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If your heater looks anything like these…
If your heater looks anything like these…

BusinessJune 20, 2018

There have been 24 heater recalls since 2010, and there’s a decent chance yours is on the list

If your heater looks anything like these…
If your heater looks anything like these…

With up to 80% of faulty indoor electric heaters potentially still in use, is the recall system in need of a major shake-up? 

UPDATE: As of June 2019, two more heaters have been recalled. An open flue space heater and an open flued gas log fireplace, both for producing potentially high levels of carbon monoxide.

It probably comes as no surprise that out of New Zealand’s 1.5 million homes, approximately half still lack the proper insulation. That means that when it comes to keeping our notoriously chilly abodes at least somewhat dry and warm, indoor electric heaters tend to be the most popular option.

In fact, the data speaks for itself, with the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) estimating that the vast majority of heater sales in 2015 were for electric heaters (250,000), while heat pump (98,000), wood fire (34,000) and gas space (14,600) sales dwarfed in comparison. Meanwhile, retail data also shows that heater sales are continuing on an upward trend, with The Warehouse and Noel Leeming reporting a 20% and 30% increase in sales volumes from this time last year.

But as electric heaters soar in popularity, so does their likelihood of causing a household fire. While approximately half of heater-related incidents are a result of human error (ie placing a flammable object too close to the heater), a sizeable number of incidents are also caused by a malfunction within the heater itself, triggering – in some cases – a product recall. 

In total, 567 heater-related fires have been reported to Fire and Emergency NZ in the last three years (Source: Fire and Emergency NZ)

From 2010 to 2018, at least 22 indoor electric heaters have been voluntarily recalled for potential safety risks, with the most common hazard being a risk of fire. According to data provided by Fire and Emergency New Zealand, approximately 567 heater-related fires were reported in the last three years, with 209 (35.8%) of these attributed to “a failure of the appliance or installation fault”.

Panel heaters, which are cheap to purchase and promoted as cheap to run, were the most common type of heaters recalled with nine issued in the last eight years. The most recent recall, issued on May 31 2018, was for a Euromatic panel heater, prompted after a woman reported that hers cracked and singed the wall of her Dunedin home.

Five of these panel heater recalls were issued in November last year when CDB – an importer, distributor and marketer of electrical appliances and accessories – recalled several models nationwide, including those sold under the Goldair, Living & Co, Ecosaver, Celsius, Number 8, and Nouveau brands. All five were recalled for their potential to “overheat and cause a fire”, and were sold at multiple retailers including The Warehouse, Mitre 10, and Goldair stockists like Briscoes and Farmers.

When asked about the number of heaters that were sold in relation to their most recent recalls, The Warehouse, Mitre 10 and Bunnings all declined to provide figures due to reasons of “commercial sensitivity”.

CDB brand Goldair – long familiar to Kiwis as an affordable but quality brand – also had the most recalls to its name with a total of five (2017, 2016, 2014, 2012, 2010) issued over the past eight years. While Goldair was previously owned by Canterbury manufacturer PDL, it was later acquired by CDB in 2008.

CDB, which describes itself as “New Zealand and Australia’s number one marketer of electrical appliances and electrical accessories”, imports a variety of products into New Zealand that it sells under its labels, conducting on-site tests and performance monitoring of all its products before they hit shelves. CDB has been contacted multiple times for comment on this story but has failed to respond. 

DATE BRAND TYPE OF HEATER RETAILER RISK
May 2018 Euromatic Panel Bunnings Fire
Nov 2017 Goldair Panel Goldair stockists Fire
Number 8 Panel Mitre 10 Fire
Nouveau Panel Mitre 10 Fire
Living & Co Panel The Warehouse Fire
Ecosaver Panel The Warehouse Fire
Jul 2017 Celsius Fan Countdown / Mitre 10 Fire / Electric shock
Number 8 Fan Countdown / Mitre 10 Fire / Electric shock
May 2017 Moretti Oil Column Bunnings Hot Oil Leakage
Akai Oil Column Bunnings Oil leak
Click Oil Column Bunnings Oil leak
Jun 2016 Goldair Bathroom Goldair stockists Fire
Feb 2015 Heller Fan Bunnings Fire
Jul 2014 Goldair Bathroom Fan Goldair stockists Unsafe failure / Fire
Mar 2014 Dyson Hot / Hot+Cool Dyson stockists Fire
Oct 2013 Slim Heat Panel Bunnings Fire
Jun 2013 Moretti Panel Bunnings Fire
Jul 2012 Kent Oil Column The Warehouse Oil leak
May 2012 Goldair Panel Mitre 10 / Briscoes Safety fuse
May 2011 Home Collection Fan Countdown etc. Fire
Sep 2010 Thermosafe Fan Unknown Fire
Apr 2010 Goldair Oil Column Farmers Oil leak

 

While Fire and Emergency NZ says an average of two to three recalls per year isn’t considered an excessive amount for a mass-produced commodity like heaters, the low success rate for these recalls is what mainly concerns fire safety officials. Peter Wilding, national manager of fire investigation and arson reduction, says that for most manufacturers or retailers, a 20% return rate is “generally considered to be a good recall”.

“That means that 80% of a known item that’s causing problems are still out there, which is really bad,” he says. “You can get 50,000 items sold quite quickly in a country our size, so to only recover 20%… that’s a lot of faulty products that are still out there.”

Consumer NZ’s head of research, Jessica Wilson, also says that “less than half” of product recalls actually work. She blames the low return rate on things like poor public awareness, and a reluctance among consumers to go through the recall procedure which can often be lengthy and bureaucratic.

“The effectiveness of the recall actually requires manufacturers to be regularly alerting consumers to the fact that this product is faulty and shouldn’t be used,” Jessica Wilson, Consumer NZ’s head of research, says. “It shouldn’t just be a one-off notice in the papers, for example. It needs to be regularly put out there that these products are faulty.”

“Essentially, it comes down to the manufacturer’s quality control processes not being good enough when the goods leave the factory. There aren’t those quality control measures to ensure that the faulty goods aren’t getting on the market,”

The five panel heaters included in the November 2017 recall. All five are distributed by CDB. (Photo: recalls.govt.nz)

Wilding adds that because heaters are such a low-priced, mass-produced commodity, tracking down affected consumers can be particularly difficult. “If you buy something like a car, just about every car manufacturer/retailer in the country would be able to tell you who’s bought cars from them so we can follow up very accurately,” he says. “But when you’re talking about a cheap commodity, it’s very difficult to track down where all the people that have bought them have gone to. So if you do try and do a recall, you can try and put it in the news media and you can try and do mail outs, but you’ll miss a large percentage of those buyers which is a major issue for us.”

He says that one of the ways Fire and Emergency NZ has been working to rectify this issue is by encouraging retailers to record customer contact details at point of sale. “It’s all voluntary, but it’s also really useful from a consumer’s point-of-view because if you go back there with a fault, they can look you up just using your cell phone details. So even if you’ve lost your receipt it’s no problem.”

“[But] the big advantage for us is that if there’s a recall, it would be very easy to selectively target all the people that have bought that particular appliance and send out something like a text message to let them know.”

Bunnings extended a recall of its Akai, Click and Moretti oil heaters after reports of products rupturing when turned on and spraying hot oil. (Photo: recall.govt.nz)

From Consumer NZ’s point-of-view, it wants to try and tackle the issue further up the chain by having more resources put into monitoring and investigating consumer products, particularly those that have a track record of poor safety compliance.

“Manufacturers have an obligation to ensure that the products they sell are safe to use. Regardless of what you’re selling to consumers, you have to ensure its safe and durable,” says Wilson. “But we don’t invest a lot in New Zealand in proactively monitoring the market. There’s very little testing done by regulators, for example. In the majority of cases, it’s a voluntary recall issued by the manufacturer.”

When asked about the poor success rate of recalls, particularly those that fall into the ‘business-as-usual’ category, Consumer Affairs Minister Kris Faafoi – who, in a typical Kiwi coincidence says he used to work in a PDL factory where Goldair heaters were produced – says he’s willing to look into more effective ways of letting consumers know about recalls.

“Audience habits are changing… and there are ways that people have been notified in the past about a product that’s been recalled, but if we need to look at new and more effective ways of letting consumers know that something’s happening, then we’re more than happy to look into that.

“Do we need to push out these recalls in a different way? I’ll have to check with MBIE (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Enterprise) about whether we use all the kind of different types of social media available to us.”

Keep going!
(Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
(Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

BusinessJune 18, 2018

I set up Facebook ad targeting, and it’s even creepier than I imagined

(Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
(Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Facebook knows everything about you, and by extension, so do a million marketers and corporations. And now so do I.

Eighteen months ago, in a sudden fit of self-importance, I decided it was time to get myself a Facebook ‘brand’ page. That way I could share some of my blog posts and journalism with whomever might be interested in following along.

Of course, my naïve hopes were dashed almost immediately. Facebook’s dastardly algorithm would only show my brilliant #sundaythoughts to a fraction of my modest following. To get in front of my own readers, I’d have to kneel before the almighty Zuck – and cross his palm with silver.

And so, every now and again, I’d half-heartedly spend a few dollars ‘boosting’ posts I thought might be worthy enough to compete with the ‘Tag a Mate So Braindead They Somehow Think These Memes are Funny’ and assorted cute animal content.

I vaguely assumed I was now ‘doing’ Facebook ads. It wasn’t until a couple months ago that I stumbled across the actual Facebook Ads application, and found myself transported to The Upside Down.

In our dimension, Facebook looks more or less like a benign service for bringing people together. The Cambridge Analytica scandal opened up a crack up in the veneer, but it wasn’t until I crawled through the ad portal that I caught a glimpse of its true, Lovecraftian form.

An artist’s impression (Image: Wikimedia Commons Shoggoth by Nottsuo)

Beyond the veil lurks a vast alien intelligence, with a writhing halo of tentacles that are silently groping and ingratiating themselves into every nook and cranny of your life. This behemoth knows everything about you, and by extension, so do a million marketers and corporations – and now so do I.

After playing around with the audience targeting for all of five minutes, my eyeballs were bugging out of my head.

Any divorced 43-year-old Auckland males who work in banking reading this? If so, you’re in my crosshairs right now. Are you a French-speaking thirty-something couple with pet dogs, a small child, and liberal persuasions? I’m lining you up as we speak.

Here are some of the things that I, a Joe Schmoe who set up an account in all of 15 minutes, can target at will: your location, your age, your gender, language, level of education, anniversary, birthday, whether you’re engaged, newlywed, in a long-distance relationship, in a new job, how old your kids are, what type of politics you’re into, what company and industry you work in, your job title, what pets you have, what causes you support, which pages you like, which operating system, browser and email client you use, your “multicultural affinity” which is definitely not race at all (haha no sirree), whether you bought something recently, how frequently you travel, and so on and so forth.

Getting ready to own the libs so hard (Image: Screenshot)

Some of this information we’ve handed over ourselves, but it gets creepier. The tentacles are also hoovering up data from the files of all your friends, and buying data about your activities offline from their ‘partners’, including your income and credit cards. They’re slurping up data from all the websites you’ve visited, which have installed a ‘pixel’ to trace your every move, right down to which link you clicked, whether you put something in your shopping cart, or joined a mailing list.

If you’re not on Facebook, you’re probably feeling pretty smug right now. You foolish sucker! As Zuckerberg admitted during his interrogation in Congress, the company also collects shadow dossiers on people who aren’t even on Facey, without their knowledge or consent. You can run, but you can’t hide.

This all-encompassing network of feelers feeds every tasty little morsel into the vast bloated sac, where the data is digested and reassembled in inscrutable algorithmic form. The other-worldly intelligence is very dumb and very smart at the same time: It might not be conscious, but it can still predict your personality more accurately than your own mother. No wonder Facebook hauled in record revenues of US$12 billion in the first three months of the year.

(Image: Lushsux/Instagram)

This thing is roughly a billion times more powerful than buying a newspaper or radio or TV ad, because you can also see a breakdown of the results in real-time. Engagement. Reach. Cost per click, per lead generated, per page like. Every metric you can imagine is right there on the dashboard.

Best of all, compared to traditional media, there’s almost no oversight. No human approves my ads, so far as I can tell. Naughty words and images with too much text and suchlike are automatically rejected by some nodule of the floating tentacle sac thing, but that’s it. What could possibly go wrong?

Fiddling with elections was only the tip of the iceberg. Until recently, you could target an ad directly to ‘Jew haters’, or manipulate vulnerable people, or target particular ethnic groups, or put fake news right in front of conspiracy nuts.

Bringing the world closer together (Image: ProPublica)

The Facebook cultists had summoned a monster they didn’t fully understand, and failed to take responsibility for. Now they’ve finally been hauled over the coals, they’re trying to hack off some of the slimier tendrils. After the whole Jew-hating whoopsie, they removed some of the targeting options late last year. They’re also phasing out third-party ‘partners’ over the next six months. Anyone running an election-related or ‘issue’ ad (from abortion, to guns, to terrorism) will have to verify their identity, and disclose who paid for it right up top.

Finally, they’ve given some power back to you and me, the users – or at least, made a good show of it. You may have received a note asking you to review how your data is used. For shits and giggles, I decided to download my whole dossier. What I received was half a gigabyte of HTML files containing a permanent record of every cringy status update, every inadvisable drunken photo, every like, every comment, every former friend, every login and IP address; in short, every tiny little action going back almost 10 years. It’s a bit icky to look through, but about what I expected.

What I didn’t expect was that several dozen companies had somehow obtained and uploaded my contact information, at least 10 of which I’d never had any interaction with. Then there were another 100 or so companies tracking me because I had allegedly visited their websites, many of which I didn’t recognise.

My trust in obscure Italian rap duos and fantasy roleplaying 3D phone games has been shaken to the core. (Image: Screengrab)

The good news is you can turn off quite a bit of this stuff, stop sharing some of your personal data, get rid of suspect-looking companies, and even ban some categories of ads entirely – namely, alcohol, parenting, and pets (presumably for people fighting an addiction, or who have recently lost a loved child/animal and don’t want a bespoke onesie popping up in their feed).

But of course, there is no escape. The alien thing is still going to serve you ads, and if you cut off some of its tentacles, it will just figure you out based on your friends, or read your thoughts, or measure the contours of your skull while you sleep or something.

I suspect Facebook knows that once the fuss dies down, hardly anyone will bother to actually do anything. I mean, I spent quite a few hours researching this article. I’ve seen how the sausage is made. I looked through my file, in all its gory detail. At one point, the new privacy toggles were right there in front of me on the screen… and I still didn’t touch them.

After everything you’ve just read, I didn’t take the slightest action to resist. I honestly have no idea why. But I bet the algorithm could tell you.


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