Diesel heater recalls

I note that several Vevor diesel vehicle heaters have been rejected at the UK border due to safety issues:

https://www.gov.uk/product-safety-alerts-reports-recalls/product-safety-report-vevor-diesel-parking-heater-zm5001-2212-0144

https://www.gov.uk/product-safety-alerts-reports-recalls/product-safety-report-vevor-diesel-car-parking-heater-2212-0008

https://www.gov.uk/product-safety-alerts-reports-recalls/product-safety-report-vevor-diesel-car-parking-heater-zp-12v-f01-2212-0139

These are one of the better makes and prosumably were being imported for retail sale, not individual purchases online. They were also rejected on safety grounds based on their intended use, never mind use for room heating.

Those using or considering these heaters, particuarly for workshop heating please take note.

Robert.

https://www.gov.uk/product-safety-alerts-reports-recalls/product-safety-report-vevor-diesel-parking-heater-zm5001-2212-0144

"The product presents a serious risk of asphyxiation due to the potential for passengers to inhale dangerous levels of poisonous gases should the product not be installed correctly. "

This could be said about any product on planet earth

Discuss

My understanding of the rejection report is no suitable installation instructions were provided, not that the heater design was unsuitable or unsafe if installed correctly.

Emgee

I think anyone who has purchased one can atest to how awful the instructions are.

They clearly fall well short of the required standard and I'm glad that Trading Standards are challenging it, because it very much could be dangerous to someone inexperienced fitting it, which with the trend for DIY camper conversions is a growing market.

This said, I am very happy with my diesel heater, which is permanently installed with a balanced flue, full copper fuel supply lines, and emergency cut-off as per the requirements of the relevant section of the building regulations; it works far better that way that it would have done if I had followed the supplied instructions...

(As an aside the instructions for the Erberspracher diesel heater it's a knock-off of were very useful for designing my heating duct network).

I think the lack of instructions was used as a technicallity for rejection and there were other concerns regarding the heaters. To reject for most detail design issues would require paying for an investigation by a independent lab. By rejecting on simple things like marking, instructions or plug dimensions they reduce costs.

Robert.

That machine is clearly designated as a ‘parking heater’. It should not be installed inside any parked vehicle in that form. FULL STOP. If it is, unsuspecting third parties may be adversely affected.

Only the kits of discrete parts should be used for that purpose - and be installed correctly.

Would you like to be the unsuspecting victim? I wouldn’t.

Most often in the UK product recalls result from an incident - persons killed and injured, perhaps in their hundreds.

There aren't huge teams of public sector jobsworths roaming the country insisting on petty-fogging regulations. Rather the opposite. Trading Standards and similar organisations have been cut back to the bone, and are now "intelligence led". They are rarely proactive, bursting into action only after the event.

In addition, opinion favours tax-cuts and encouraging business above safety: hardly anyone on this forum believes in Health and Safety! Organisations are the same. The Grenfell Tower enquiry found the local council as customer had pressured the builder to use cheaper Aluminium Cladding. At the same time Building Approval was given by the same council - a single employee heavily overloaded with work, doing the work of a small team.

Further, government had deliberately chosen not to forbid this type of cladding in tall buildings because it put extra cost on businesses. So UK regulations allowed a type of cladding on tall buildings long banned abroad above certain heights because of a known fire risk - chimney effect raises the temperature of a fire enough to ignite aluminium. That foreign bans resulted after serious fires was ignored in the UK, and it's not clear who decided or why...

We live in an imperfect world.

Dave

Grenfell cladding wasn't aluminium it was a composite sandwich. Two thin aluminum skins with thermoplastic "filling".
Aluminium would have been OK.
I think that this passed the flammability test because it did not consider this type of construction and applied the flame to the center of the panel.

The testing by BRE did consider the eventuality which happened at Grenfell, and the product failed.

So the manufacturer Saint-Gobain, went back to the drawing board and designed an installation system which included various flame retardant baffles, and other mitigation measures to allow the system to pass, which it then did.

Saint-Gobain's marketing team then plastered the "passes test such and such" all over the product marketing literature, leaving the "* only if installed correctly using our complex mounting system" caveat to be buried in the product technical literature.

The Council and Housing Association then employed a principle contractor who hired a very cheap, not very savvy cladding sub-contractor to do the cladding work, who didn't have a suitable engineer or architect on staff to pick up on fine details like that, so let the owners unqualified son bid the project, which he did so based on fitting the product directly (in the manner which failed the BRE testing), wrongly believing from Saint-Gobain's marketing literature that this would meet the fire safety standards.

The Principle Designer took assurances from the subcontractor that they were fitting a compliant system at their word, and no-body in the chain (Council as owner, Council's Building Control team, Housing Association as Client, or the Principle Contractors) undertook independent verification of the subcontractors faulty design and installation work.

Ultimately there were 6 different organisations who had opportunities to prevent it by undertaking proper design and installation verification:

• Sub-contractor,
• Principle Designer,
• Principle Contractor,
• Housing Association,
• Building Control,
• Council,

and two organisations who actively made decisions which led to the installation of dangerous cladding:

• Subcontractor (through blindly trusting marketing materials), and
• Saint-Gobain (by publishing marketing materials including test certificates but absent the details of what was tested, which if I understood Dame Hackett's findings correctly were so unclear about when the test results were valid that it verged on misrepresentation of the product).

Edited By Jelly on 03/05/2023 12:46:38

Thread heading says "recall" - text says "rejected at border" i.e the products with inadequate documentation didn't get in to the UK.

How is what is described a "recall" ? Are there any other links stating that Vevor heaters that did make it in to the UK are being recalled due to safety concerns (other than iffy instructions ) ? I am aware that Vevor have had to "recall" at least one product due to safety issues (300 Bar air rifle compressors where the earth cable was not actually connected to the metalwork of the machine). In this case Vevor didn't actually "recall" the item (i.e have it returned to them to be destroyed) but just refunded anyone who had bought the item & told them to destroy it. Of the reports I read from those affected, non destroyed the item after getting the refund - when checked most did have the earth wire correctly connected & on those few that were not the owners chose to rectify the error and carried on using them.

Nigel B.

(not a Vevor customer)

OK the title choice was poor, but Vevor have 50 entries on the UK gov product safety reports database. It looks like their imports were targeted by customs. It is also interesting to note that there are NO mains powerd items on Vevor's UK website

https://uk.vevor.com/electrical-c_10017

No diesel heaters either There is this:

https://uk.vevor.com/floor-jacks-c_11489/triple-bag-air-jack-pneumatic-jack-6600lbs-lift-jack-compressed-air-quick-lift-p_010841313218

and similar items that look pretty dodgy. They look unstable and nothing to stop the top pad poping out.

Robert.

Vevor diesel heaters were recalled in December last year following the seizure of almost 1000 of them at Felixtowe by Suffolk Trading Standards.

I'd recently bought one from ebay and they (ebay) emailed me to tell me this and advised that I contact the vendor directly. I did this and received a refund and was asked to 'dispose of' the heater.

I think that the Suffolk TS statement came out on some sort of social media, and can only find secondary references to it now.

For example.

"Consumers who believe they may have purchased an unsafe diesel heater are advised to stop using it immediately and report it to Trading Standards via Citizens Advice Consumer Service on 0808 223 1133."

Edited By Andy_G on 03/05/2023 20:28:02

The airbag jack is pretty much a direct copy of a design by ARB which is designed for off-road/overland enthusiasts as an alternative to a farm jack in very soft conditions, they're not great but they're intended to be used when everything else fails... The off road ones often come with a kit to inflate them using your exhaust!

I think similar but bigger ones exist for use by heavy equipment mechanics too, very useful when you're working on an FLT which weighs the same as several estate cars, but has about as much ground clearance as a lotus.

.

More generally I would guess that Vevor weren't taking their duties as importer seriously and we're relying on inadequate conformity assessments and documentation from the manufacturer, and totally failed to account for renewed scrutiny after the switch from CE to UKCA, or simply became so big that they were an inviting target for enforcement action.

I am certain that dozens of smaller importers are bringing in the exact same goods right now with even less attention to compliance and zero chance of having action taken against them, because they're just too small for the regulator to pay attention to.

Jelly,
Do you have a link to the ARB jack? I know that they do a hydralic version of the classic farmers/off-road "hy-lift" jack and a conventional airbag lifting bag/jack but those have a much lower height/diameter ratio and larger overall diameter so much more stable.

Yes there are lots of small importers of poor qulity stuff and even more overseas sellers selling to individuals in the UK with total disregard for the regulations. As somone you desingns and makes things in strict compliance with the regulations and sits on a committee the sets some of them I do find this annoying. Trouble is people are injured and killed by this stuff.

Robert.

You seem to be suggesting that the approval authority bears these costs (apologies if I've misunderstood). Seems logical that the manufacturer should be required to demonstrate that his product meets applicable safety and other standards including, if necessary independent lab testing at the manufacturer's own cost.

Edited By Peter Greene 🇨🇦 on 03/05/2023 21:48:08

The local enforcement agency has to bear the cost of any assessment. This is normally "Trading Standards" at point of sale or Cuatoms at point of import. Trading Standards were given the extra responsibility with little on no additional funding from centeral government. When you are talking about more technical complance such as EMC (interference) or radio equipment the cost of confirming compliance can run to tens of thousands of pounds per item. Even if they seller/importer is found guilty at court the TS will see little or nothing back.

Robert.

ARB seem to have discontinued it in favour of the much simpler airbag type you mentioned which is wider and more conformant resulting in greater stability, and clearly far cheaper to produce (they sell for about wat the Vevor ones do, but have ARB levels of mark-up on them).

.

I after some formative years in O&G, I spent a good chunk of my career operating in the Waste and Resources industry where the regulator is both unable and unwilling to take enforcement action against non-compliant operators, and actively targets larger more compliant operators (who they knew could stand any fines) for minor administrative issues to generate revenue (as admitted by their chief exec on an agency wide call, and leaked to the Gruiniad), but will fail to take against smaller ones which would be bankrupted leaving the regulator to foot the cleanup costs even when other operators give them cast iron evidence of serious non-compliance, that I have long since ceased to get upset about this kind of thing...

To do otherwise would long since have sent me mad, it's just another part of our increasing broken civic landscape stemming from a lack of funding and resources.

.

There's also the issue of how regulatory compliance is now approaching Byzantine levels of complexity, which would be fine, apart from the fact that ultimately for a huge proportion of goods which are subject to self-assessment conformity assessments, it's actually in a place of "Do what you think complies, then if we don't think it did, we will prosecute you at some point later and a judge can decide who was right"...

But simultaneously paying an external body if you don't have to will price you out of the market so there's an unlevel playing field on compliance approaches that incentivises companies to do things in house which they're poorly equipped to do.

.

That's made worse by the fact that we persist as a nation in maintaining an arrangement where the majority of our standards in the hands of a private body, behind a exorbitant paywall. Despite many of them being treated as the de-facto approach to regulatory compliance and some of them being de-jure regulations as they're referenced without expansion in secondary legislation...

Even the Americans make their standards publicly available when they take on legal force.

To sidetrack slightly, if you ever have to buy a British Standard, say BS EN 12345, look at getting the Eire equivalent, which I think will be IR EN 12345.exactly the same words apart from the preamble, but a lot cheaper. Large public libraries used to have access, but not sure nowadays with cuts to public spending.

Some european countries sell them for even less than the Irish.

EN 60335-1 (Domextic equipment electrical safety) references over 50 other EN standards. Many of those will specify more. It gets very expensive.

Then you have companies like IHS who will happliy charge you for documents (PDF) that are free from thr publisher....

Re this thread: I do wonder how many even consider the term “Fail-safe” when making purchases.

Most certainly this is a top priority within aeronautical standards (along with avoiding forecastable failures, in the first place). It’s why there are are more than a single engine on passenger planes capable of carrying multiple passengers. It is why passenger planes with two engines need to be able to remain operational if they lose one engine. Think here, too, what is the immediate next arrangement if/when one of those two engines fail - land safely ASAP - or carry on regardless, relying on the only operational engine.

Big Clive, on youtube, quite often demonstrates some of the blatantly dangerous imports - mainly on items imported and sold from China. Some without ground protection, some that can cause fires, etc.

Who buys cheap wall-warts which have been known to fail unsafely?

If controls are abandoned, the country would be flooded with dangerous items. It is bad enough already because the majority of the population are not able to reliably assess the risks they may be either ignoring or unaware of.