental it is a very very simple circuit it's basically just a few switch the heat on this one protective element and then just a simple capacitive dropper and smoother powering the water and the way this thing goes together is quite neat it's quite a modular design let's get this out the way here this is where I completely wreck the exposure no it's quite white that's the prom with my object but the assembly is such that this fan blade just goes on and you don't want to push it on too far I'd guess that one of the things that could go wrong with this is if this was pushed on too far could stall against the back of the housing and likewise this cover goes in the front and it just clips in it hooks under like this I've just popped the wires off that's all right and it snaps in like that and as long as the blade can still spinned it's clear that that's fine I could see that if sometimes over time the blades will move on the fan shaft and the motor shaft and if that happens you can end up with a touching one side weakness of noise that's when people would just throw Oaks as making noise interesting they thought that this may if I'd a little extra feature I thought that when this was satin because it kind of does it kind of sits behind those clips I thought it might stop it being unclipped as a wee safety feature but it doesn't quite make it there so it's just there it looked like it did that but it doesn't the heating element sits in with these lugs there's two in that side there's one in that side these are the connections that are going on to those air metal plates so these fins are effectively life when it's in the sit room when it's powered okay another thing the little grill is actually integrated into the heater module itself this basically just feeds down from the top and those little plates go through the bottom and then one of them just folds over like that to lock it in place the other one wasn't really folded over I don't think it really matters that much I shall fall over a little bit but that then sits down into the end here and that's it's sitting flush with the front of the unit that's what you see when the lids on the circuit board just sits in the back clips in quite neatly a couple of screws these wires go on to the motor and that is fundamentally it when it's cooked together when you push that button it just runs and that set the fan runs and blows air through that element and it will self-regulate if the air in the room was too hot that element would just regulate the power down a bit and I'm guessing that the main safety features in this are the fact that the element is self-regulating that this plastic is that hard heat-resistant plastic it's notable that the connections are actually screwed onto nuts and bolts and this little thermal thing I think this is just a standard module but it still means that that does rely on the plastic is one of the sort of grips for that if the plastic soften in any way though it shouldn't if it's that hard thermal plastic and then it kind of it could result in these terminals queenless but that's the only protection other than the self regulating facility and the thermal cut oh I'm not sure how long would how it would last in air you know if you had it face down for instance with the heat going up the way into the fan blades I don't know if would distort them there's a good chance that could damage it that way and then it just really wouldn't work out just keep cutting in and out but this is quite useful it cost about ten pounds from my UK warehouse obviously a Chinese seller but it's from a UK warehouse and I could see it being quite useful just as a source of low level warm air for some application like preheating something or perhaps and drying small items just you're something you could sit on it so in with that little stand or even just sit up vertically and it would just blow that stream of air into an enclosure or something like that so quite useful for the components themselves and their little fat the blower but more importantly their PTC heating element here I have ordered another one and it's apparently a bit higher power that other one I've ordered is notable for all the pictures on the listing of flames which isn't very good it's a supposedly 500 watts and it looks like two of those elements or maybe even three stacked and then maybe a traditional fan behind them so that'll be interesting to see even I get that but in the meantime this is that was pink one but it's no stealth black has a little plastic combustible heater that looks okay but I just you never know where I hope trustworthy these things are how reliable that heating think the thermal cutout is going to be usually they have the in bigger heaters they have a one shot thermal fuse as a last resort they may have left that out just in case yeah you know it does trigger for some reason without before that the plastic would really have been damaged and it just renders the product unusable there we go it's an interesting little thing it doesn't look like it to have its uses but not something I'd want to leave totally unattended other things worthy of note here it does have these little channels it's not uncommon but it's quite nicely done in this instance it's got little channels that support the wires and because they are that sort of fiberglass coated wire it does fit in quite snugly into those it holds it well it looks like a fair amount of effort has gone into the design of this so the unit is now back together and also worth mentioning is the plastic on this not only holds the button position but also holds this socket in position so that when you're plugging the well the built-in plug certainly a plug in the connector into it it's not going to flex it back so first too much and damage the solder joints but that is the thing built back together again I'll just plug it in you can well I don't know if you'll see anything the fan is running the heaters come here at the front you'll maybe just have to believe this because there is quite a quiet little thing it doesn't make much noise at all but yeah that's it back together and I'll just put a lid on and that'll be it but it's actually quite nicely made it is a neat design

Channel: bigclivedotcom

Views: 272,631

Keywords: desk, desktop, small, mini, miniature, fan, heater, PTC, blower, plastic, ebay, 150W

Id: iB0jyFFZvYk

Length: 21min 27sec (1287 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 09 2020