How to choose high quality Portable Battery Charger?

Components of portable battery charger

A portable battery charger consists of battery cell, circuit board, and housing.  The quality of battery cell and circuit board together determine the safety of product. Currently the portable battery chargers that are being sold in the market normally use either Lithium Ion battery or Lithium Polymer battery.

What is Lithium Ion battery?              

95% of the portable battery chargers in the market are using Lithium Ion battery,the one that most commonly used is 18650, this cylinder shaped battery is 18mm in diameter and 65mm in length. The cost of using Lithium Ion battery cell is very low, but it comes with high risk of explosion when battery is overheated or being squeezed. Unfortunately, there are still many illegitimate manufacturers using inferior/defective/recycled 18650 batteries in their products which could be a huge potential safety hazard to the consumers.

What is Lithium Polymer battery?  

Lithium Polymer battery is in a colloidal state, so only in certain extreme situations the battery could be swollen or deformed but will never explode, and because it is much safer than Lithium Ion battery, with the same capacity, the cost of a Lithium Polymer battery is several times higher than that of a Lithium Ion battery.

The importance of having a high quality circuit board in a portable battery charger   

A circuit board which is rationally designed and strictly tested plays a very important role in ensuring the safety, it can stabilize the output voltage, can charge almost any cell phone and other digital devices. For instance, the iPhone4S battery voltage is higher than iPhone 4, so a portable charger with a poorly designed circuit board may charge iPhone4 just fine, but when it charges an iPhone4S, the charging could be interrupted from time to time.

Apart from the above,a good quality circuit board should have the following functions:

In order to minimize the production costs, those illegitimate manufacturers would probably compromise on these functions which could cause serious safety issues.

What is overstated capacity and what is the power conversion efficiency for a portable battery charger?     

When the real capacity is smaller than it is indicated, that’s what we call overstated capacity, some manufacturers would use “power conversion rate” as an excuse to fool their customers. Then what exactly is the “power conversion rate”?  In fact, when we use a portable charger to charge the digital devices, the circuit board itself will consume the power too, but if that circuit board is well designed, it should be less than 20% of the battery capacity. For example, if the manufacturer claims that the actual capacity of their portable charger is 12,000 mAh, and your cell phone battery capacity is 2,000 mAh, you should at least be able to charge your cell phone 4.8 times(12,000 mAh x 80% / 2,000 mAh = 4.8 charges).

Tips for choosing a high quality and safe portable battery charger     

For the safety purpose, we strongly recommend that the consumers should choose Lithium Polymer battery over Lithium Ion battery to avoid the potential risk of explosion. How to differentiate these 2 kinds of battery from the appearance? A sample way would be looking at the thickness of the batteries. For the portable chargers that use 18650 battery, it has to be thicker than 19mm, as the diameter of a 18650 battery is 18mm. Whereas, Lithium Polymer battery is like your cell phone battery which is quite thin, so if you see a portable charger more than 19mm thick, we can almost be sure that there are Lithium ion batteries inside.

Maxway as a brand name for top quality portable battery chargers is registered in the USA and owned by Ming Di Long Industrial Inc., whose subsidiary company has many years of experience in R&D and manufacture of consumer electronics. We aim to provide our customers with the most reliable and the best value for money portable chargers combining state-of-the-art technology, finest workmanship, strictest selected Lithium Polymer batteries, well-designed circuit board and a series of rigorous tests.

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