A Question about Wall Warts

Don't do it. There are devices that work independently of the wall wart rating. But there are also a lot of devices that depend on the characteristics of the wall wart to operate properly. Just cause it says the same volgtage number on the sticker don't mean it will work. One of the symptoms is exploded batteries. If you knew how to tell which, you wouldn't have asked the question. There's a reason the manual says use only the supplied charger. mike

And that reason would be: "Because we lose money out the wazzoo if you don't buy *OUR* $50.00 "purpose-designed" unit instead of that quarter-the-price Radio Shack universal unit that runs anything."

That *REALLY* is the long and the short of it.

Fortunate coincidence. As far as I've ever been abe to figure out, the "standard" of connector size/layout versus volts/amps supplied is "What have we got in the back room that we can plug together for today's production run?" - I've had three of the same item, each with a diferent size/type of plug, despite the fact that they were all running on wall-warts labeled for the same V/A/polarity output.

That ignores the problems you're going to run into with muliple lines from each wart. Chances are good that it'll run fine as long as it's only feeding one gizmo at any given moment, but as soon as you hook up a second (or perhaps third, fourth, etc if you've got a beefy enough wart) load, things will start going wonky as the additional load drags the juice out of spec. (Drawing too many amps causing voltage to fall, not drawing enough causing voltage to spike, etc.)

Ok, I suppose I could use Fimo to make keyed connectors.

Couldn't this be fixed with a better regulator added to the warts circuitry?

teh yellow ones are standardized to some degree. Yippee! ISTR the pin diameter corresponds to current, and the outside dia to voltage.

For the OP: beware with your plan. Even if all your devices run from 6 volts, they may use the adaptor voltage differently. For example one ties the + to it schassis, the other it -. The moment you connect those two devices you have a short...

Thomas

Possibly (but only possibly). The old axiom about polishing a turd comes to mind.

Or when one gadget uses + for chassis ground and the second uses - for chassis ground, and you hook the two to each other :-).

Tim.

What if you use Turdle Wax? :-)

Tom

:-)

Tom

Is that what it's for? Then what would you use Johnson wax for?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I believe that is the short of it, but it you believe that's all there is to it, you have an explosion in your future.

You guys are missing a key point. The wall wart and the battery and the stuff in between are designed as a SYSTEM. It is VERY COMMON for a consumer device to use the high impedance of an unregulated wall wart to limit the charge current. It is common for laptops prior to Lithium to use a current limit in the wall wart to limit the battery charge current.

If you think you can ALWAYS be safe putting a 10A 9V supply on a device that says 9V on the label, you had better be wearing safety glasses and have a fire extinguisher handy.

Yes, there are many devices that don't have this problem. And if you could tell which, you wouldn't need to be asking the question here.

mike

After all the replies I've decided, to put up with the wall warts until one manufacturer realizes that getting rid of them would be a selling point. I'd be happy if they would just put a short power cord between the wart and the plug so it wouldn't cover two receptacles. I guess it's time to start saving power cords so I can mod them myself.

Best solution I found was to fix trunking to the wall and fill it with power sockets. Plugg in all the wall warts and use cable ties to hold them to the trunking if the want to fall out. Fold up and cable tie up any excess cable.

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Most of the wall warts were unregulated in the past and were 'linear', a simple transformer and rectifier/filter cap. Newer wall warts are often regulated and are a mini switch mode power supply. The linear unregulated wall wartss tend to have a lot higher output voltage especially when lightly loaded. Connecting one of these to a piece of equipment that came with a regulated wall wart could damage the equipment. Conversely, connecting equipment that had a linear wall wart to a regulated one could result in insufficient power to the equipment.

So to make a long story short, I think you're making a big mistake, and should not push your luck and risk damaging an expensive piece of equipment. If you want to do this to a ten dollar piece of equipment, fine, but don't do it to a several hundred dollar PDA, etc.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that you could damage the wall wart by overloading it.

Reminds me of today at work. Our plant mgr had a tumor taken out of his brain and he has problems with his balance, so he has to use a cane and a small three wheeled electric chair that he can hop on and ride from bldg to bldg. Today I was looking at the hand controls, and it has one for speed. In the push towards making it less dependent on language, instead of 'slow' and 'fast', they put a picture of a tortoise and a 'hare' rabbit! One only hopes that those users in other countries have heard that tale of the tortoise and hare. However, does that mean, if you crank it up all the way to the rabbit, you lose the race? ;-) This is verrry confusing! :-O

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I think you're making a wise decision: bettrer safe than sorry. You can buy power strips that have wider spacing to accommodate wall warts. I've also used a three pronged 'cube tap' with three outlets to allow me to plug two wall warts into a single power strip outlet, and leave enough room for the other outlets. I recently saw a 'power strip saver' which is a foot long. They weren't cheap tho, something like 6 bucks. Here's a cheaper one online, only two dollars.

Perhaps. The increased discharge rate might force you to stop for a recharge.

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Nah, just use a really long extension cord. ;-))

Same thing on my snowblower.

Ed