Turn on the heat safely

Pushpa Girimaji

I want to buy an electric room heater this winter. How can I make an informed choice? What precautions should I take at the time of purchase?

Today, you have a very wide choice of heaters and if you Google ‘room heaters’, you will get adequate information to decide on the right kind of heater for your home. You can also check online to find out the prices of different brands and models. However, there is one information that you will not get during all this research and that’s what I would like to focus on here. 

Whichever room heater you choose, make sure it has an ISI mark certifying the safety of the gadget. I say this because an unsafe room heater can give you an electric shock, cause burn injuries or even start a fire.

In fact, in the second week of January this year, two women admitted to the ICU ward of a private hospital in Bareilly became victims of a substandard room heater. Apparently, sparking from one of the three heaters kept in the ICU led to a fire, resulting in the tragic death of these two women. About 10 days before that, Manohar Lal, a 50-year-old from Kullu in Himachal Pradesh met a similar fate. He died of 90 per cent burns he suffered after his bed caught fire from the electric room heater he had turned on before going to bed. In January 2015, a 37-year-old property dealer, his wife and their child died of asphyxiation caused by a fire that started in their electric room heater in their home in Delhi.

It’s for this reason that the Union government brought these heaters under mandatory certification way back in 1981, when only one kind of room heaters, electric radiators, were available in the country. Subsequently, the Household Electrical Appliances (Quality Control) order, 1981, underwent several changes and today these room heaters are covered under the Electrical Wires, Cables, Appliances and Protection Devices and Accessories (Quality Control) Order, 2003. What it means is that all room heaters must have the mandatory safety certification from the Bureau of Indian Standards (ISI mark) in order to sell. The relevant BIS safety standard (IS 302-2-30) covers convector heaters, fan heaters, liquid filled radiators, panel heaters, radiant heaters, tubular heaters and heaters for use in greenhouses. The obvious purpose of the order is to ensure the safety of these heaters, but manufacturers exploit the ignorance of consumers about this order and the slack enforcement to push sub-standard room heaters without the mandatory third party guarantee on safety.

So whether you are buying online or offline, make sure that the product you buy has safety mark. In fact, some of the basic safety features in a heater include a thermostat for heat regulation, a tip-over shut down, which ensures that the heater is automatically shut off if it tips over, and an overheat protection that shuts the machine in case of overheating for any reason.

In the United States, where product related complaints and accidents are closely monitored by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and unsafe products are recalled, over 3,50,00 units of China made electric space heaters — Vornado VH101 — were recalled this August. There were 19 reports of the machines overheating and catching fire. There was also a death from a fire started by the heater. I quote this to highlight the risk posed by unsafe heaters.

Are there any precautions required to be taken while using them?

As many fires are caused on account of keeping heaters close to flammable materials, always make sure that they are at least three feet away from the bed, furniture or other flammable substances. And they must be placed on the floor and not on carpets or furniture. Similarly, it is always prudent to heat up the bedroom before sleeping and switch off the gadget before going to bed.

If you are using an old appliance, make sure that it is in good working condition. Have it serviced by a qualified electrician or the company’s service centre and make sure there are no loose connections or broken wires and the machine is securely connected to a three-pin plug and socket.