Part 1 : Amazon Fraud???

TLDR; I was SOOOO not expecting this to ever happen to me. I got scammed on Amazon! but hey, at least, they’re offering full refund and all that so, all good… just a bit annoying that I can’t use the new toy.

Long story: I received something I’ve been wanting to get for a long long time. I finally was going to have my very own bench variable power supply! I did made one crude version when I was much younger and I still use it to this day but, It is not the same as a legit piece of hardware made for this. I ended up finding a generic brand from amazon for a decently cheap price, which I thought would be great, and I’m still convinced that it would be WAY better than the one I use. So, I asked for that to family for Xmas. Little did I knew in what kind of rabbit hole I was about to jump in.

Fast forward to a family dinner where I received the box we ordered, I unpack it and I’m all overconfident and like ‘Oh yeah I know very well what’s in the box’…. and I unwrap the thing (that was weirdly wrapped)… and there’s a PC power supply with it wires cut, clearly very used. Also in the box, there’s a pair of used potentiometers.

So, managed to get a refund from amazon and all that, going to ship back that totally useless piece of junk (what a waste…) and I started looking for a replacement. I initially thought of going with a direct replacement but I was a bit skeptical, thought I’d look up reviews of these generic boxes. Turn out they are very not reliable, tends to dies often or randomly stop working. No need to say I was a bit deceived by the news. Then I then decided to look into the alternatives… I started looking up used ones on eBay and FB marketplace. Found several that were quite interesting but as usual, prices are not cheap. My choices were narrowed to two contestants. Either a Korad KA3005P that is a smaller digital regulated PSU, or a much bigger TekPower TP-3005D that is a larger, linear and mostly analog PSU. The newer versions of each one were significantly high priced so that was out of the question (400$ and 700$ respectively for these two).

The Korad reviews seemed to point to older models could have some pretty terrible flaws in it guts, aka a bad transistor from the manufacturer that will make the unit dead in certain cases, which means ordering one means preemptively changing that transistor, which would be a SMD fix and I’m not 200% sure I’m comfortable with that kind of mod.
On the other hand, the TekPower reviews seemed to point that the potentiometers are very ‘touchy’ as in, the adjustment can be difficult with a single big pot. The solution is to add a second finer adjustment potentiometer, ‘coarse and fine’ adjustments. I do think I’m way more comfortable with that kind of mods than messing with swapping transistors.

The feature that the TekPower doesn’t have that I would have liked, is a USB or serial interface but I definitely can live with that (well, without, but you get what I meant).

So, on the morning of the 25th of December, I ordered the TekPower unit from eBay, for 140$ shipping included (a steal if you ask me). It doesn’t come with the banana wires but I already have some so I don’t care. In fact, neither came with the banana cables. I should receive it by the end of the year! (I really can’t wait).

Once I’ll receive the new beast, I’ll try to do a review of it. ☺