You’ve probably seen the extremely cheap batteries and power banks available on Temu and similar sites. You may even be tempted to buy some. Let us be the first to tell you: do not.
At ONE MORE TIME, the core of what we do is testing and verifying the batteries we use in our own products. We know what they cost, how they should perform, and what “normal” looks like. Something felt off with these Temu batteries, so we bought a batch to test.
In a shock to absolutely no one, these batteries are not what’s advertised. But how bad are they really?
We bought 10 batteries total, five “2600 mAh” and five “2200 mAh”. These seemed like relatively tame, believable capacities (we’ve seen sellers claim 9000 mAh 18650s before lol), so our hopes were at least decent. We put them through our lithium testers, and here are the results:
|
Advertised Capacity |
Advertised IR |
Sample Size |
Times Tested |
Avg Tested Capacity |
Avg IR |
Health Score |
Result |
|
2200 mAh |
25 mΩ |
5 |
5 |
719 mAh |
80 mΩ |
32% |
FAIL |
|
2600 mAh |
25 mΩ |
5 |
5 |
1043 mAh |
40 mΩ |
40% |
FAIL |
The results speak for themselves. We expected that, even if they were exaggerated, they’d at least come in somewhere around 80% health. Instead, these numbers are so low that our testers flagged them as not fit for any use at all. Because of the high internal resistance, they aren’t even safe to reuse. They went straight into recycling with the other non-salvageable batteries.
Again, these are brand-new batteries that are going straight to recycling. Bad for you, bad for your devices, and terrible for the environment.
And if this is the quality of the cells, imagine the quality of the power banks being built from them.
If you need a high-quality, local, and environmentally positive power bank, check out the ONE MORE NIGHT. It’s built from tested cells with real capacity and real safety, the opposite of what we found on Temu.