Slashdot Mirror
EE Recalls All Power Bar Chargers Over Fire Safety Risk (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: British mobile network EE is recalling every one of its promotional Power Bar smartphone chargers amid safety fears that they may overheat and blow up. The portable blue charging tubes were released in April of this year as a way to allow customers to charge their phones on the go. The mobile carrier, which also runs the Orange and T-Mobile brands, said that it had made the decision after reports of a very small number of incidents where Power Bars have overheated in circumstances that could cause a fire safety risk.
Maybe you can still get your phone charged using a Clif Bar or Nutri-grain Apples and Cinnamon?
I'm guessing that "electronics that burn your house down" are the must-have present here in the UK this Christmas. Just a couple of days ago, we had Amazon UK offer refunds to most customers who had bought a hoverboard from them, advising them to destroy the offending item due to fire-safety concerns associated with the plug and charger.
Are standards of cheap electrical goods with outsourced manufacturing falling to new lows? I'd have thought that plugs and chargers were fairly important things to get right - and probably not the most difficult things, either.
A couple of years ago I was involved in a product recall of a server line where a backplane could overheat and start to burn. There were three cases among a few thousand shipped and the cause was a PCB made in China. Nothing new here, it's probably a matter of statistics now that this stuff is made by the gazillions.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Some people just want to watch the world burn.
I think it's more down to a new found penchant for hauling around huge blocks of lithium. I've had an e-cig battery blow on me and it was scary as hell, so when my mate asked me to repair his 14Ah power bank / jump-starter I was more than a little wary. There's circa 600kJ's sitting in the palm of your hand and it only needs a good hard knock to start spitting it all out.
What does the house working have to do with it? The problem is the charger device itself.
What about the one I ate this morning? I don't think it was charged.
I don't imagine that the so-called hoverboards are unique to the UK market, so I'm kind of wondering how come this hasn't cropped up elsewhere.
It has been happening in other places. There's an investigation under way from the CPSC in the US after a dozen or so reports of fires. You just haven't been paying attention to all the news stories.
Indeed, circuit breaker per radial. A few long lived high reliability breakers reviewed by building inspectors and house construction time seem like a much more reliable way to go than counting on product manufacturers. Expecting every cut rate consumer product manufacturer to live up to the spec for fuses in the power plug always seemed like an invitation to cost cutting induced risk. I remember an off-shore manufacturer offering to add UL labels for 1/10 of a cent (Labels not certs) so I'm a bit cynical.
And thanks for using a "Y" and not a "W" when calling me a Yank.
UK: Could real circuit breakers prevented this?
No. This was a problem with power bars (supplementry battery packs), not with mains adaptors.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Currently the UK usually uses 32A breakers on socket circuits.
I'm not convinced that reducing that to 16A or so (and you can't really go much lower than that given that some appliances draw 13A) would help much. 16A is more than enough to make the electronics in a wall wart go up in smoke.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
"32A breakers" So I assume that you must have more than one ring bus is a UK house?
The number of circuits in a UK property varies depending on the size of the property, when it was wired and who specified the wiring. A couple of examples below
my paretents 4 bedroom house:
6A upstairs lights
6A downstairs lights
32A downstairs sockets
32A upstairs sockets
32A kitchen sockets
40A shower
16A outbuilding power
16A immersion heater
my 2 bedroom flat
6A lights
32A sockets
32A cooker
40A shower
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register