I'm currently repairing an older video game console, in the past I've been lucky and had either other broken hardware around to salvage components from or been lucky and managed to find some for sale.
The repair is simple enough - just an SMD fuse.
but nowadays I can only source two things.
Cheap Chinese clones of the CCP2E15 fuses, they're about 8x cheaper and can be bought in quantities as small as 10 (this comes to about $8 with shipping, or about $0.8-1/fuse when normalized, hell I could buy 100 and still be under $15, which gives a lovely normalized price of 20 cents a fuse!)
or original KOA CCP2E15 fuses, but I'm not going to spend $800+shipping on 2000 fuses (MOQ) when I only need one, sure it's cheap per fuse but that's a whole lotta fuses.
So my main question is really, how likely is it that such a simple component is likely to fail (if I buy 10 I'd test a couple by applying 1.5A to them and seeing if they break as they should) - even if it's a Chinese knockoff?
Some people bodge it and solder a through hole fuse to it, I don't roll that way.
an off-brand SMD fuse is still more professional than a salvaged surface mount fuse (or even a new surface mount fuse), esp. since it has to be non-exploding which the knockoff also claims to be.
Arguably I'd sooner pick a reputable brand 1210 format SMD fuse that meets the following criteria:
non exploding.
breaks at 1.5A
fast breaking. (the data for the CCP2E15 says it'll fuse in less than 1 second)
here's the relevant data for the CCP2E15
http://www.koaspeer.com/products/circuit-protection/fuses/ccp/the only place I could find where I could actually buy it was ordering it from a Japanese seller with a MOQ of 2k (as stated)
I couldn't figure out how to order from koaspeer.com directly, well I found a sample order form but it requires me having a company and in any case I'd have to lie to get samples as I'm neither prototyping or evaluating.
And I don't roll that way either.
So really, there are three main questions in this case.
How likely is the chinese knockoff to fail in a dangerous way.
Where can you source parts like this in more manageable quantities? (google didn't help, couldn't find it on ebay and only found the knockoff brand on ali express)
What would some suitable replacement parts be that have similar characteristics, or if no specific part comes to mind - is there some online tool that can be used to find parts matching these criteria?