SaferProducts incident

Failure type

Overheating

Incident narrative

SaferProducts.gov consumer incident report 20220913-2D38A-2147353888. Severity: Incident, No Injury. Product: Viking 63350 (Viking 6/12v 4amp high frequency battery charger/maintainer). Incident: Viking 4amp charger became hot and bursted within the plastic . I had a whiff of burning plastic so i knew something was up and out of nowhere there was a red flash and after somthing kept shorting out to something inside the charger i quickly unplugged the device. This all happened within seconds. The device was previously acting up. I had a bought one previously which just stopped working . Upon inspection of the one i have now i opened it up to examine the pc board to see if i could repair whatever electronic components were fried(as a hobby i have a little experience with pc boards and components and soldering skills ect.) i traced the suspect fail component to a 8 pin IC (tpc8124)09 it is visually burnt but didnt do any further testing of the device since i was just going to find a equivalent IC and repair it which i started by looking up the datasheet and somehow ended up on harbor freights recall page which led me here. Also it looked like the neutral and hot(no ground) input solder joints were starting to melt the plastic around it. There is multiple complaints on this device on the reviews on their website. Its a cheap charger so didnt really mind but it killed my mini 12v agm lawn mower battery which made me mad.