Halt don't catch fire: Amazon recalls hundreds of thousands of Ring doorbells over exploding battery fears Amazon’s home security brand Ring is recalling roughly 360,000 of its Wi-Fi enabled video doorbells over concerns they may catch fire when incorrectly installed. The recall affects Ring’s second-generation video doorbell, with the defect appearing on units sold in the US and Canada between June and October of this year with …
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I got one of these a couple of months ago, mainly as I'm moving my home office indoors & needed something like this to answer the door (i.e. camera not just a dumb door bell).
Anyhow, the thing is it had a warning inside the box about this exact problem & not to mix the screws up.
The security screws (which they provided the appropriate tool) is to attach it to the mounting thats screwed to the wall so it's difficult for someone to nick the door bell.
The warning clearly stated the overheating problem as the wood screws could "puncture the battery".
It's not just door bells, I see this sort of problem all the time, users install something incorrectly, often without reading the instructions, and then blame the problem on the supplier. And the product designers make everything easy to build and install without ever considering that people screw up occasionally because they failed to think about what they were doing. This is just normal these days - everything is "fixed" by releasing an update.
--PRESS RELEASE--
Dateline: HEAVEN, 11 Nov 2020.
Today, God released a product recall order for Homo sapiens sapiens. Units returned to manufacturer will be fitted with essential upgrades, including but not limited to improved spinal column construction, non-shared airway / digestive system entrance, enhanced DNA copy-error protection, reduced cytokine storm pathways, and operant restrictions to false-positive pattern-recognition circuitry.
"I would like to apologise to all members of My favoured species who feel they may have been adversely affected by previous design decisions," boomed God. "I trust that recipients will be satisfied once they have received the current tranche of product upgrades, which I can assure them have completed thorough beta testing on other planets in My Creation over the last six thousand years."
--ENDS--
That's scheduled for the Cumulative Update for Homo sapiens sapiens Version 20H2. Until then you'll have to make do with the spiritual component of non-obsolescence, which is still only applicable to the first 144,000 Jewish male virgins demonstrating a lifetime's adherence to Levitical law.
"It's not just door bells, I see this sort of problem all the time, users install something incorrectly, often without reading the instructions, and then blame the problem on the supplier."
If using the wrong screws can mean puncturing the battery, it's a design mistake. The battery shouldn't be in the cross hairs of a user installed screw. It may not be the customer, it could also be the manufacturer in China substituting screws in the hardware pack.
I'm sure Chinese factories very rarely substitute parts, but it could happen. /S
home of "Contents may be hot" labels on coffee cups
Congratulations, you bought the slander job that McDonalds (and other large corporations, funded through "Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse") made against a grandmother who suffered genital burns due to maccies serving 90°C coffee in a flexible cup and denying all responsibility.
She just wanted $20k to cover her medical costs; McDonalds only offered $800. The jury decided McDonalds were so reckless with their practices that they wanted to award her $2.9 million, and she settled for $600k.
The lawsuit ultimately made McDonalds use a more sturdy and rigid cup, which has saved more people from being burned unnecessarily to make McDonalds 0.5c more profit per coffee.
+1
This wasn't a case about Americans (or anyone else) being so stupid that they didn't understand coffee can be hot. What McDonald's were selling was so much hotter than would ever have been expected, dangerously hot and injurious when spilled.
Like pop-tarts and toasties; "hot" does not cut it when "danger of scalding injuries" is appropriate.
"the payout was ludicrous"
From the very brief summary of the story above - the payout was decided by a jury, not asked for by the lady in question (or her lawyers).
Welcome to the USian litigation system (i nearly typed justice there for some reason).
I wonder what she (or more likely her lawyers) did with the additional $$$?
Wikipedia actually has a decent article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants
Which states that the spill was when she was, in a parked car, attempting to remove the lid to add cream and sugar. Not an unreasonable thing to attempt to do IMHO.
"Other documents obtained from McDonald's showed that from 1982 to 1992 the company had received more than 700 reports of people burned by McDonald's coffee to varying degrees of severity, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000."
She will have noticed it was hot, yes....but people when buying a coffee don't expect it to be hot enough to cause third-degree burns. Most coffee places serve their coffee at a lower temperature...McDonalds served theirs at a much higher temperature than the typical coffee drinker would expect...which was the crux of the lawsuit. It wasn't that it was 'hot', it's that it was way hotter than anybody would reasonably expect, and you weren't warned about that fact.
It wasn't that it was 'hot', it's that it was way hotter than anybody would reasonably expect, and you weren't warned about that fact.
It's sold as a "hot" drink, the purchaser has some responsibility to find out how hot before doing anything with it.
Interesting that the people downvoting seem to think that this is pure conjecture. It's not - this is actually what the courts ruled and why McDonalds lost...the court decided that they were selling coffee at a far higher temperature than anybody would reasonably expect, and there was insufficient warning about this.
They didn't originally contain a warning, although it was pretty clear about which screws were which and you'd have to go to some effort to stick the doorbell up with alternate screws and use the wood screws instead of security screws.
Ring did send out a warning email in the middle of August. I'm guessing the recall affects any "in channel" that haven't already had updated instructions?
So Amazon did test the things, saw the issue and provided a warning, yet people still installed it wrong.
I was all ready to blame Amazon for not having tested, but it would seem that it's more the idiots who don't pay attention that should be blamed.
I don't know how clear the instructions were, but if I open an electrical appliance and there is a clear warning sign about something, I read it. The warning telling me about being careful with the screws means I'll pay more attention to the instructions.
This is precisely why the concept of "fail safe" exists. It's all very well to say people should read the instructions, but in the real world you know perfectly well that a significant number of people won't. Given that unavoidable fact, good practice is to come up with a design that won't explode and injure people if they make a mistake, especially if it's such an obvious mistake as "there are two kinds of screws and someone might mix them up".
For something like this, the best design would ensure that such mistakes can't even be made at all - ideally by just using the same screws everywhere, but if that can't be done then something like using different sizes so the wrong screw physically can't fit. But if you can't manage that, the absolute minimum would be making sure that using the wrong screw doesn't take someone's arm off and burn their house down. That might be a failure on a part of the customer for not following the instructions properly, but it's a much bigger failure on the part of the whole design and QA process in releasing a product that can do that in the first place.
The easiest option it to make it impossible to sell anything sharp to fuckwits. If they can't tell the difference between a woodscrew (sharp pointy spirally thing) and a machine screw (blunt spirally thing) they they really shouldn't be allowed anything sharper than a crayon.
I'd also like to see the stats on oh many Ring doorbells fell off doorframes/walls etc due to the inability of a machine screw to cut a thread (and yes - they do cut threads in rawlplugs too)
"The easiest option it to make it impossible to sell anything sharp to fuckwits. If they can't tell the difference between a woodscrew (sharp pointy spirally thing) and a machine screw (blunt spirally thing) they they really shouldn't be allowed anything sharper than a crayon.
I worked at an aerospace company and remember an intern who was going for an aerospace degree that didn't know what standard screw callouts were. He dropped a screw that shifted dimensions and told him is was a #4-40 x 1/4" pan head phillips machine screw and were in the drawers on my workbench. You'd think I was speaking Russian from the look I got back. He was probably really good at FEA, but no hands on experience.
A regular person may also have dropped a screw and found one in their jar that was just slightly longer and figured it would work. The hardware kit could have been short a screw or they could be wrong in the first place.
"a much bigger failure on the part of the whole design and QA process in releasing a product that can do that in the first place."
It's not possible to warn against everything. Otherwise all power tools would have to come with a 2Kg book of warnings. And even then, some idiot would find some way to injure themselves or others that wasn't in the warnings manual.
There'd have to be another warning manual about the dangers of the first warning manual.
Warning: warning manual is heavy and may cause personal injury or injury to another if dropping on any part of the body.
Warning: warning manual may ignite if exposed to naked flames or incandescent heat sources.
Warning: do not ingest part or all of the warning manual.
Etc. etc. ad nauseum.
The risk is that manual grows so large it needs another manual to warn about the dangers of the warning manual's warning manual. Infinite recursion.
And now my head hurts. Shouldn't have dropped that 15th tier warning manual warning manual on it, I suppose.
That sounds more like they new ab out the problems a long time ago and the more recent ones come with the updated instructions they are advising their US customers to download, not that those have always been the instructions. On the other hand, I would imagine the original instructions already told people which screws to use where, otherwise the security screws would not do their job properly and people were not warned of the consequences of not following the instructions.
I am trying to imagine how it's possible to fit the thing by using wood screws to attach the bracket and then try to get the mounting screws to bite into a door frame.
I assume the wood screws are too long and penetrate the casing and battery but in any case it seems like a design fail combined with the application of Darwinism.
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I guess this is only for those that are not connected to the new CCTV network operared by the local PLOD.
As with all other IoT shite, it ain't coming anywhere near my home. If my latest project works well, I'll be able to go off grid (gas and leccy) by next summer. I'll cut the landline then as well.
Try Belize: limited national grid (power comes from Mexico as or if available). Little telecoms so satellite internet a must. Solar power is a must but inverters cost a bloody fortune out there (+£5000 each). Fuel is via butane delivery, provided none of the the bridges have collapsed in the (frequent) flooding.
Apart from all of that you can be totally off the grid and most of the year it is a fantastic place to live, except for the Americans.
It's nice to point the finger at the meatsack tasked with nailing the thing to a wall, I can't help but wonder if extra waste and safety could have been done with a simple trick....
Namely have only set of screws and the security bracket separately (with it's own screws). Seems a relatively easy fix, stops the installer getting all confused and if they didn't buy the bracket and installed it incorrectly anyway then it's not Amazon's fault the installer is being a spanner.
On the flipside, yes, RTFM can also be applied I suppose.
Some years ago, I was installing a sub woofer in my old Camaro. Those suckers are heavy, and you have to mount them securely. Some people used Velcro, but that isn't going to stop it from becoming a 20 pound missile in an accident. Screws are required.
But the most obvious location is the shelf behind the back seats, but guess what is right under it? The fuel tank of course. I definitely did not want to be driving screws anywhere near the explodey gasoline.
So yes, keeping sharp things away from explodey bits is a very good design decision.
The battery isn't removable - you remove the doorbell to charge.
The mount screws into the wall using scary sharp 5cm long woodscrews
The doorbell clips to the top of the mount, and a couple of 1cm long shoulder security "machine" screws (untapered with only a thread on the 0.5cm closest to the head) screw into the bottom of the mount. The unthreaded part of the screw protrudes into the base of the doorbell and stops it being removed. You need to find your security torx every month or so to recharge.
You'd have to be pretty confused to get it wrong, but clearly people did, and that was a nicely charged battery they were self-tapping into!
It's important to get this fixed so the cops' live real-time surveillance access is not interrupted.
I've installed a number of these and have to say that the Ring 2 are really crappy devices. While I like the idea behind them of having a battery powered unti when someone didn't have cabling pulled through, so far every one of these things that I've installed loses wifi connectivity for no rhyme or reason. No real reply from ring as to how to fix the issue and I've given up and started pulling them when called.
I've now been replacing them with the ring pro (yes, I know it needs power run to it, but the reliability outweighs the additional time/cost to pull a cable)...
will never recommend these things to anyone again...
I this is a normal torx or standard torx 'security screw' then these are waste of time anyway. I bought my first set of security bits for £30 a couple of decades ago. at that point they were difficult to find for a consumer (I bought mine from a steam fair of all places). I recently bought an updated set which came with a little ratchet handle in a very nice plastic case for £8 in the middle aisle in Aldi. Apart from that the fact that these security bits are now easily available I've yet to find a security screw that can't be defeated by a desperate enough amateur mechanic / engineer even if he doesn't have an appropriate bit. Most can be extracted using an appropriately sized flat head screwdriver, hex or star bit hammered into the opening.
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