I buy a lot of things online and mostly overseas using different shipping forwarders from different countries. Each one of them has their own pros and cons.
So one day I decided to find out who’s faster and cheaper and here’s my findings on a shipment I’ve made on Amazon.com on the same day, and to be delivered at the same day to DHL, Aramex, and PostaPlus.
The time it took to forward and deliver a parcel to home from USA
All shipments are light, and less than 0.5 kg (~1 lb). For PostaPlus and DHL you would need to consolidate the shipment before it begins the forwarding process. On both cases I’ve consolidated the shipments as soon as I’ve received the email notification about the reception of the shipments.
So basically the higher you pay the faster it gets delivered generally.
There could be many factors that affect shipment speed and without knowing them all, making a very brief comparison might not give you the best idea of what’s gong on. But anyhow this will give you a rough idea with the included tracking information included on the links.
Just need to clarify that’s my experience and your experience could be different.
If you’re a heavy smart home user, you might find that you change batteries regularly for your motion sensors and remote devices. Sometimes changing it too often which costs a lot of money and it’s a lot to deal with. It uses the CR2477 battery which is hard to come by and if you find one, it’s expensive for what it provides. So I decided connect the Samsung SmartThings Motion Sensor (F-IRM-US-2) to the household electricity. Just FYI this motion sensor is located at the dressing room to turn on the lights when there’s motion in the room, and then turns the light off when there’s no motion.
So the RC2477 battery provides 3V power to the sensor, so I started looking for a 3V wall power socket and I found this. You can get any wall power socket as long as it provides 3V of DC current for your device. I’m not worried about the current as they’ll always provide more than what I need. In fact, in the future I’m planning to use that same socket for second motion sensor using a 3-Way connector.
Now I need a low-profile way to connect the wires to the motion sensor and I know exactly where I can get it. I got this flat wire from SuperBrightLEDs. I also need two connectors, one to connect the wire to the wall socket, and a pigtail connector to connect the wire to the motion sensor at the other end. For the wall socket connector make sure you get the correct size of the barrel bullet, 5.5×2.1mm in my case.
I’ve ended up gluing the motion sensor to the pigtail connector using a hot glue gun. I’ve decided not to solder just in case I needed to go back using the battery in the future. Just make sure you’re using the right polarity (+ve, -ve) when connecting the wires.
This project was completed six months ago, and since then I’ve been using the motion sensor that way with zero problems.
