Here is a pet peeve of mine: folks who use cheap chargers to power their valuable electronics. While the urge to save a couple of bucks is noble, knockoffs chargers can end up costing you MORE money in the long run.
Convenience stores and online shopping sites, like Amazon, often sell these types of chargers and cables at a low price. A charger that costs as little as $1 should be a warning sign. To offer a product for such a low price, manufacturers cut corners.
If we’ve learned anything from the Samsun Galaxy Note 7 debacle, it’s that you don’t want to mess around with the batteries on your gadgets.
Apart from being generic and costing only a few dollars, cheap chargers and cables often share the following features:
Cheap chargers have incorrect ratings and don’t have sufficient overload protection.
For example, the charger may claim to offer 10 watts, but can only safely output 5 watts. As a result, the charger will have a higher chance of overheating if the device overloads the charger. Lousy overload protection also means slower charging time.
Their high noise output makes it difficult to use the touchscreen while charging your device.
High noise output means that the noise from the cheap charger disrupts the sensitive electronics that measure your finger’s position on the screen.
They could ruin your device’s battery.
When charging a battery, it’s important that the charger recognizes when it is full and stops sending power to it. If the charger does have this circuity, this could damage the device’s battery and the actual device.
To prevent the above from happening always check the packaging to make sure that the charging cables you’re buying are certified and designed for your particular device. When in doubt about what charger to buy, we recommend that you buy a charger from the same manufacturer as the device.