27 Jul Warning issued about chargers amid spate of fires caused by e-scooter explosions
PEOPLE should be wary of using universal chargers for electric scooters which are to blame for an increasing number of battery explosions, the charity Electrical Safety First has warned.
Spokesman Giuseppe Capanna told GB News: “Manufacturers of e-bikes, scooters and their batteries, are allowed to self-certify these products and just declare that they’re safe and put them on the market.
“What we’re finding is that lots of these products haven’t been through safety testing and that’s when these dangerous products are getting into people’s homes.
“What we want to see is mandatory third-party approval of these products, like has just happened in New York.
“New York has just introduced new legislation because they’ve had lots and lots of these e-bike and e-scooter fires to make sure that any manufacturers that are selling these products have to get them tested before they can put them on the market.”
In a discussion with Andrew Pierce and Dawn Neesom, he continued: “There are too many bad operators, there are not enough reputable manufacturers that are following the rules and doing the proper testing, which is why we need to see some tighter controls so that we can start to like weed out these bad operators and make sure that only tested products get onto the market.
“If you’ve already got an e-bike or a scooter there’s a few things you can do to try and help keep yourself safe.
“One is don’t charge your bike or a scooter in a hallway or in an escape room where it could stop you getting out of the building if something goes wrong. Don’t charge it overnight, if you can avoid that.
“If you can’t avoid charging overnight, make sure you’ve got working smoke alarms so that it can give you some advanced warning and let you get out of the property if something goes wrong.”
He added: “The other thing is it’s quite important that if you’re charging your e-bike or e-scooter, only use the charger that came with it. And if you need to replace it go back to the original manufacturer to get a replacement charger.
Don’t use one of these universal chargers because we found from online marketplaces over 60 of these universal chargers that hadn’t had any safety testing carried out and they were dangerous, because you’re using the wrong charger, that’s when you get the risk of it being overcharged and the battery going into ‘thermal runaway’.”
