Pulling the Plug on Fires

by Paul McGoldrick

My family got its first TV receiver in 1953 in time for the June coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. It wasn’t purchased: at the time receivers (sets) were quite costly and beyond our finances. They were also rather unreliable, with the line output transformer acting almost like a fuse! So a great many people rented their sets from an operation called Radio Rentals. The company was founded in 1932 by one Percy Perring-Thoms to rent out radios and later expanded into TVs. The company name still survives in Australia, but TV rentals are far from being its major thrust.

Even a couple of decades later, if you were entitled to have a BBC-provided TV in your home, it was always rented – and it was collected extremely promptly after your departure from the Corporation.

My father was rather pedantic about a lot of things, and one thing that he had a real bug about was pulling the power cord on the TV receiver at night. It didn’t, of course, increase or diminish the three minutes that it took for there to be any life showing at all after power up (with fifteen minutes before the pictures were acceptable) and he would point quite correctly to the enormous number of house fires that seemed to emanate from the TV. There were any number of reasons for that including putting flammable objects like doilies on top of the set; careless watering of the aspidistra; allowing candles to burn down to the case of the set. But there were also a large number of fires that were very conveniently attributed wrongly simply because the TV always seemed to suffer in those fires.

Between 1983 and 1993,  the number of household fires that were caused – allegedly – by the TV in the UK reduced from some 1300 a year down to 400 a year. Most were believed to be caused by the on/off switches, the input circuit to the power supply, and bad insulation in the power cord itself. With mains plugs being wired by the homeowner himself there was ample room for confusion about miswiring the colored wires, and in most cases there was no ground to the receiver (it didn’t matter if the chassis was live if you couldn’t touch the metal...) Fires in North America were always smaller in number, perhaps due to the earlier introduction of molded plugs and at least partly because the receivers were constructed with less flammable materials.

After 1993, receiver fires increased again, not as dramatically as before. Now, however, that seems to be changing. In the last year I have seen a number of stories about fires. One, from February 2011 in Adelaide, Australia, recounts a AUD30,000 fire caused by a Loewe receiver that ‘continued to burn’ after the householder pulled the plug and the Australian press noted a number of other fires allegedly caused by Loewe product even after a recall. Fire brigades in Australia reported 21 house fires in New South Wales, 18 in Queensland, and 22 in Victoria in 2010, caused by TVs, in a country where it is quite common for homeowners to extend mains power outlets without benefit of an electrical contractor. One of the other things happening is, of course, that so many of us now leave our complete home theater systems in a standby mode, looking for instant gratification when we need entertainment.

This last month another fire was blamed on a TV in Santa Rosa, California. 

Perhaps more alarm-worthy, there seems to be an ugly pattern developing. Amazon readers report in recent reviews two instances of Vizio HD TVs catching fire and there were also three smoking/flaming Vizios reported on the Sears website (who have now dropped the brand) and one on consumeraffairs.com. In an example of its user manuals Vizio is keen to point out not to overload power strips and extension cords. Very sound advice...but is that all that is happening?

There have been problems with other vendors as well, with reports about Polaroid-branded product, and Samsung has been way up there on the list of customer complaints as hundreds of letters attest. Most of these owners seem to be convinced that there is a faulty capacitor in their receivers (some say in the power supply) with symptoms that include cycling on and off, audio but no video, and popping noises. The letters are not very complimentary about Samsung service.

You probably share feelings similar to mine toward all this bad news. And I fear that if the problems were to be examined in real detail, we would find that under-rated components are being used in circuit areas where safety should be paramount. Saving a few cents on a passive may look good to a company’s bottom line initially, but, eventually, it is a lousy practice that will come home to roost. In a way that will not leave the companies responsible with goodwill to burn.