Millions of unsafe home electrical products that could cause death or injury by fire or electrocution are in use in UK homes, warns new research by the Electrical Safety Council (ESC).
The response to product recall warnings is pitifully low, as consumers appear indifferent to warnings of fire or electric shock, or underestimate the danger from the everyday electrical products, such as televisions, hair straighteners, or even baby monitors, in their homes. They have become used to having them on tap and are reluctant to part with them, even if they have been contacted two or three times by the manufacturer.
According to the research, two million people have deliberately ignored product recall notices, with one million more admitting to currently owning an electrical item that has been recalled. A third of respondents find it too inconvenient to return faulty products, while a fifth refuse to forgo them.
The ESC found that the average success rate of a typical product recall is a paltry 10 to 20 percent. Given the 266 electrical product recalls made in the last six years, and the fact that manufacturers often produce hundreds of thousands of each item, there are likely to be millions of dangerous products threatening safety every day.
Recalled products have caused deaths, severe injury, and damage to property. The majority of recalls in 2012 for household appliances were because the items were at risk for catching fire or causing electrocution.
Recall checker
The ESC says that retailers and manufacturers need to do more to aid customer awareness. Meanwhile, the charity is launching an online tool so users can quickly and easily discover if they own a defective electrical product. The database enables users to check whether the products they own have been recalled via the model number, brand name, or description. If the product has been recalled, the website will give advice on what to do next.
The Daily Telegraph reports that almost half a million potentially dangerous dishwashers are still being used despite fire risks because owners cannot be traced.
More than 600,000 faulty Bosch dishwashers, made over a seven-year period, are at risk of catching fire, but only one in four has been traced, despite a product alert by Bosch in July 2011.
Hundreds of fires involving these dishwashers, with more than a dozen blazes deemed serious, have occurred over the last few years. Owners are urged to use the machines only under controlled situations and not to leave them unattended.
Global risk
Despite the new ESC website, there is no single official source responsible for all recall information in the UK.
If this sorry state of affairs is the case in the UK, what is the situation in other countries? Hopefully, they are doing better than the UK in alerting and persuading consumers to remove the risk of such obvious danger from fire.
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If you own an automobile and there’s a recall due to reliability, you won’t likely do anything about it until it fails. Yet a safety recall is acted upon immediately. Why are consumer products other than automobiles treated in exactly the opposite manner? I suspect that if products were less reliable, recalls would be adhered to in gerater numbers. The fact is that folks buy and use many “utility devices” without thinking about them. If I buy a dishwasher and it works OK, I’m not likely to pay any more attention to it. The real financial beneficiaries to product recalls… Read more »
Robert I think safety recalls are actually the face saver for the firms. I would like to ask why any thing having such a dangerous connotation is send to the market at first place. Why proper scrutiny is not done beforhand. I think government should be having a say in that. Secondly I think companies recall calls are not that effective as they are focusing those areas where they have large customer base and if some how tghe recall reached to other areas well and good but no actual effeort is seen.
I think this is true in the US as well. Recalls are not always as well communicated to the public as they should.
I think mistakes (and subsequently, recalls) are inevitable, and it isn’t necessarily a case of manufacturers not vetting their products carefully enough or a lack of scrutiny. Sometimes stuff goes wrong, no matter how carefully you test things. I’m sure, for example, that you didn’t intend for there to be typos in your post — you wrote it, read through it, and hit the “Post” button, and somehow “beforhand”, “tghe”, and “effeort” slipped through. I also disagree that a recall is a face saver. Admitting a mistake is painful, and it inevitably causes people to wonder what other mistakes were… Read more »
Yeah, strange, but then I suppose it’s easier to track down owners of a car than it is most products, due to the surrounding paperwork.
I think the onus of safety lies on the consumer more than the product manufacturers. People tend to ignore the safety requirements due to thier own shoddy way of handling electric gadgetries. There is an enormous need to educate people and raise awareness amongst them rather than squarely blaming the manufacturers. Adequate safety measure are already inplace in products brought in the market but accidents most take place because of human error.
Good old Humans, all too often being the weak link in the chain! Let’s be honest, the manufacturers are blamed if they don’t issue a recall. If they do, they’ve done what they’re supposed to and are less liable should something go wrong. People should know how to use an electrical product beyond that.
I don’t know how you get around it though. The mass media communication tools aren’t likely to be an attractive option as they cost money. Who wants to pay money to inform people their products are potentially dangerous?