Yet another product safety issue - a self-balancing electric scooter, a.k.a. "Hoverboard"

Considering all the fuss about this particular type of personal transportation gadget having been responsible for numerous fire incidents, given that it is already part of a distant past (by modern perception), I took the chance of buying one of these units, going for a cheap one. My expectation was that this industry had some time to mature and learn with all the beating they received from the press and these incidents:

Once again bumping into questionable product safety standards

About 6 months ago, I replaced the manual plastic pump I used to have for dispensing water from 5+ litre jugs, with what would in principle be a more sophisticated and convenient approach: looked for an electric water dispenser, and without much searching, found several options. Most, if not all were unfortunately designed to fit into the 19 litre office water bottles. Without any alternative, ordered one of these, considering that I would have to come up with some custom adaptation if I wanted to use it with the 5 litre bottles. Ended up ordering the one below, for its minimally elegant design and compact dimensions:

After-market safety treatment of low cost products

There was a time when it was not possible to obtain a proper pure sine wave inverter (12 V DC -> 220 VAC 50 Hz) without shelling out hundreds of Euros or USD.

Today, with the massification of supply and demand, and with the sheer scale of the chinese industry producing these types of devices for consumer and industrial applications, prices necessarily went down.

Until recently I had a modified sine wave inverter, which given its limited compatibility with different types of loads, I have discarded (resold) and went looking for a cheap pure sine wave (which intuitively I expected to be much cheaper in current days).

Through Aliexpress, I found a 500 Watt/1000 Watt peak for 38 Euros (roughly the price I paid for the modified sine wave model years ago - and it was only rated to 250 Watts):