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"2. Safety. Search this forum and you'll find accounts of lights catching fire, blowing up, dripping burning oil from the capacitors - there may or may not be a risk of electrocution, but for me, the fire risk (especially when used in a house with a carpeted floor and very likely where, unlike a professional studio, there are no fire extinguishers) is enough"
The ONLY time this comes up is if its cheap, if this post had of come up in a post about Bowens, Elinchrom etc with a known name the number "2" would not of been put on a public forum.
You know, this whole thread would be very funny if people weren't getting so agitated by it.
You seem baffled why somebody would mention safety in regard to lights but not (for example) a bag.....
Buy a cheap bag and it may rip and dump your gear in the mud - or worse on concrete. Buy a cheap tripod and it may trap your finger or collapse and damage your kit. All of these would be regrettable but not disproportionate losses from saving a bunch of money on easily understood items.
When I run training courses (on behalf of Lencarta and others...) one of the points I make is that even a properly manufactured monoblock is probably the most dangerous item of electrical equipment you can come into contact with in a domestic setting. (See also the thread on PAT testing that went on for months...). A badly manufactured head could literally be lethal - not just to the owner but to anybody in the vicinity if it happened to catch fire or explode.
Now the reason you never see that mentioned as a risk for Elinchrom/Bowens etc is that they are properly manufactured and tested. And if they caused a fire then the company that made them wouldn't have a reputation for very long. The brand is literally the guarantee. As well as a trustworthy company disclosing that they have complied with CE rules.
A no name seller of kit under many brands on eBay? Well yes, a fire could damage their reputation. But it would take minutes to create a new identity.
I'm not certain it's a big risk (though IIRC there have been at least 2 users here who found similar kit stopped working abruptly) - but the impact of the use makes it worth considering.
For example, years ago I bought some mains triggers of eBay. A friend who knows far more than I do about these things looked at them and said that they weren't even close to UK regs (something about which wires were connected to the switch). Rather than buy super expensive triggers I swapped to battery ones since I understand the impact of failure would be much less. Without an electrician to explain it to me it would never have occurred to me that switches can be dangerous.