Energy Safety, part of the Ministry of Economic Development, is responsible for overseeing the extensive safety rules for electrical and gas products.
Energy Safety carries out regular audits of retailers and suppliers to check whether the goods they're selling are compliant.
It recently conducted an audit in Auckland. A small number of problems are generally identified during these audits, but at some low-price retail outlets it uncovered some alarming examples of illegal electrical goods - such as touch-lamps, travel adaptors, festive lamps, and hot-melt glue guns.
From all the audits done up till when we went to press, 80 percent of items were found to have non-compliant documentation, and 19 percent of audited products were considered to be electrically unsafe by Energy Safety.
Most of these non-compliant and unsafe products were located at low-price retailers or their suppliers. In many cases the non-compliant products were originally not intended for our market. This was because they were fitted with foreign plugs or incorrectly rated at 220 volts and not the 230 volts used here.
We took a look around too ...
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