Stay SAFE - Your GU10 or your life

A badly designed or manufactured LED product can be dangerous. Robert Bain considers the measures in place to protect us.

 

GU10 LED spot light

Nearly half a million people have watched a YouTube video posted last year by electronics blogger Julian Ilett, titled Dangerous GU10 LED spot light is cheap and bright but could kill you – seriously.

In the video (which you can watch at bit.ly/gu100214) takes apart a GU10 lamp that he bought on eBay for £3 – including postage, naturally. He shows that, depending on which way round the two pins of the lamp are inserted, there's a 50:50 chance of getting live mains electricity on the front face of the lamp. From there, there's very little preventing the current reaching the heatsink as well – posing a pretty serious risk to anyone touching it.

‘It's a bit like Russian roulette,' Ilett says. He's not wrong. And that lamp is not alone.

Old lighting technologies had their own safety issues (mercury, for starters), but LED products introduce a new set of problems. Whereas making a fluorescent or incandescent lamp required some serious industrial equipment, pretty much anyone can cobble together a LED product in their garage – or try to. The market has opened up to those with less experience (or scruples). Plus, the electronics required to make LED lights work introduces the risk of parts becoming live.

Mark Salt of the LIA Labs says: ‘As we move into LED technology from traditional technologies, the skillsets required to drive these technologies, particularly electronics, is something that the industry does not have a great deal of knowledge about. So the quality of the product being procured is not always what it should be.'

Safety first

That's putting it mildly. Last year the EU banned 41 LED products because of a risk of electric shock or fire, including lamps, torches, light strips and novelty lights. Several more have been taken off the shelves already this year. The vast majority were made in China.

The detail gets even more interesting. Amazingly, 19 of the products banned in 2013 – nearly half – were spotted in Finland. Does Finland really have such a problem with dodgy lighting products that it gets half of all the European total, despite being home to barely one percent of Europe's population? It hardly seems likely. Much more believable is that the Finnish market surveillance guys are well resourced and on the ball. So if the Finns can find 19 dodgy products in a year, how many more are being missed across the rest of the European Union? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

The good thing is that there's greater awareness, and the other thing is that testing is gradually catching up. One of the big issues up until now has been that the standards have been either ambiguous or just absent. That's improving slowly.

Jeremy Turner of Fab Controls messes about with lamps and transformers for a living. The biggest safety issue in the LED world, he says, is poor quality GU10s. ‘In the good quality ones, the big names like Megaman, Bell, and so on, the electronics are fully enclosed, so you cannot get to any live parts. But there are some lamps where, if you grabbed hold of it while it was on, you'd get electrocuted. If you're buying a LED from a reputable supplier in the UK then that's not common, but if you buy something on eBay, it can happen.'

But low-voltage MR16s can be hazardous too. ‘The lamp is intrinsically safe, but you connect it to a transformer that is expecting a halogen load, some will go band and some will pump out current until the lamp goes bang.'

So what are our lines of defence against dangerous lighting products? Well, first is the CE mark. Standing for Communauté Européenne, the CE mark is a symbol that must be stamped on lighting products (and other goods) for them to be sold legally in the European Economic Area. It's how manufacturers declare that their products comply with all relevant EU legislation, including the Low-Voltage Directive, the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive and the Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) Directive

There are other schemes such as ENEC, which goes above and beyond what is required by the CE mark, requiring third-party testing by an accredited lab. But the ENEC scheme is only voluntary.

Hope for the future

It's not all bad news, though. To take a more proactive approach to the safety of lighting products, the Lighting Industry Association has been helping the National Measurement Office to test a sample of LED lamps – firstly to see if they perform as well as the manufacturers boast, and secondly to see if they're safe.

Testing for safety issues on samples of between 50 and 60 products showed ‘a significant number' of safety issues. This information has now been passed by the National Measurement Office to Trading Standards authorities, who are conducting risk assessments and deciding where to take further action.

Lighting professionals need to continue to be vigilant. Even if those dodgy GU10s do not electrocute you, they could do some serious damage to the industry in which you make your living.

Novel Energy Lighting specifically works with quality manufacturers, and screens out poor quality imports. Aside from any physical hazards, we want to be sure that the lighting we sell delivers the lighting performance people expect. This is why we stick to reputable manufacturers like Philips, Megaman, Osram etc. Moreover, Novel Energy Lighting also sells quality LED accessories such as transformers, dimmers, resloades, sensors, emergency packs, modules, batteries etc, and similarly screens products for quality. We are also driven by a strong incentive to reduce lamp failure rates and warranty claims, to reduce costs and boost repeat business. We focus on retaining our customers for the long term and delivering quality service as well as products.