I recently had a customer contact me about a failure of our jewelry.  She had ordered a Blinky blue square necklace, and less than a month later one of the LED’s burned out.

In all our years of testing we’d NEVER had this happen before. Trust me, we’ve tried to break them any way possible.  We were very puzzled but I assured her I would give her a replacement.

It was very convenient that she lives in Madison WI too.  We met at a coffee shop and I gave her a new necklace.  We had a lovely chat and I was able to ask her a few questions about how it happened.  She said she was charging the jewelry when it started smoking.  She used an Anker charger with “PowerIQ Technology” like the one below.

After returning home, Marty and I dissected the offending piece of jewelry, and sure enough one of the LED’s was burned out.  Below is a closeup of the LED.

As you can see the LED is very charred.  It is not supposed to look that way, ever.  Everything else was working perfectly in the circuit, which was surprising because the LED is not supposed to be the weak link.  It was quite a puzzle.

Our guess is that the Anker’s PowerIQ technology wasn’t sure what to make of our jewelry.  Lumen jewelry is extremely low power and very energy efficient.  Unlike your usual phones or other devices the Anker would be used to charge.  The PowerIQ engineers have probably never seen anything like us, and so the power bank kept pumping more and more charge into the jewelry.  Eventually, it fried it.

We’re working on ways to prevent this failure in the future.  In the meantime be on the lookout.  Overcharging is most likely only an issue with certain chargers and our smaller jewelry pieces.  However we can’t test every charger, so if you think something is wrong PLEASE let us know.  We’ll happily replace anything that fails.

Live long and solder on,

Robin