Imagine this: you’re on campus, working hard, listening to music, and checking your texts when… crap! Your laptop and phone are about to die. Damn you Spotify and Bluetooth for eating too much of your battery! Et tu laptop? You charged it last night.
That’s okay, you have a charger in your bag and you can charge them in class. You do have a spare, don’t you? Well, dear student, you better have gotten that spare from a reputable source.
Believe it or not, not all USB chargers are made equal. Shocking, I know, but it’s so easy to pick up a charging block for a phone these days. Laptops are getting easier since they charge with USB-C (unless you’re stuck in the dark ages of technology like myself and still need a barrel jack adapter). That cheap spare charger may be the end of your device if you plug it in. Best case, no charge, worst case… say goodbye to that expensive tech.
USB devices all have varying power needs. If you’re an Apple user, you know the struggle of trying to charge your iPad on an iPhone charging brick. Many modern USB charged devices actually need 10-30 watts to charge efficiently. If you have a laptop that uses USB-C charging, you’re looking for 45W, at least, for better battery health (take the output voltage and multiply that by the output current — this would get you the wattage of the charger. For example: 5V and 1 AMP or 5W is the baseline USB standard). You can always use a higher wattage USB charger as long as it’s from a good manufacturer.
But, you bought one at the corner store or Amazon for $10 to $20 or less, plugged it into your phone and… nothing. The phone gets hot and doesn’t work anymore. To quote Dr. Bones McCoy from Star Trek, “She’s dead, Jim.” Unbeknownst to you, that cheap charger has a fault that basically connected your phone to the wall power directly. Remember that your phone only needs 10-20W; when those cheap chargers fail they send up to 1800W into the phone. Most high end gaming desktop computers use 500W or in some cases 1000W, so you can see how that’s way too much power.
A charger from a reputable manufacturer like Ugreen or Baseus will cost you more, but the investment is worth it, especially because they undergo stringent testing and quality control. It’s common to find 65W to 100W chargers these days with multiple ports — that’s enough power to charge most laptops and a phone at the same time. These chargers also have protection built in so that they never send too much power to one device.
So, be careful: not only can a bad charger damage your devices, it could also damage you if the fault is severe enough. Always read the reviews and check your devices to make sure they’ll be able to charge properly.
