There’s been some hoopla in the media o late after some bright spark decided to work out, from some statistics that ten fires a day were being caused by faulty appliances.
Thing is, does that claim really stand up to even a little scrutiny?
The answer is vague but probably it doesn’t and we’ll explain why.
The first thing to keep in mind is that these “incidents” are where an appliance is said to be involved.
What these figures do not tell us is, how many were false alarms, how many were just faults like a burnt out component, a belt fault, door seal rubbing and so on. How many were mis-installed. How many were a result of misuse. And, goodness knows how many other reasons that the fire services might be called.
Our point is, these figures may look or even be made to look alarming but the reality under some scrutiny and with the application of some common sense may well paint a different picture.
We’ve even seen claims that the Grenfell disaster was caused by a faulty Hotpoint fridge freezer and, thus far this is not at all certain. We simply do not know this for sure as yet and, we are unlikely to until the enquiry publishes its results.
All this off the back of an investigation carried out by The Sun newspaper that says that 428 fires between 2014 and 2016 were blamed on Hotpoint appliances.
Meanwhile, 226 were caused by Indesit products and 201 on Beko items, according to the figures obtained by the newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act.
It is said that at least five people died as a result of the fires which is tragic and any loss of life is so regardless of how it was caused.
But to put a little perspective on those numbers, there’s roughly 27 million homes in the UK each with a conservative average of around 3 appliances per home meaning that there are probably at least 90 million in use daily in the UK alone.
Add up all the fires, all the appliances and you get a risk of 0.00095% over that two year period and, if you have that per year, it’s less than half of one thousandth of a percentage point.
In short, so low it actually points to appliances being ludicrously safe things overall.
Our point is and, we are not in anyway trivialising any danger from any source at all, that the danger presented by appliances is staggeringly low and people have no call to panic, despite what might be claimed in the media.
