As the owner of Vision Products, this fire and the other 3 or 4 fires that I have heard about in the last year are incredibly disturbing and have kept me up at night wondering what could have caused them.
I have talked with many of the players involved in some of these fires and a disturbing pattern seems to be forming and it involves cheap Chinese power strips used to plug all of the heating elements and thermostats into.
Back in the old days, power strips used to cost quite a bit and were made in the USA and had a metal case around where the numerous plugs were situated. Today, we all go to Home Depot or Walmart and grab 2 plastic power strips (made in china) for $4.99 and never give it a second thought.
We think nothing about paying $1000 for a rack, thousands of dollars for breeder Ball pythons and hundreds of dollars for high quality thermostats and then we splice the whole thing together using a plastic, made in China, $2.49 power strip.
On top of that, how many of us actually read the label on the power strip to see how many watts it will safely accept and then factor in exactly how many watts we are actually plugging into these things? I know that I have been guilty of overloading cheap power strips and I have even had two of them short out, melt the plastic case a bit and turn smokey black. Luckily, they were both on concrete floors with nothing close to set a fire.
I recently went out and bought some higher quality power strips and I got the smoke alarms connected into the alarm system and I feel a bit better about all the electrical gadgets that I have running at my facility.
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