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Dozens of carbon monoxide alarms sold over Amazon and eBay have been withdrawn from sale after failing safety tests.
Four alarms available for sale on the retail websites failed to detect the presence of the gas, making them potentially lethal in the event of a carbon monoxide build-up in a home, an investigation by Which? found.
The consumer group urged anyone who purchased one of the devices – which all claimed to meet British safety standards – to replace them.
One of the alarms, the Topolek GEHS007AW CO, failed to detect the gas in more than 80 per cent of the tests conducted by the watchdog. It was bestseller on Amazon, where it retailed at £14.99.
Three other unbranded alarms, made in China and sold through Amazon and eBay for less than £10, also repeatedly failed to sound when there was carbon monoxide in the air.
[...] Amazon and eBay have removed the alarms from sale and also “de-listed” another 50 lookalike alarms believed to be identical to the three unbranded alarms.
Which? advised anyone who owns one of the alarms to replace it immediately and to contact the company they bought it from for a full refund.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday June 25 2018, @02:58PM (9 children)
As you (probably) know, all items sold in the UK have to pass standard tests which are conducted by an official testing body, which also includes tests to prove that the device actually does what it purports to do, and that it does it safely. The same is true for most European countries. I don't know how the system in the USA works but I would imagine that there is something similar.
Once a device is awarded the appropriate standards mark, periodic and random testing of devices being sold or at the point of importation is conducted on items to ensure that standards are being maintained. Chinese goods, in particular, are sometimes fakes and also bear a fake standards mark. The importers of such devices can be, and often are, prohibited from importing devices in the future, and suppliers can find themselves on a prohibition list. However, I'm not sure how this system works if you purchase something from Amazon which is then sent by post from another country outside the EU (in this particular instance).
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday June 25 2018, @03:20PM
Yeah, I worry how much longer that will be true though. I mean in theory Amazon ought to be subject to the same regulations, and they probably are for stuff that ships out of their warehouse...but there's no way to know when you buy on their website. Apply whatever filters you want when you're searching, you're still going to end up with marketplace products that ship direct from China...they keep making it harder and harder to identify those and absolutely impossible to filter them out, probably because that's the majority of their stock these days. But offline retailers are moving towards shipping everything too -- just this weekend I was shopping for a laptop on short notice. Every store you'd go into, they'd literally have a sign on the shelf saying "Available in store!" but when you ask to buy one they say "Well, we don't have any *here*, but you can buy in store and we'll ship it directly to you!" So once they get one display unit through (and often they didn't even have that), it's possible that everything else would skip inspection the same way the Amazon marketplace items do.
We seem pretty set on the path of eliminating traditional retailers...but we probably need to figure out a solution to these kinds of problems first...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @03:43PM (7 children)
Does that include ebay? Most of the stuff I buy there costs under $1 (£1)? I can't imagine anyone paying for any sort of certification test.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday June 25 2018, @05:25PM
Legally, if it is imported into the UK it should be subjected to the relevant safety checks. As I acknowledged in my previous post, buying on EBay might mean that the purchaser is also the importer. I'm not sure how such things are managed in the UK at the moment with this sort of thing. It might be more a case of caveat emptor.
The cost is not an issue. Goods for sale in the UK (and Europe) should meet the appropriate safety specifications - where such specifications exist - and be fit for purpose,
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @05:34PM (5 children)
If the product has anything to do with safety then you should make sure it is independently tested. If it's so cheap that the manufacturer cannot afford any kind of type approval then the product is likely to be dangerous.
Even if it's not actually illegal to buy, I do not recommend saving $5 by getting a product that is fail-deadly.
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday June 25 2018, @06:16PM (1 child)
I'll take my chances
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Stainless-Steel-Metal-Ruler-20cm-8-Inch-Metric-Imperial-Scale-Measuring/263716842092?epid=3017531093&hash=item3d66bfaa6c:g:ibkAAOSwHf5bCk1S [ebay.co.uk]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @06:27PM
How is a measurement ruler relevant to the topic at hand? That's obviously not going to fail deadly.
We are talking about safety products, such as carbon monoxide detectors...
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday June 25 2018, @06:22PM (2 children)
I was going to complain that you're trying to ruin my plot to kill my in-laws, but given how rarely the potential CO source runs in the house (at most 3 weeks a year), that was a pretty shitty plan to start with.
Coincidentally, it looks like the manufacturer of my CO detector decided to put in a timer to disable it after about 5 years. That happened two nights ago. Batteries and everything else seem fine, but it beeps continuously.
Related : Can anyone explain to me why smoke alarms and similar detectors always seem to start beeping for battery/lifespan fail between 3 and 5AM ?
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Monday June 25 2018, @06:52PM
Coolest time of the day? Battery life is temperature dependent. The place where I work in the winter has plenty of poorly insulated cabins, each with a smoke detector. In winter when we get the first real cold wave, all those smoke detectors start beeping at once, usually overnight. There's nothing so sad as the beeping of a dozen, dying smoke detectors.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @06:57PM
All detectors in current use have a limited shelf life. For example, the common electrochemical type is basically an electrochemical cell with a platinum electrode. Platinum is a catalyst for the oxidation reaction of CO + H₂O => CO₂ + 2H⁺ + 2e. By applying a known bias voltage we get an electric current from the resulting ions which can then be measured by the instrument to determine the amount of CO reacting with the detector.
Like all electrochemcal cells, the electrodes and the electrolyte degrade over time, increasing the ionic resistance until eventually the instrument will fail to meet its required accuracy specifications. It should be replaced before that happens, which is why all such instruments have a replace-by date (often this is date is printed directly on the instrument).