General health and safety information
Electric Heater Safety – including why you must not plug heaters into extension leads
Electric Heater Safety Tips This is a true story, that happened in October 2021. It was a Tuesday in October 2021; we had a 3-man team working in a busy office/production business in Newcastle upon Tyne. The company is very well run, with many intelligent personal, many of whom are electrical engineers - we're saying this to show that even people who should know better can make mistakes. In the reception office, where it was cold, mainly because the building had no real ceilings, just a corrugated roof, so the receptionist was running an electric convection heater. It had a sealed plug - they often cause alarm bells as we don’t know what standard the internal wiring is, and that plug was plugged into a “cheap” 4-gang switched extension lead - that's a big no no whenever we see this, and we always advise the client against such an arrangement. We did on this occasion of course. What made the situation every worse though, was that that extension was plugged into another extension. In this case a cable reel. The cable reel was coiled up inside - if you are going to use a cable reel, [...]