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Dozens of carbon monoxide alarms sold over Amazon and eBay have been withdrawn from sale after failing safety tests.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 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...