In reality its only the threat of legal action and the size of that action that controls primarily what is sold nowadays.
That's part of business. Its bad for business if some one sues you successfully. Thus there is a balance between selling dangerous rubbish for greater profit or less dangerous stuff for less profit.
I spent a lot of time sifting through imported rubbish for Jaycar and giving opinions on whether I though stuff was safe or saleable.
You cannot believe the dangerous rubbish I have seen, let alone whether it worked or not.
The scale of sales is: if you give it away you will sell a million, if you make a top product and charge a lot no one will buy it.
Thus most stuff sold is cheap, fails quickly, hardly does what it is rated to do, and you buy another one to keep the smoke coming out of the Asian factory chimneys. Most "intelligent" Australians think this is the way to go.
I spent many years making tough long lasting machinery that did the job, would last for several generations, could be repaired and we were so stupid thinking that Aussies would stick with a good product and not buy the cheap flashy chrome plated light weight s**t that we succumbed to.
And thank you to the gormless government that dropped tarif protections, that other countries still apply, and killed local industry.
Level playing field my backside.
I watched other firms die as well, making diesel generating equipment, DC to AC invertors, UPS systems, Solar panels and so on.
Smart techs and scientists headed overseas where they could continue studies and make money.
Anyway, i'm an old man ranting...…………
Hopefully our current crop of scientists and engineers can re-integrate Australia into a better position of standing in the world. Pity a bunch of them cant even spell, speak or add!!!!!!
Fred.

Here's a perfect example of what I think Fred is saying. When I wanted a bench grinder about ten years ago I made sure I bought a second hand one instead of new. Why? Because today's grinders generally don't have the horsepower to go the distance. You put the work on the wheels and the machine slows down, even when using moderate pressure. On an older, Australian-made GMF or Durst, no worries, the motor just keeps spinning and you get the job done. When you turn machines like this off it takes more than a minute for the wheels to stop spinning and with this you know that the motor's bearings are also still in top condition after decades of service. I will never part with the beast I purchased.

A couple of months back I purchased a citrus juicer with a brand on it that starts with B.
It's an Aussie company that dates back to the 1930s and made radios, hair clippers and the like. You know the one.

This unit is pitched at heavy duty cafe users. It appears to be solidly made and rugged. It was not cheap.

Anyway, after juicing a bag of oranges it stopped working. So I left it a while and cleaned up.

Hey presto, it works again! But after a few minutes, it stops again.

A quick look inside showed a thermal cutout attached to the motor's stator core and a very hot core.

Monitoring the motor's current draw waveform on no load shows the core is saturating.

Hmmm! What do you suppose? Factory in China substituted mild steel for silicon steel in the core laminations?

About 10 years ago I bought a pair of APC UPS things. They both died after about a year, after never having been used in anger. The first one lost its AC input, leaving the computer to run on the battery. There was no alarm, and It died before I could shut everything down. The second one stopped working after another few months, but I can't remember the exact details.

So, both of them went in the bin. There were no burnt parts, and no blown fuses. So as to what actually blew, I have no idea.

UPSs are funny things. Some are completely dumb and just supply around 15 minutes of power before running flat. Others come packaged with management software and an ethernet lead, which the UPS is connected to your LAN with and then the software installed on an available server, one that isn't as busy as the others. When there is a blackout the software monitors the battery levels and then when the crunch time is getting closer it will shut down your servers one by one until there is no load on the UPS. Following this, the UPS will shut down before the batteries get too depleted, remembering that if you let a lead acid battery fall below around 10 volts it shortens the batteries life. Most UPSs will also not run from the battery off the bat. They need to be started on mains first and then allowed to fall over to the battery.

The only object to all this is money. Oddly enough, in the days when I hosted websites I did not worry about the software even though the UPSs could handle it. The batteries were quite big so the four main servers would be split across two 3kVA UPSs and the less important servers would be split across a few 1kVA ones. The general theme was that if the batteries ran out, they ran out but the bigger units were good for four hours with the load they had on them. The web server, DNS servers and the modems were on the bigger UPSs. Mail, IRC and an NTP server were on the smaller UPSs. Given that I already had things well backed up and each server had two discs, my priority was uptime over data protection. If a disc died or a server needed repairs, there was usually no barrier to it apart from being a pain in the clacker.

Fitting in with this the Mens Shed here in the usual "In good faith" (aka cleaning out dad's shed in many cases) donations actually occasionally contain usable stuff. There were two bench grinders that actually came from a government dept. and were Australian made.

You could hear both of them for about two blocks away (probably why we got them) all that was needed were new bearings, so I did that & they will probably last till that lot quit. What a waste of energy material & machine time to toss it when you cannot buy better.

It appalls me when you buy a piece of gear from asia which not only is of poor quality but it is unfit for it's intended job.
There must be thousands of these little factories churning out this stuff without one thought as to whether it may work or not.
The primary objective is to get you to buy it. Whether it functions or not is of no interest to them.
When buying any appliance these days my first inquiry is where was it designed and where was it made.
Often you have no choice but occasionally you do, for instance some years ago I bought a stand mixer with the brand "Kitchen Aid" which is made in Michigan and is built like a tank, weighs a considerable amount and works exactly as intended.
It can even kneed bread dough which stalls any other brand mixer.
Good stuff is out there but it's hard to find.

(Bring back the sunbeam radiant heat toaster)

I may be old and grumpy but I'm in good company!

Ian your juicer is a reminder of what I found while evaluating stuff.
Yes they probably used iron of the same grade as tin cans because they did not know better.
That pointed me toward a huge truth.
The Asian manufactuers did not have the benefit of many generations of engineering research as the Europeans did from the late 1700's through to 1900's. Thus they did not have the pedestal of knowledge won from the research to base designs on and so can make fundamental dumb mistakes in engineering design. I saw this so much. The level of research of many Chinese suppliers was to take a Japanese designed (or European) object and copy it as exactly as they could. If there was something subtle in the type of iron used in the core they would not have a clue having no base of knowledge and make an exact copy out of.....plain sheet metal!
I have a particular example in mind the common Variac. You will all be familiar with the red coloured type sold by several electronic suppliers over the decades. They would smoke and burn out if the primary voltage exceeded 270 volt just sitting there doing nothing.
Why? Because they copied the core dimensions and copper turns exactly as the original, BUT, the core material of the original had a much larger magnetising capacity type steel. As you raised the excitation voltage on a English Variac sample the magnetising current just goes up in proportion the steel being on the flat part of the excitation curve. The "Red" brand is already on the top of the curve and saturated, let alone any load applied. Raise the voltage above 230 volt and the excitation current goes up in a vertical line!
My advice to the supplier was to go and get some f#$$$$%g decent steel in their cores and stop wasting our time.
I can give you all many more examples of monkey see, monkey do, design that comes horribly apart but I wont.
The other point was, above I was speaking in the past tense, because I kept saying once they get a bit of field testing under their belt (I.E. selling to the stupid round eyes) they would actually work out how to make stuff that does work well and last. Trouble is we buy so much crap from them we have trained them to hold the lower level of quality/life and we have made our own beds. They sell the good stuff to their armies and export the crap to us.
We need a government that works out the best way forward is to forget "international level field trading" (Ha!) stop importing crap and make our own factories fire up, make what we need and forget other countries. Our engineering and science is capable unfortunately the bulk of the population are sheep and elect PR men to herd the sheep.
How was that for a rant!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Fred.

Its interesting: I have had a red one for a while & use it to adjust the volts to the isolation transformers going down to 110V. However, I scored a Bombay special (Dimmerstat): What a beautiful construction job it is. The sweeper actually has a carbon brush. It outputs to terminals but that can be made safe. Not in any way cheap & nasty.

What I do find annoying is finding stuff with out mains plug & sockets on 100V stuff.

Yeh Marcc that unit is probably a version of a type like BTH or Seimens made under licence and will last forever.
I have one mounted above my work bench and never give it a moments thought.
Yes it has an actual carbon brush not the piece of lead pencil some of the Red ones have!
I shouted at them and they put in a blade thin carbon brush that did not burn a hole in the winding!!!
I had awful trouble convincing my Asian friends that some parts of Australia like WA commonly had 270 volt and the gear they made had to accommodate that. Their design centre figure was 220 volt! That was back in the 90's, I would expect the state voltages are pretty much the equal nowadays. I have been out of the distribution loop since the late 90's.
In Sydney you could get 270 volt if you were near a line transformer!
Red variacs afire!
Fred.

We had a guy in the Radio Club here who was in charge of the area around Benalla when it was the SEC. I had some issues with the main transformer here & apparently it was not supposed to exceed 252 and it was rapidly getting there.

The Americans are having a lot of issues with particularly Zenith radios where the transformers were fairly marginal at 110 Volts & when they raised the voltage and there were no tapings, they were even more marginal & many fried.

Marc

The proliferation of solar panels has not helped regulation of mains voltage either. It can often be above 250V.