Melting glass and wires that give you a shock: fairy lights that make your Christmas party go with a bang. The Netherlands took part in a survey to see whether European safety regulations are being observed. Conclusion: one third of the lights tested should not be on sale.

"People want them very cheap, and they're often sold and then thrown out after a couple of weeks. There's a lot of pressure on manufacturers to make them, and retailers to commission them, as cheaply as possible. And that often means you drive down the cost, but at the expense of safety."

Helen Kearns, spokesperson for the European Commission, says it’s the consumers that cause the biggest problem with Christmas lights. They want them as cheap as possible because they’re only using them for a few weeks or days. “After that, they often throw them away.”

Safety
So the manufacturers cut corners – with the instructions or the materials: in other words, with safety. In Hungary, one of the five countries taking part in the European Commission survey, more than 95 percent of fairy lights were defective in some way.

That percentage was quite a bit lower in the Netherlands. Kearns says this was because the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (VWA) is one of the few watchdog bodies which carries out regular checks. However, when the Dutch-German research laboratory TÜV Rheinland carried out tests recently the results were dramatic.

“There were strings of fairy lights where, if one or two bulbs were broken, the rest reached temperatures
of more than 200 degrees.” According to director Henk-Jan Pieters “There were wires where you could easily pull a light off. If you touched that you could be electrocuted”. Go to the TÜV website to download a factsheet on the lights in question.

EU label
Henk-Jan Pieters is not inclined to blame the consumer: “All these products are labelled CE – Conformé Européenne – so people must be able to trust them to be safe. Although, there is a misunderstanding here. CE is not a seal of approval. The manufacturers add the label. It doesn’t mean the product has been independently tested.”

A real European seal of approval is still a long way away, according to Helen Kearns. Meanwhile more and more Christmas lights are being made, particularly in China. There are so many that it has long been impossible to check them all, even for a watchdog like the VWA.

"The long-term solution to safety on the European market is raising standards in China. We do a huge amount of work with manufacturers in China. And working with the customs authorities, because often customs authorities prioritise things like drugs and people trafficking, and product safety isn't always the priority for testing with limited resources."

Tips for consumers
Until Chinese goods are safer, there are a number of tips for consumers. Buy from established shops rather than on the internet, even though some of the lights found to be unsafe by TÜV actually came from well-known Dutch stores like Blokker and V&D.

“I would advise people to buy the more expensive strings of lights” says Henk-Jan Pieters “and make sure the instructions are in Dutch.”

But are the penny-pinching Dutch going to do that for something they’ll only enjoy for a few days? “Oh yeah, sure.”
 

Photo: Prodigaldog/Flickr