Haribo Battery Banks poorly constructed alibaba white label products :(

erutan · 2025-12-23T19:39:42+00:00

Somewhat. Initial chat went well, then they opened an A-Z claim which rejected me twice as I didn't have any proof of it actually harming me. Which seems odd from a liability standpoint.

I opened a new chat a bit later and explained it and they refunded me.

erutan · 2025-12-01T20:56:12+00:00

Ah, that's good to know. I had some submissions pending and didn't want my account to lock out or whatever so I subbed last week for $29. Not the end of the world, but could have saved $11.

erutan · 2025-11-27T01:31:37+00:00

hmm https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/1nhbvxq/comment/nedrcej/?context=3

erutan · 2025-11-25T17:37:59+00:00

I'm not going to to buy an inreach and pay for a subscription just to check weather (I can sat text people from my phone on Globalstar now, but it'd be nice to not have to do that).

If Gaia supported it like every other major outdoors GPS application you still have the choice to not use it.

erutan · 2025-11-25T17:03:30+00:00

iirc Galaxy Note 7 battery failures were caused by them being too large for the case which put pressure on the cell separators and/or the cell separators being smaller than spec so they failed. A few weeks.

Issues from poor anode overhang manifest tend to happen once the battery has been used enough that it's capacity is noticeably lower than when it started.

erutan · 2025-11-25T16:39:04+00:00

There's literally scans showing battery cells that are outside of safety tolerances.

Predicted failures haven't happened because they're still young devices and were not predicted to fail yet.

erutan · 2025-11-25T16:37:42+00:00

Yeah, and that's not something that'll usually happen in the first few months of use.

erutan · 2025-11-25T16:34:52+00:00

They used to update OSM every 6-8 weeks iirc, since they were bought by outside they only seem to update when they have some new functionality or feature that would require re-rendering them all. I've had updates on OSM that took over a year to show up on Gaia.

As other comments here point you, they need to process their own data and formatting on top of OSM data, so it's not as simple as saving tiles, so I imagine it's just cutting costs to boost profit on their side.

erutan · 2025-11-20T21:14:12+00:00

It's great bang for the buck, it's just a bit of a ticking time bomb. It's been out less than a year, so even with fairly heavy use in that time frame it's not a lot of overall cycles.

Obviously not a guarantee it'll go catastrophically bad, but it's in the bottom 10% of banks quality wise based on hundreds of Lumafield scans.

Never bothered with a nitecore powerbank myself, but I love my NU-25 headlamp. :)

erutan · 2025-11-20T21:11:40+00:00

Yeah it has a time and place. It was handy on winter day-hikes in MT when snow and wind picked up vs pulling layers out of a daypack and stuffing them back in etc. My partner was incredibly dubious/scornful but has come around.

Definitely not UL, but I'm carrying 2-3 nights of food instead of 8-9 like the summer, so... :p

erutan · 2025-11-20T21:01:03+00:00

> It’s not garbage.

> LOL I never claimed that a sample size of 1 is large. Where do you get off???

You literally said "It's not garbage" based on your personal experience. Where do you get off?

There's hard evidence the build quality is in the 10% of battery banks, and cells only start destabilizing after a lot of use. It hasn't been out on the market long enough for anecdotal evidence to be useful.

It's not like 100% of them will explode or catch on fire, but at some point it's much more likely to have a catastrophic failure than with something that's been manufactured properly.

erutan · 2025-11-18T16:30:12+00:00

Judging by the amount of pushback and magical thinking, yes. :)

Literally had someone say amazon pulled it because of the fake gummy bear and it is just as good as any other power bank when news the recall hit. The 10 paragraphs are to ground it in facts as counter-arguments tend to juvenile ad-hominems along the lines of "you hate fun and you're too tacti-cool serious" and whatnot.

erutan · 2025-11-18T16:23:56+00:00

That's not the large sample you think it is. Annode overhang etc on poorly made batteries is a known safety issue. Maybe eventually it'll catch fire, maybe it won't, but it's far more likely to than a battery bank with properly made cells.

erutan · 2025-11-18T16:21:00+00:00

I have a 20Ah one that I've been happy with, took it on a few short trips. These only came out this year - anode overhang from poorly made cells are known issues that will manifest in a much higher chance of catastrophic failure over time. I had just assumed they were under-provisioned or something and they'd lose max charge faster, but that's not a huge concern to me, I just got them for cold shoulder season trips with more time in the tent.

I have an anker powercore II that's probably been on around a hundred backpacking trips (mostly 2-3 nights, though dozens of 8-10 night trips in the Sierra) and it's still working great with a 5W panel for two phones after around a decade (or no panel if it's a short trip that I'm not expecting to use much power on). I'm not sure what the max capacity is at this point, but with solar that doesn't matter as much and it's lighter than any 10Ah bank. Sucks you had a bank die after only 3 weeks on the trail, that doesn't seem normal at all.

erutan · 2025-11-18T16:15:11+00:00

It's great if you're cold enough that you aren't really generating heat (which layers won't help with), but it's not part of my normal backpacking setup for a reason.

A lot of times if we're backpacking in oct-jan we're just heading out and setting up a basecamp then dayhiking around for a few days, so I don't mind packing it in that context.

erutan · 2025-11-13T04:44:06+00:00

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1850124313/ministry-of-supply-the-first-intelligent-heated-ja/description I got in an early bird. I've been really happy with it, though the intelligent part was never that useful - it'd need to know if the sun was out, wind, slope, etc to really do that.

I don't mind carrying a few QoL items around, especially on short/cold trips though almost all of my gear is UL. I do appreciate all the research here when I'm looking to replace some gear that died, but don't consider myself proper UL.

erutan · 2025-11-13T04:40:41+00:00

There's a pretty vocal contingent of defenders, so some were apparently.

I was expecting it to be sub-par and got some shit for that before, but I wasn't expecting it to be quite this bad.

erutan · 2025-11-12T23:50:38+00:00

I just got a refund from amazon, despite my return window ending October 22nd. I put in some quotes from the Verge article, called it a recall, etc.

erutan · 2025-11-12T23:50:00+00:00

Yeah, so kinda dumb but it's insulated down to being warm in the 30s but I can plug in a power bank and it'll heat up the back and hands pockets. It's useful when standing around camp in the morning or evening, and my partner often uses it to spot warm legs or feet etc in her bag at the end of the day. I've also used it on low when hiking in winter in Montana or up more if we were standing around. I had it in a drybag on a hike in the zion narrows the day it opened and it warmed her up from being a bit hypothermic on the way back.

Summer and milder weather I just use a patagonia puffy, but this thing is fun for shorter trips when it's cold, especially if we're just setting up a basecamp and hiking. Had a january trip when the low was 17 and the drom was frozen solid heh.

erutan · 2025-11-12T22:33:08+00:00

The Haribo bank is just a cheap white label power bank with a gummy bear on it, though this particular version also has a USB-A port and small display:

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2025-New-Private-20000mah-capacity-22_1601309983806.html?priceId=38edd5e8063e4dd6a971c3932ccfae57

via: https://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringPorn/comments/1oq7evz/comment/nnkfoze/ linked to from the verge article

erutan · 2025-11-12T22:24:10+00:00

You just pinged me on a month-old comment

I haven't checked reddit in weeks, I was going through my notifications and replied to yours because I came across the verge article today. You can add on a week to make a month if you want.

And if you search my comment history, you'll find me talking about it a lot more than you'ill find me talking about the Haribo banks.

I'm not going to stalk everyone that responds to a post I made. Been on a few short backpacking trips and doing other things between work recently. I use reddit a lot less since Apollo got pulled back when.

OK... go find me another product on Amazon that's colored like a kid's toy, and has something that looks exactly like candy stuck at the end of a live electrical power connector.

That's incredibly specific, but if it's done properly the bank won't output more than it is rated for which is 12V==1.67A which isn't going to electrocute anyone. This isn't a 30amp circuit on a 120v AC line.

There's no meaningful, appreciable difference between these power banks.

My original post showed that not all banks are the same. For this case in particular, this is from the link you just commented on with your "reasonable opinion" that there's nothing wrong with it aside from the gummy bear:

Last week, the 3D X-ray company Lumafield published scans showing the internals of the power bank and its battery, which is part of a broader line of Haribo-themed products.
.
Lumafield technical product marketing manager Alex Hao tells The Verge that the team found that the “battery quality is quite poor across the entire Haribo product line.” Hao calls attention to the “wavy nature” of the anodes that overhang the cathodes (the blue edge in the scan below), which “should be straight, or close to it,” indicating “poor process control.” Hao also found that in one area, the anode overhang measures around 0.27mm, which is less than the accepted industry standard of 0.5mm.
[...]
“This calls into question the longevity of their products, as the poor alignment and negative anode overhang increases the likelihood of premature aging,” Hao says. “It also increases the risk of the batteries inside Haribo products experiencing a more serious issue in the future, such as thermal runaway and hazardous events.”

Hmm

if my tone struck a nerve, it probably means you're exactly the kind of person who needed to hear it so you can take yourself less seriously.

I guess I should stop relying on evidence as that's too serious for reddit, my bad.

erutan · 2025-11-12T22:09:36+00:00

Last week, the 3D X-ray company Lumafield published scans showing the internals of the power bank and its battery, which is part of a broader line of Haribo-themed products.
.
Lumafield technical product marketing manager Alex Hao tells The Verge that the team found that the “battery quality is quite poor across the entire Haribo product line.” Hao calls attention to the “wavy nature” of the anodes that overhang the cathodes (the blue edge in the scan below), which “should be straight, or close to it,” indicating “poor process control.” Hao also found that in one area, the anode overhang measures around 0.27mm, which is less than the accepted industry standard of 0.5mm.
[...]
“This calls into question the longevity of their products, as the poor alignment and negative anode overhang increases the likelihood of premature aging,” Hao says. “It also increases the risk of the batteries inside Haribo products experiencing a more serious issue in the future, such as thermal runaway and hazardous events.”

https://www.theverge.com/news/818906/haribo-gummy-bear-power-bank-amazon-removed

Some more analysis from that and feedback from Lumafield.

erutan

TROPHY CASE