This was sent to me by a friend who had been using it for a while, but after refitting it during redecoration it failed catastrophically with sparks.  That does make me wonder if something happened during the process that either resulted in ingress of dirt/liquid or a bad connection causing arcing, which can sometimes trigger circuit failure.

It would have been nice to go in a bit deeper, but when these things blow up they often cause a chain reaction due to conductive plasma bridging adjacent pads and tracks.  That can destroy the evidence of which component initiated the failure.  Not helped in this case by a very densely packed PCB with a black silkscreen, making the analysis even harder.  I might guess at MOSFET failure with subsequent destruction of current sensing resistors.

I'm not a huge fan of built-in electronics.  It means that in an instance like this, the densely packed electronics can fail dramatically with the awkwardness of it still being built into the house wiring with no easy way to remove or replace it without electrical skills.

For charging USB devices I recommend using good quality plug-in chargers, and better still, plugged into a fused adaptor or extension.


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