False feeling of safety

Many elderly people who live alone at home have installed electric cooker safety monitors that automatically turn off the power if the contents of a pot are in danger of catching fire. However, many of these instruments disconnect the current too late, concludes a report from SINTEF’s fire laboratory.

“In our tests, several cooker monitors switched off the cooker only after flames had appeared”, says Reidar Stølen, a fire scientist at SINTEF NBL, Norway’s centre of expertise in fire technology. The results of the tests formed the basis for SINTEF NBL’s recommendation that type approval and a labelling scheme for electronic safety monitors for electric cookers should be introduced.