One two three FOUR duff lights!

A friend of mine had a tip off (me) that four Chauvet 305 Barrels were going for a song & he snapped em up. Problem was they're all deaded. The issue.. dead power supplies among other things.

Anyway here's the rub: Scoping around for a suitable replacement PSU (once fault finding time goes over a set amount it's uneconomical to repair) I found the manufacturer on AliExpress, selling exactly the model Chauvet use.

FOR SIX DOLLARS apiece.

$6 USA... in singles, nevermind what volume discounts the OEM gets.

In a light fixture retailing at very nearly 400 quid! Where's the profit?!

Yours sincerely, disgusted of Co. Durham.

Look at the logistics of equipment.

Take a £400 light. 20% of that is vat.

So it's a £333 light.

Now the retailer is going to need to make some profit on selling it.

And the distributer is going to need a profit.

And the manufacturer wants a profit too.

I don't reckon they cost more than about £25-£30 to produce. The rest of the cost is getting it to you.

I purchased a solar powered battery led light from wilko yesterday for £1. Again they need profit from it - so it must have cost a couple of pence to make.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rth_discos

I don't reckon they cost more than about £25-£30 to produce. The rest of the cost is getting it to you.

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Where's Toby when you need him? :confused: Buying £300-£400 lights for twenty quid, from Ali Baba and his forty friends- as long as you took a hundred or more.
And allowed for a fairly high attrition rate of failure and non-starters. :shrug:

It's not restricted to disco lights, chaps. I used to service twenty tons of agricultural equipment, built to the highest possible specifications.

Controlled by a brain built down to a cost. A low cost. A very very low cost. :mad: Substituting a £2.50 component for a 50p one cured a serious design fault. In a machine worth around £50k!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rth_discos

I purchased a solar powered battery led light from wilko yesterday for £1. Again they need profit from it - so it must have cost a couple of pence to make.

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Look Gavin, I know some folk are promoting " Green Discos", but don't you think that's taking it a little too far? :whistle:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Excalibur

Where's Toby when you need him?

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#BringBackToby

An important point here is that a quality power supply would cost maybe £15 in decent volumes. Modern manufacturers are significantly reducing the lifespan of their products by cheaping out on vital parts. I wouldn't be bothered so much were it not for the fact this is affecting 'decent' manufacturers now not just cheap crap full of deadly Chinesium.

Re our mutual friend Ali.. I've got 14 mains powered uplights from there. They weren't expensive & I gave them all a once over when they arrived. I ended up replacing every IEC inlet & outlet and adding mains earth wiring to them. Other than those points they were absolutely sound :lol:

Having repaired one of said barrels I'll be resuming work on the others. The prognosis for two of them isn't looking good. The PSU going wonky seems to have damaged the motor control boards (the microcontroller is getting hot & merely replacing that part isn't an option without code to program into it).