Home Fire Hazard from Home Theater Equipment

Residential fire safety is a big deal. In the USA there is a good record of home fire safety and different governmental and private testing companies make sure the products we purchase are safe. Many products are marked with logo's and declarations of safety by testing agencies like Underwriters Laboratories and TUV Rheinland. When we encounter a product that is not safe, sometimes the results are devastating.

Consumer electronics have many parts that can throw off a spark such as resistors, diodes, transistors and capacitors. Basic overloads or component malfunction could cause a condition producing little fires inside your television or stereo. Voltage spikes caused by lightning or electric company troubles are one of the greatest reasons for electronic part breakdown. A voltage spike can cause an immediate failure or a delayed (or latent) failure of those components.

Whenever an electronic part fails, it may merely cease conducting electricity or open the circuit it is in or it may short the circuit. Short circuits may cause over heating of the part in question or surrounding circuits. This excessive heating may cause a small fire within your electronic device and is often seen outside the cabinet as a puff of smoke or bad smell coming from the piece of equipment.

It is essential that this small bit of fire can not be utilized to ignite any adjoining flammable material and create a more substantial and more dangerous fire. In American televisions, the plastic cabinets are made from fire resistant material and even though one can burn an opening in the cabinet with a torch, the fire goes out once the torch is taken away.

Manufacturing consumer electronics that cannot catch fire and burn outside of the cabinet seems not to be a requirement in the United States. We are inadvertently subject to bad engineering, cost cutting manufacturing and testing by testing companies that do not test for possible fire threats. Since these products catch fire in low numbers and sometimes the source of a residential fire is undetermined, some of these badly designed and shabbily tested electronic devices go undiscovered and may even be lurking within your home.

The question is; Would you prefer to know if one of the products in your home had even the tiniest possibility of starting your house on fire? If consumer electronics could be made so they literally cannot start your house on fire, would you not want to buy those products? Would you sleep far better knowing that your consumer electronics cannot catch fire, or just probably not catch fire. For me, I choose products that cannot catch fire.

There exists a web site where a consumer that had a 'whole house' audio unit catch fire in his home and he details his experience with the manufacturer, Russound and the testing organization TUV Rheinland. The Russound CAV6.6 caught fire in his home and burned outside the cabinet. He was able to extinguish the fire using a fire extinguisher, but if he was not home, his home and family could have been lost.

Instead of admit there was an issue with the product, a Russound executive threatened to sue the customer if he told anybody about the fire. There was a CPSC recall of the product, but the approved fix for the CAV audio unit left the combustible material exposed to all the parts capable of burning up. Russound and TUV Rheinland instead made the decision to place a fuse in line with just one component that can emit a spark.

Neither Russound nor the testing agency, TUV Rheinland examined the Russound CAV device that caught fire before proclaiming the defect and prescribing a remedy. The question is: Would you sleep better with consumer electronics that cannot catch fire, or products like those manufactured by Russound and tested by TUV Rheinland that probably will not catch fire? You choose. More information is available at the It's On Fire Web Site