I’m traveling out of the country (from USA to EU) and bought a couple converters for my electronic devices (tablet, phone, etc). My question is, can I leave the charging “bricks” with the standard plug at home and use the USB outlets on my converter to charge my devices or will that harm them. I think all it could potentially do is slow the charging on the ones that increase the wattage, but am I missing something? Thanks in advance!
In: Technology
It will work but likely be slower. It’s worth bringing at least one high current charger. If you look at the “brick” input voltage you will find they likely handle anything from 100-240 VAC and 50 or 60 Hz which means they can handle European voltages without a transformer.
Nope you’re good, USB uses a standard protocol.
Source: I have to travel a lot and have been charging my devices all over the world without their bricks
Thing to note is that some devices such as the Nintendo Switch apparently don’t follow standard USB protocol and they could die if used without their bricks, but I’ve been ignoring this for past 4 years and nothing has happened to my switch yet.
The main thing the brick does is convert AC power to DC power. USB ports naturally output DC power so that wouldn’t be a problem. As others have said it might not put out as much power as the brick but that depends of the device you’re plugging your phone into.
The biggest difference is that not all bricks are equal. Just because a plug uses the USB-C format doesn’t mean it offers the same wattage as another.
The best example is that you can plug a laptop in using only USBC, but don’t expect it to charge using the brick from a phone. The laptop might need 100 watts, but the brick is only delivering 20.
It certainly can’t hurt anything, but it could feasibly be slower if the USB port has a lower amperage than the plug.
USB ports provide 5V DC, which is what your device expects. The “brick” part is just there to convert the wall juice (110-240V AC, depending on where you are, also the frequency might be different) to 5V DC.
It’s fine, but they may just give you 5W of charging while a proper adapter could give you 20-30+
I recently traveled from USA to UK. I ended up buying a fast USB C charger in UK because the hotel USB A ports are slow and not available everywhere. It has a hilariously big (by US standards) proper British plug.
If both devices follow USB protocols, there is no problem – USB is designed so that if you just plug things together, the charger is gonna give 5V and the charged devices is gonna drain some small current – this is slow charging. Anything behind that, the devices have to actually agree on – there is a communication protocol going on, even if the connection is just for charging. So you can plug anything to anything and the devices will settle the situation themselves.
It’s important to remember the qualification I started with though – the devices have to follow the protocol. I have for example an amateur telescope that came with integrated heating, which has a USB connector for some reason – and a huge warning “don’t plug this in your laptop unless you want to use the USB ports on it ever again”. I personally think that the use of USB connector for this is borderline criminal, but some manufacturers have no common sense.
It’s worth noting that most “bricks” can handle the voltages in Europe they just need a small plastic converter to allow them to fit into the European outlets. *You should check yours to be sure* , it’s printed in small text on the brick somewhere what input voltages it will accept, but most major manufacturers make a single universal brick to avoid having to make multiple models.
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