Only 28% of UK homeowners think their home is “very prepared” for the winter, leaving millions of people vulnerable to home emergencies and boiler breakdowns. This is according to a survey by Sainsbury’s Bank Home Insurance, which also found that 1% of people think their homes are not prepared for the cold weather at all,…
Millions of Brits are turning to the internet for help and advice about home improvements and DIY. And the internet is happy to oblige – there are more than three million videos about domestic DIY on YouTube alone, and websites such as ours are full to the brim with advice about how to deal with a…
The below picture could be far more shocking than it looks!
A four-month-old infant and his mother and father were hospitalised with carbon monoxide poisoning as a result of their landlords’ failure to adhere to their legal gas safety requirements, a court heard. Suraiya Bobat, 46, and her husband Mehboob Bobat, 47, were each told to complete 8 hours of community work, to pay a £60 victim…
Electric blanket safety checks are taking place throughout the UK this autumn, enabling people to make sure these devices are safe before they plug them in over winter. Previous safety tests have found that more than half of all blankets examined are faulty, suggesting that thousands of people could be keeping themselves warm overnight with…
Millions of British people are risking electrical home emergencies, boiler breakdowns, gas leaks and fires due to their reluctance to invest in essential health and safety equipment or maintain their appliances properly. Research by mortgage and loans firm Ocean Finance found that approximately 7.5% of people in the UK do not own a smoke alarm,…
Prepayment meters (PPMs) are creating hard choices for some of the UK’s most vulnerable people, research from the Citizens Advice Bureau has found. The charity discovered that, by the end of the second quarter of 2013, 683,796 people with PPMs were repaying debts to energy companies – a 15.5% annual increase. Overall, 10.8 million UK…
A coroner has called for electrical appliance safety standards to be overhauled after a father died rescuing his children from a house fire. Santosh Benjamin-Muthia, who was 36, lost his life in 2010 after his Beko fridge-freezer cover set alight due to a defect in the defrost timer. This was not the only fire these fridge-freezers…
Hundreds of home emergencies every year are caused by faulty electrical appliances. From the dangerous – such as fire, electrocution and injury – to the troublesome – such as electrical breakdowns and power cuts – the number of problems that defective electronics can lead to is huge, and the consequences of these problems can be…
A home improvement company’s partners have been fined after a woman and her foster children were potentially exposed to fatal carbon monoxide poisoning as a result of inappropriate building work. Gas Safety breach Philip Thomas and Janusz Wojcik, partners of Lochaber Street, Cardiff-based firm P Thomas and J Building Home improvement Specialists, each admitted breaching…
