Good Morning All. do you know what these are? They're connectors. Uh, let's take a look at one of them. Here are the sockets.

the pins I suppose you could call them although they're receptacles and there's also not very good action on this one. There's also a micro switch in the mechanism here so that it cuts the power when this thing opens out and there are several different types here. this one's actually only a two pin. most of the others are all.

the others are three pin. uh, again, a micro Sitch in there to cut the power. Well, they're the charging connectors for these things. electric hot water bottles.

So here's an old one which I've had for a while. There's the uh, the pins of the connector in there. three pins here. Not entirely sure how useful an earth is.

Um, this is a new um, this is uh, this I got from Lidl Actually, again, it's a three pin one. It's got the Ukca mark on it, so let's take a look at this one as I say this one came from Lidl and I got it um, recently and it's this. It's the Carmen rechargeable hot water bottle. It was 1795 which actually is a good deal cheaper than the other three I've got which were all around the 25 pound mark.

So this is a Carmen brand I believe Carmen did heated rollers years ago. It actually says here style and well-being since 1965 so this is just a brand for sale. If you look at Amazon you'll see that there are lots of this product, same image here and there's all different brand names up here. This has a three-year warranty, which is typical for products from Lidl But that does concern me a little bit because these things have a bit of an issue.

We'll just look at this briefly. Um, imported and distributed by Rkw Limited. St4 is that Stevenage UK Representative office is PowerForce distribution Ireland limited and of course it's made in China Now, the problem I've identified with this thing these things is that when you first get them, they're quite saggy. They're not over filled so you can kind of fold them like this.

However, my older hot water bottles, which I've had for well, at least a year. Um, I'll show you the blue one again. they puff up. Um, this one's nowhere near as sucky.

It's quite taught. Um, almost as though it's sort of got additional uh, liquid inside it. I Don't think it's quite water because when these are very cold, the it acts a bit like a gel. It doesn't slosh around so much.

So Now, when I charge this now, of course you're not charging it. In the sense of charging a battery, you're just simply heating up the liquid that's inside. here. There's some sort of heating element inside the bottle.

You can feel it. It's kind of. It's hard. I Just wonder if I can get an imprint on it.

Probably not on this one because as I say, it's all puffed up. Um, when I connect this and it starts to get warm, it puffs up like a scared cat and uh, it switches off and it switches off Far too cold. So I've connected the connector to this bottle. Um, that red light appears to be flashing, but it's not.

in reality. It's obviously, um, only taking half the sine wave. But this is starting to warm up now and I'll give it a moment and then we'll see at what point this connector switches off simply because the bottle's puffed up and the connector has opened out and the micro switch has uh Switched Off In fact, there it is and this is well, warm. But if you slosh this around, it soon becomes very tepid because it just hasn't had any time to heat the liquid inside.

And uh, yeah, if I put my hand in the Muff section, I think this is called a muff. isn't it a sort of double ended glove type section. Uh, this isn't warm at all. This is completely tepid.

So if you look on Amazon at these things like I said, they're about 25 pounds on Amazon A lot of the comments say worked for a while, worked possibly for the first year, but then stopped working. It doesn't warm up and that's right. it doesn't warm up because it switches off far too quickly because this thing has puffed up far too much. Now you can get around that and I'll show you how.

And the solution to this is that you just hold this down and you have to put quite a bit of force on it because as this thing puffs up, it really fights against you because it's it's getting quite, um, high pressure inside here. And yeah, you have to impact quite a bit of force on this connector to actually get the contents of this bottle. Uh, the least bit warm. Now, it doesn't feel particularly good doing this because you are having to put quite a bit of force on this and there is a concern that the bottle will explode.

It doesn't. Um, or it hasn't yet. Um, so this does work. But uh, yeah, you are overriding one of the safety features, which is the micro switch in this connector.

I Do believe that there are also thermal cutouts inside the heating element in here, or whatever that heating element is. Uh, not entirely sure how it works. So looking at the Carman unit again, the one I got from Lidl There's all sorts of stuff in here. It says charge for 10 to 15 minutes.

The indicator light indicator light will illuminate. The charger will automatically switch off. After this time, the appliance reaches 50 degrees, the indicator light will go out, and then it stays warm for between two and five hours. Um, It Also says a double temperature controller is incorporated.

When temperature reaches approximately 60 to 70 degrees, it will automatically switch off. So I'm thinking some sort of um Thermo I don't know. mechanical, perhaps bi-metallic thing inside, but it also has the hot water bottle has a protection device and the temperature rises higher than 85 degrees. C The protection device will start to work and automatically cut off the power.

so you've got something that cuts off at 50, something that cuts off at 60 to 70 and another thing which cuts off at 85 Are there really three temperature controlled devices in this? and what about the external micro switch when it puffs up and that switches off is that a fourth one? Hmm. So another couple of things about this. while it's warming up. Um, these fabric ones, they do get a bit dirty because you can't stick this in a washing machine.

I mean like you could get a scrubbing brush with a bit of detergent and give it a good Scrub But it's a lot of work and the point is you know this is designed to warm your hands so your hands are on this thing the whole time and any dirt and Grime on your hands gets transferred to the fabric and it starts looking like this kind of off color. slightly grayish I Hesitate to say brown, but certainly not blue color. So I've changed the camera angle in order to get a viewer just how puffed up this gets. So I'm just gonna press it down to re-enable the micro switch and then hold it with one finger and you can hear it boiling and it's fighting me and see how taut it's got.

It's really a balloon at this point. Yeah, that is puffed right up. Um I don't know how close to bursting that is. So I'll just show you my collection of these electric hot water bottles.

um, this blue one. Because of this issue with the fabric getting dirty quite quickly I Went for this one. Now this one's got no, uh, what's this flock? This is a fabric I think just glued onto the the rubber. This one is just plain rubber.

This was the one with just two pins. Didn't bother with a an Earth on this one. Uh, then there's this Carmen one which has already started to come apart actually. uh, this has started to pull out there.

so I ought to take this back actually and get my uh or get a replacement uh unit. And then the fourth one is this. I've had to go to a wider lens uh to get this in. This is a sort of horseshoe shaped one which you heat up and stick around your neck and again, this one is one that hasn't yet puffed up.

So actually yeah, that's quite taut there, but it's still quite saggy this one so this one still works fine. Now you may have seen um Clive do a tear down of a very cheap Chinese electric hot water bottle and the heating element wasn't an element, it was just too carbon rods and then presumably the water in in here has a little bit of um I don't know salts in it, maybe so that you get a a transfer of electricity through it. Now if that's the way this one works, then you will get oh, what's it called hydrolysis? Is it where you separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen? and that would certainly explain why they get puffed up over time, But I would hope that this type has actually a proper coiled wire heating element in it, in which case, you shouldn't get that generation of hydrogen and oxygen. but I just don't know.

And and certainly since these things do puff up, I'm just wondering whether they have a rather crude heating elements in them. So I'm going to start a tear down now. I'm not sure how far I'm going to get with this because I don't want to make a huge mess on my desk and I can't really go outside because it's snowing today, so we'll certainly take this screw out and have a look under this bit. I'll go back to the uh, more zoomed in lens so I'll just take this as a single screw holding this on and then it's hooked over the end with a little hook there and there's some sort of inspection Port here with a little white dot in it I'm not entirely sure what that is, but I I do intend to take some of these or perhaps more than some of these screws out and just see what happens.

See, perhaps if it starts leaking. Now these two I have removed and they don't seem to do much. they just appear to hold the polythene bag, which you can see the edges of this sort of evidence of it, but it doesn't leak. So I don't quite know how this works.

Uh yeah, they just hold the polythene bag up onto the connector and I'm not entirely sure what that inspection Port actually is for or what it does. Well, the next thing is to undo these screws. Now the question is if I start undoing these, will I get any leakage? or maybe they just hold this top plastic piece to the heating element piece underneath. Don't seem to have any leakage at the moment, so I'll keep removing these screws and uh, just see what the effect of that is.

So this is coming out. Ah, okay, we've got some wires uh, running down into there and there is a thermal cutout switch there. I'll take a closer look at that, right? that one is 92 degrees. Uh, Celsius So now this isn't the Carmen one, so maybe that one has a different thermal cut out, but that's just really in this aperture at the top here.

One thing I have noticed is if I tip this over, you can see if I tip it that way you can see the liquid rise up um into there and actually that changes color over so slightly doesn't It goes from a sort of creamy color to a gray color. so it's certainly an inspection. Port possibly for the liquid, but then the wires disappear. The red wire is actually connected through the thermal switch onto that third pin there.

Then you just have three wires disappearing down into the unit. Uh, red, blue and yellow. and beyond that, we can't see anything. So what do you think? do you think this is, um, a proper coiled wire heating element in a in a metal container with with an insulating um substance in there? Or is it something crude like a couple of carbon um, tips that just put electricity through the water which is pretty horrible.

Really? Yeah, how do you think this works? Um, and if there's sufficient interest and perhaps you know if this video makes a profit sufficient that I could cut one of these things up, then perhaps I'll take it apart further and investigate how the heating element works. But that's as far as I can go without totally destroying this. and of course, without the liquid coming out. and I don't really know what the liquid is I Imagine it's just water with um, well, something in it that turns it into a gel when it gets cold because they're quite.

They're quite stiff when they're cold these things. But I think that's it for this video. It was really just an introduction to the fact that I got four of these electric hot water bottles and they do seem to have multiple cut out systems. Um, hopefully to make these things relatively safe.

But as for the three year warranty on that Carmen One Yeah, it is a multi-part warranty. I think it's one year at the shop in two years. You have to register with Rkw importing and whatever they're called and they'll give you the extra two years. Of course, 90 of people won't bother to do that, and so they probably these things fail after a year and people don't bother to ask for a replacement unit.

But uh, yeah, that's it for this video. So cheerio.