A handy little 0 to 30 Volt testmeter

[Sparks]

       
Here is a handy little 3 to 30 Volt DC tester that I put together this morning.     The meter module in the first image was obtained from China (Post free) for a mere £1.20!      I bolted it to a piece of 4mm brown acrylic, and put two input terminals and leads below the meter.      Its range is 3 Volts to 30 Volts.     After bolting it to the acrylic, it was still a bit too light, so I glued a piece of  0.35 inch-thick steel to the back (insulated from the terminals), to give it some weight.      I will be using it to check my rechargeable 6V and 12V sealed lead acids.       Its lowest reading is 3 Volts!      Very handy when I don't always want to dig my normal test meter out just to check the lead acids!    
Bob      

[Cleggy]

£1.20 ; wonder how that price gets built up? Bet the largest chunk goes to the seller.

C 

[Sparks]

Quite surprisng really. Maybe it was a mistake. I found it on Ebay as "auction," someone did bid for it, but I beat them in the last few seconds and got it for £1.20 and free postage. It took about 10 days to arrive. I see you can now get EF95 pentodes from China at 99p each and free postage - goodness knows how they do it!
Bob

[Sparks]

I have just checked my purchase history. It had 8 bids as follows: Starting price 1p, followed by bids: 6p,18p,50p,77p, 87p,98p,100p and my own at 120p. There are some more on there at the moment, but with prices of 99p, free postage.
Bob

[Nick]

This works because the SARs (Special Administrative Regions) and some other select regions have free international postage for small items subsidised by the Chinese government.

There is no VAT or other tax payable, so you get items at the raw cost price plus a small uplift. It's insane, but only to our benefit

With international mail, the general rule is that the sending end keep any fees and the delivery end do their part for free - the logic is that the costs will balance out, the assumption being that traffic is equal in both directions.

Of course, in this case the Chinese will be sending us FAR more packages than we send them, so there will be a definite imbalance in costs and we (the UK) are therefore subsidising the costs of this "free" mail service.

Because of the imbalance in volumes, counties agree "terminal dues" between themselves - this is normally based in the weight differences in tonnes, i.e. if China send us "x" more tonnes than we send them, they pay a terminal due based on that excess tonnage - the Universal Postage Union (UPU - part of the UN) administer this settlement as part of their remit.