Protect your family - Air Fresheners that plug in are DANGEROUS!!

Tweet

HOUSE FIRES - PLEASE READ AND ALERT EVERYONE YOU KNOW Received from a friend who is in the property insurance business. It is well worth reading. This is one of those stories that if you didn't share it, rest assured someone on your list will suffer for not reading it. The original message was written by a lady whose brother and his wife learned a hard lesson. Their house burned down... nothing left but ashes. They have good insurance so the house will be replaced with most of the contents - that is the good news. However, they were sick when they found out the cause of the fire. The insurance investigator sifted through the ashes for several hours. He had the cause of the fire traced to the master bathroom. He asked her sister-in-law what she had plugged in the bathroom. She listed the normal things: curling iron, blow dryer. He kept saying to her, "No, this would be something that would disintegrate at high temperatures". Then her sister-in-law remembered she had a Glade Plug-In, in the bathroom. The investigator said that was the cause of the fire. He said he has seen more house fires started with the plug-in type room fresheners than anything else. He said the plastic they are made from is THIN plastic. He also said that in every case there was nothing left to prove that it even existed. When the investigator looked in the wall plug, sure enough the two prongs left from the plug-in were still in there. Her sister-in-law had one of the plug-ins that had a small night light built in it. She said she had noticed that the light would dim and then finally go out. She would walk in to the bathroom a few hours later, and the light would be back on again. The investigator said that it was getting too hot, and would dim and go out rather than just blow the light bulb. Once it cooled down it would come back on. That is a warning sign. The investigator said he personally wouldn't have any type of plug in fragrance device anywhere in his house. He has seen too many places that have been burned down due to them. HOUSE FIRES PLEASE READ (From a fire chief) Ok, I had a freshener similar to this at my place in the mountains; it used the slide-in packets. Last weekend I unplugged it to use the outlet and found that the unit had melted and scorched the face of the outlet so I decided to replace the outlet. I went to my panel and shut off the circuit breaker. Upon pulling the cover plate I found that the outlet had burnt away, melted a considerable portion in the interior plastic wall box and wire insulation. Obviously, this got very hot and I was very lucky that this did not cause a fire in the wall because I would have certainly lost my place. Notice that my breaker did not trip and I manually shut it off. I need to investigate why. Perhaps it was a steady current and never caused a surge or arcing that would have tripped the circuit breaker. I am encouraging everyone I know to pass on the fact that these are potentially dangerous. The Consumer Products Safety Commission does not have a recall on the specific model that I was using. However, they will be hearing from me. Our Fire Prevention personnel will be using the remnant that I brought back to help spread the word through the Fire Prevention community as well. If you use something similar to this or other "plug-in" products take the time to pull them and toss them. We can't afford to be the proving grounds for these devices. It is my opinion that these are unsafe and should be pulled before something tragic occurs.