Castle Creations 10A BEC failure...again

[HangarQueen]

I bought this CC 10A BEC 5 weeks ago, and yesterday was the first time that it was actually used in a model. After the third flight of the day, when I connected my 2S receiver battery to it again, nothing happened. A faint red LED was visible on my receiver, but that was it. Connecting the flight battery (and thus the BEC from the ESC) made everything come to life again, which proves that there is no excessive load on the BEC whatsoever.
When I came home, I did some tests and found that when plugged into the receiver, the output voltage of the BEC was only 2V, and when unplugged it shows 5V.
As I bought it more than 30 days ago, and I soldered the output wires, I can forget about any warranty apparently.
This is already the third of these BECs that failed on me, but now I've finally learned my lesson to stay very far away from them. Luckily I only used them for redundant power supply to my receiver, otherwise I could have lost 3 models too.
The previous 2 incidents was when they burned up on me. All of them were used in models with very small load on them, with normal 9g or 12g servos, so nothing extreme at all.
A quick search online also shows me that I am far from the only one with these problems. At my club, they call them Castle CreMation. For a reason.

[HangarQueen]

Some follow-up. I had another of these CC BECs around, and I replaced the failed one with this one, for the heck of it. It worked again, green light on the BEC and on the receiver. But when I cycled the retracts of the model a couple of times, all went dark again, BEC dead.
I tried the retracts on a cheap HK uBEC, and they worked several cycles without hesitation. I then connected the retracts to my tester, and measured 1,9A during cycling, for 3 retracts together. This is more than acceptable, and a 10A BEC should be able to cope with this, no? I know that, contrary to their label and marketing, they are rated for 7A max, but even that should be more than enough to cope with a current of less than 2A.
So now the total tally of failed CC 10A BECs is 4. It will never get the chance of going to 5 with me. I learned my lesson, luckily without serious damage.

[HangarQueen]

Mistery solved. The specifications of this BEC are way off and wrong. You can't use a 2S battery as input, even though the specs say that it accepts anything above 5V. My 2S battery dropped just below 7V and it was game over. When I test with a 3S battery, everything works just fine again.
I wonder which part of the specs is correct.... (not even the max 6S as input, I've read reports of the BEC glowing like an afterburner if you try that)

EDIT: back to square one....I had the 3S connected while I was fine-tuning the control surface connections, and then it died on me again. Just like on the field, the BEC felt very warm to the touch. When I connected my cheap HK BEC to the receiver, everything worked again for like 10 minutes.
Conclusion: these BECs can't be trusted as a single power source for a receiver. I own 7, 4 of them failed. I will be replacing them all with something more reliable.

[freakbrother]

While a lot of people swear by CC ESCs and BECs, my experience has been different. I lost two helicopters to CC failures, one an ESC that blew, and the other a stand-alone BEC. I won't use them any more.

[quitcherbitchen]

They have a weakness in the way they are soldered from the factory. I had two fail until I realized that flexing the wires from disconnecting the battery caused the wire to break Fix is to zip tie the wires over the bec to prevent flexing. Yes you shouldn’t have to do this.

[HangarQueen]

In my different cases it wasn't a wire break....2 of them started smoking, one output only 2V, and the third just stopped working alltogether.
I replaced it now with a Jeti BEC, as I could find it in a local hobbyshop. And they have a handy LED indication of the battery voltage level.
It seems hard to find reviews or even info about the reliability of the different brands and types. I would be very interested in any info, as I need to replace several CC BECs.