I'm listening to a guy from https://www.ifixit.com/ on the radio. He inspires me to at least start thinking about replacing the battery in my non-replaceable Redmi Note 3.
Ok, the battery is a BM46. I look that up. Roadblock- overseas sellers won't ship it to Australia. Or will they? It's confusing- most of them won't but a few will. What's the deal? Is it legal to ship a 4000mAh lithium battery to Australia?
Yes, that looks suitable- if it's genuine. I don't need it yet.
Legal? Yes, but only when specially marked as dangerous goods, with special handling (cannot be carried on passenger aircraft). Which usually means a special courier option (DHL, UPS, TNT, with their dangerous goods options) costing extra (I've seen min. $30, to over $100). Sometimes maybe sea mail but that … takes a while.
For free postage at $15? Nope. They'll stick it in standard airmail and hope no one checks. Usually it makes it through, sometimes not.
Also, be careful with batteries off eBay - they're often not genuine, which can mean dodgy and maybe dangerous protection circuity and cell quality. They often even wrap it in a genuine-looking wrapper…
they go kabooim when not packaged properly and get nicks and bumps during transit. KABOOM
Zerolemon battery for my s5 7000mAh battery shipped fron usa with no problems…. just need to fins the seller willing to ship.
There was a case in Korea where a cargo airplane that crashed due to fire caused by lithium battery. I am sure that wasn't an isolated case so yeah.
I am not sure when this was introduced, but there are regulations introduced on transporting lithium batteries on air. I am sure it was fairly recent, if I remember correctly.
But they must be safe if transported correctly otherwise how do the millions of phones, tablets, laptops etc get to Australia? By ship? I doubt it.
As I said, they have introduced regulations on transporting lithium batteries. I am getting the feeling that it got harder to avoid following those regulations. So they simply don't send it over because it costs bloody fortune to use couriers that can send batteries via air.
I assume companies that sell electronics in Australia sells enough in Australia to reduce the freight cost (per good). I doubt an Aliexpress or an eBay seller from China has that privilege.
Put a deal from aliexpress on here and watch the site crash. I think we are th cause of it all….ahh the conspiracy, where is my tinfoil hat
Most definitely by ship…
Cause it's WAAAY cheaper, like 100 times cheaper to ship than to fly the same quantity.
This what you're after?
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Newest-BM46-4000mAh-Mobile-Phone-…
Not sure about li-ion but I'd imagine it'd be no different to lipos and people seem to be able to ship 12,000+ mAh lipos into the country for RC use easily enough…