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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

I have a ravpower, a hyper, and just bought the new ugreen. The ugreen is too new to judge, but the others have ran for over two years, and a good amount of that time has been outdoors in the sun.

I constantly expect failures. This seems like an absurd task I'm putting them up to. But they are all still alive & doing the job.

I've had a kill-a-watt so I can see their power consumption. A large amount of their life is spent ~60 watts, but there's definitely hours on end & heavy usage days, where they go up to or stay at 90+.

My anecdotal data looks different than yours.

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My Ravpower device died within 8 months, and they refused to honor the warranty, giving as the reason that the purchaser of record was Amazon LLC, not Ravpower. Even though they advertised a warranty on their Amazon page, which was the main way they sold the devices.

Does Amazon not honour the warrenty in that case? I've never had to deal with a similar situation but I kind of figured that Amazon would do something if the page advertised a warranty and the company refuses to honour it.

I have never been able to get Amazon to honor a warranty when the manufacturer refused, even though the law in my country clearly says the retailer is responsible in the first place. In fact the button to return a product disappears from the order after a couple months, and they don't even have a category in their support system for this.

Talk to Amazon customer service and tell them you'd like to make a claim pursuant to consumer rights law.

... dreams of the EPA obtaining warrants for the fraud on the public for the disposal costs of so much wasted electronics...

I smell a class action.

In the EU you get 2 years warranty for all items from every retailer by law, and most generally honour them.

So this is a very frequently repeated misconception about what the EU law actually says.

Yes, there is an EU law that says retailers are responsible for 2 years(6 in a some cases) for any item they sold......but only to rectify any manufacturing defects. The law additionally states that any defect found in the first 6 months is presumed to be a manufacturing issue, anything after the first 6 months it's the responsibility of the customer to prove that the product has failed due to a manufacturing problem. I'm sure you can appreciate that this can be very hard to do.

It's not a "warranty" in the sense that most people mean warranty. If your laptop fails 18 months after purchase, the retailer only has to fix it if you can prove that it failed due to a manufacturing defect. It's different to manufactuer's warranty, which usually covers any defect no matter the reason.

And yes, there is also the law that states that products should last a "reasonable" amount of time - but what is reasonable is not a strict definition, and again, unfortunately sometimes has to be argued in small claims court. It's not so straigtforward.

However, in practice most good retailers do not make a big deal out of the burden of proof as long as there is no visible damage that could cause the issues.

I have used warranty frequently after 6 months and never had to prove it is a manufacturing defect. Of course, if you buy at some shady webstore or known-bad retailer, you might have more issues.

These are not EU laws, they are EU directives directing the member countries to implement laws. But these laws are not all the same, for instance in how much effort a customer has to make to ‘prove’ that a device failed due to a manufacturing defect.

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