Buying laptop batteries on ebay - Never again!

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Interesting. I've purchased both batteries and chargers on eBay for my Dells and never had an issue. I have no idea which seller I had, but everything worked fine. I'm not paying Dell prices for OEM replacements.
 
When necessary, I rebuild my own battery packs. I only buy quality cells. Used LT batteries are indeed a racket. The local confuser place doesn't "refurbish" anything...they don't even blow the dust out of the case & fans before reselling.

The price they want for USED batteries is ridiculous as well.

FUBAR.
 
did the seller require you to ship the duds back?
i get about one in 12-15 thats stillborn when buying ebay/amazon packs.
mostly bms programming faults and bad connections.
only one wanted the dud back and sent a tag for it.
so i get to tear down the duds.
some are grossly overstated capacity wise.
like 5200mah while being built with 1800mah cells rather than 2600.
some are quite good units and hold up fine.
the nice thing about getting to keep the duds is you get whatever number of free 18650 cells!
the cells are never the issue.
so brand new cells for the flashlights,ect.
so if you still have the duds and have those silly flashlights that take 3 aaa in a carrier you have a supply of free batteries!
just order up a decent charger and tear the packs apart.
or if you dont want to do that but want to know what they were made of send them to me.
Originally Posted By: Reddy45
I'm sure that most here are wise enough to avoid this route, but I needed a new battery for the Dell Latitude I recently repaired.

So a few pertinent points:

1. The OEM battery runs about $100+ from Dell for the 34WHr model. There is also a 47WHr model that costs probably $150+.
2. Dell claims that only they sell OEM batteries. (maybe also their authorized resellers who service enterprise clients with equipment leases)

Well unsurprisingly, eBay is absolutely flooded with Chinese sellers who are basically selling counterfeit/generic versions of every Dell battery in existence. The WHr claims are all over the place, with generic versions of the 34WHr, 47WHr, and some even claim to make a ~58WHr version. You can't even know which model they are selling because they spam the titles and descriptions with every battery model (34GKR, PFXCR, F38HT)

Prices range from $18 shipped to $120+ shipped (for the exact same battery).

So I noticed a few things about the counterfeit battery listings that made me realize the direness of it all:

1. Most ads used the exact same stock photo.
2. Most ads used the sort of "jagged" font-face indicative of someone on a computer that is not configured to input English.
3. Most ads claimed a location of "US, US". The ones that were specific to a city often claimed to be in NY or CA.
4. Most ads had a surprisingly good seller rating, usually around 98% or higher, but with a LOT of sales in the last 12 months (tens of thousands of sales). If you looked at only the negative feedback, you could see that SOME sellers were accused of selling counterfeit batteries, but some were sparking clean.


Well I decided to be risky and found a listing that claimed to sell a "New Genuine PFXCR E7440 Battery For Dell Latitude...". Price around $35 shipped so right in the middle of it all.

It ships out from Flushing NY, a few days pass, and on arrival the darn thing was WARPED. If you put it on a flat surface, it would wobble back and forth. It was also suspiciously light weight... almost as if the cells inside it were not genuine.

I contact the seller for a return, and then I notice yet another warning sign: they only seem to respond between the hours of 8PM to 8AM central time. Sure they could be a night owl, but then again I can think of a region in this world where those equivalent hours would be day time.

And yup - the communication I had with the seller made it obvious that I was dealing with a Chinese merchant who had a friend or family member in the US do all their shipments.


Anyway to wrap it up, I'm currently on my 2nd return with this seller since the replacement they sent out was also warped.


But to provide a decent ending to it all, I found a small company in GA that does used tech wholesale and they were able to get me a lightly used but in great shape battery for $30.
 
The problem that I've seen with batteries on eBay, is that they'll advertise them as "NEW OEM" batteries. When it shows up, it is an OEM battery, and it very well might be new.... but it is dead as a brick and won't take a charge.... and is possibly older than the battery that I'm wanting to replace.

Instead, I'd rather have a fresh, non OEM battery instead. The one I'm using from DTK right now.... 5 hr 00 min (86%) remaining.
 
Originally Posted By: bubbatime
There is a HUGE industry in China, of taking used laptop turn in batteries (by the millions and millions from Chinese consumers). They remove the battereies from the battery packs, charge them, and get rid of the "totally" dead cells. The batteries that still have life, are then repackaged and sold to American consumers as "new" battery replacements. They are also wrapped in plastic and sold as new 18650 batteries for flashlights. Most laptop batteries use a bank of 18650 batteries.

If you are handy, there are tutorials online how to rebuild these laptop battery packs. Basically, you buy new Sanyo(made in Japan) cells for about $5 each, times however many battery cells that your laptop came with. About $25-40 to do it yourself with premium, brand new, made in Japan Sanyo or Panasonic cells.

There are also rebuild services if you are not handy, such as Batteries Plus and others.
recycled cells
 
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