KP184 Earth Safety

Kunkin KP184 Electronic Load Issues Fixed | Voltlog #302

In this video I’m going to address the issues I found with the Kunkin KP184 electronic load during the review and teardown of the unit but also some issues people mentioned in the comments. There are 7 things I would like to address in total:

Binding post internal diameter issue.
Grounding issue with blue metal enclosure.
Bad solder joints on thick wires coming to mainboard.
IRFP250M mosfet safe operating area, fake or genuine?
Supposed bug in tripping over-power protection.
Supposed noise in constant current mode loop.
Calibration procedure.

Nothing changes in terms of this being the best electronic load you can buy in this price range, II like it and I highly recommend it if you need to test power supplies or batteries, I think you will be pleased with this unit. If you would like to see the review or the teardown video I will link those on screen right now so you just have to click somewhere in this area. As always thank you for watching and don’t forget you can support this channel on Patreon.

Best Affordable Electronic Load – Kunkin KP184 Teardown | Voltlog #300

In the previous video I reviewed the KP184 electronic load, I showed you all the features it has, I tested the accuracy of the front panel meter but the video was getting quite long and I skipped the teardown for a future video. Well, this is it, it looks like we have a bunch of screws that have to be removed to slide the folded metal cover off.

As you may remember from the previous video I discovered something related to wiring & safety, the earth wire was connected to the bottom part of the enclosure but it wasn’t connected to this blue cover which is also metallic. Now we can see why, this has a thick coat of paint so we can fix this by either scraping the paint away in the area where this makes contact with the bottom part or we could add a separate earth wire which would probably be a more reliable way to fix this.

The first thing I’m noticing is the silkscreen, this board is version 04 and has a date code of November 2019. And there are a bunch of other nicely placed labels for various signals throughout the board. Soldering looks to be nice and clean with the exception of these thick wires coming from the bottom board, which in this particular joint looks like it hasn’t flowed sufficiently, I will have to fix that later. Wires are nicely secured with adhesive to their end connectors and apart from these thick wires coming from the bottom board everything has connectors which makes it easy to disassemble and service.

Checkout the teardown pictures of the Kunkin KP184 electronic load below

Best Affordable Electronic Load – Kunkin KP184 Review | Voltlog #299

Welcome to a new video, this will be a review of a new test instrument I discovered, you know I like electronic loads and I’ve tested a bunch of hobby grade electronic loads in the past, these were sub $50 items and that budget also meant they had some disadvantages like limited power, limited reliability, limited connectivity, limited functionality and limited accuracy. You were basically trading off a bunch of stuff to be able to get a cheap affordable electronic load.

This is the Kunkin KP184 and I believe this will be a game changer for those who are looking to get something a bit more professional but are still limited by budget and they can’t go for the better instruments starting at 500 USD. The unit is delivered in a large box with nice padding protection and inside you get the instrument, a user manual and a few accessories like some spade connector, an RS232 cable and some wiring.

Let’s talk a bit about the specs of this unit, I have the KP184 model which is like their better equipped model, it works with both 110 and 240VAC, the load voltage can be a DC voltage between 1 and 150V, up to 40A, up to 400W. Measurement accuracy is 0.05% + 5 counts for both current and voltage with 1mV and 1mA of resolution, we’ll be verifying that later. There is RS232 and RS485 connectivity with a modbus protocol which is specified in the user manual and there is a piece of software for the PC, you have to obtain it from the manufacturer which doesn’t respond to emails but I’ve managed to source it and I’m gonna put a link to this in the description below the video and I’ll try to connect it towards the end of this video.

If you would like to checkout the teardown of the Kunkin KP184 click here.