Fake Apple: Cheap phone chargers could burn down your house

Cheap chargers go for ?5 online compared with official ?15Apple running worldwide programme to replace counterfeit USB chargersDevices can take around five hours to charge with authentic chargers but more than 19 hours with a fakeMan from Cheshire electrocuted in most recent case of Apple gadget malfunctioning

By Jill Foster

PUBLISHED: 23:14 GMT, 29 August 2013 | UPDATED: 23:15 GMT, 29 August 2013

No workplace, coffee shop or even school playground is complete without them. But Apple’s ubiquitous gadgets, the iPad and iPhone, have been making headlines recently for some — literally — shocking reasons.

This week, a father told how his daughter’s iPad charger exploded in his hand giving him a massive electric shock.

Tim Gillooley, 34, said he was thrown across the room and left with blackened fingers when he reached down to unplug the device at his mother’s house in Widnes, Cheshire. He believes his eight-year-old daughter Chloe would have been killed had she touched it.

Shocking: The Apple iPad and recharger plug, which exploded at the socket, burning Tim Gillooley''s fingers and sending him flying across the room

It’s the latest in a line of incidents where iPhone and iPad chargers have been blamed for putting lives at risk. So are your Apple chargers really dangerous? Or is it all down to the cheaper imitation chargers which flood the market?

Yes. The incident in Cheshire comes after two in China, leaving one person dead and another in a coma. Chinese air stewardess Ma Ailun, 23, was reportedly killed by an electric shock in July when she answered a call on her iPhone 5 while it was recharging.

Earlier this year in New York, a woman claimed her iPhone 4S spontaneously melted, oozing acid that destroyed the handset. Then in February this year, fire crews in Oregon blamed an apartment blaze on an overheated MacBook battery which had been placed on a mattress. In 2011, two iPhone 4s on opposite sides of the world caught fire and self-combusted.

The first happened on a plane over Australia and the second in Brazil when its owner was awakened by the smoking device on his bedside table.

Lethal: Tim believes his eight-year-old daughter Chloe could have been killed in the explosion

It's highly likely that some of the dangerous incidents have been the fault of chargers. Indeed, Miss Ma’s death was blamed on an imitation charger.

So why do people buy them? It’s simple — the price. You can get them for under a fiver from Amazon sellers, for example, whereas the official one is at least ?15. But it’s a saving that could come at a high price.

‘There are plenty of reputable companies that make accessories for Apple products, and as long as you go with one of them, you should be fine,’ says David Price, online editor at macworld.co.uk.

‘I’d never buy an ‘official iPad charger’ from a bloke on the street and I’d advise others not to do the same.’

There are over 600?million Apple devices including iPhones and iPads being used around the world and only a handful of reported incidents. The chances are you’re very safe. But counterfeit cheap chargers appear to raise the risks significantly.

‘Any genuine products from a well-known manufacturer such as Apple are rigorously tested and should be safe,’ says Dr Kevin Curran, a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a reader in computer science at the University of Ulster.

‘But you may experience problems with non-proprietary products — those that may fit your iPhone or iPad but come from a different company.

‘I can understand why people would buy cheaper chargers but a few years ago I had one that exploded so I wouldn’t go near one now.’

So big is the problem that Apple have decided to help customers tell the genuine articles from the fake —although, ironically, their detailed online guides to spotting the difference may well help counterfeiters imitate the visual design of Apple products more closely.

For details about how to detect a genuine Apple charger see: www.apple.com/uk/power-adapters/.

Any item connected to mains could lead to a shock but this is exceptionally rare. ‘To tell people not to speak while a phone is charging is akin to telling people to disconnect a microwave before opening the door to remove food,’ says Dr Curran.

‘If the report about the Chinese lady being electrocuted when she answered her phone is accurate, then it is fair to say that the phone or charger was defective. The current flowing into a charging phone is typically not enough to kill a person.’

While it should be safe, you shouldn’t do this if you want your battery to last.

Most modern smartphones and tablets have a device that stops the charge from trickling out once it’s full, but if you have too many apps open or your Wi-Fi is left on, a small amount of charge will leak out — even when it’s plugged in. The result? It will just keep on re-charging.

‘The problem with that is that batteries can only be recharged a finite number of times,’ says Dr Curran.

Action: Apple says it is running a worldwide programme to replace fake chargers

‘It varies from battery to battery and can be anything from 10,000 times to 40,000 times. That means that if it’s plugged in overnight, your phone or tablet might lose, say, one per cent of its charge as it searches for Wi-Fi or one of the apps becomes active and then it will recharge itself.

‘That means your battery will recharge itself 30 or 40 times a night which will affect its lifespan.’

To combat this, Dr Curran advises putting your phone/tablet on a socket that is controlled by a timer and only charging it for a few hours a night.

You could even use the timer to switch it on and off a couple of times during the night. ‘I used to put mine on charge until about 5am and then it would switch off,’ he says.

If you’re using the charger that came with the phone or tablet, it shouldn’t take as long as if you’re using a non-proprietary model.

A recent test by Techhive.com found that an iPad 4 took five hours and nine minutes to charge fully, but an incredible 19 hours and 13 minutes with an alien charger.

Victim: Ma Ailun, a 23-year-old air stewrdess with China Southern Airlines, who died when she picked up her phone as it was charging

Meanwhile, the iPhone 5 took two hours 16 minutes to charge with the Apple charger, but two hours 57 minutes with the alien charger.

And ensure you have ten or 15 hours to spare if you’re ever tempted to use your iPhone charger to charge up your iPad.

Phones have no problems drawing charge from tablets, but tablets take much longer to draw juice from phone chargers. In tests, the Apple iPad 4 took ten hours and five minutes to charge using the iPhone charger.

Prompted by the Chinese incident, Apple has now begun a worldwide programme that will run until October 18 to replace third-party and counterfeit USB chargers.

‘Recent reports have suggested that some counterfeit and third-party adaptors may not be designed properly and could result in safety issues,’ says Apple. ‘While not all third-party adaptors have an issue, we are announcing a USB Power Adapter Takeback Programme to enable customers to acquire properly designed adaptors.’

Consumers with any concerns about their adapters should drop them off at an Apple store or an authorised service provider, Apple says, where they will be disposed of in an environmentally friendly way.

They will replace it with a genuine adaptor for the reduced price of ?8.

More details of this scheme can be found at: apple.com/uk.

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Mark Carney interview: I'll step in to stop house price bubble, says Bank of England governor

Mark Carney said he is alert to the 'damage' that could be causedComments come against background of sharply recovering house pricesGovernor says Bank has a 'toolkit' to restrict mortgage credit

By Alex Brummer

PUBLISHED: 23:15 GMT, 29 August 2013 | UPDATED: 23:26 GMT, 29 August 2013

The new Bank of England governor says he is ‘personally’ ready to head off the risks of a housing bubble caused by low interest rates and the Government’s Help to Buy scheme.

In his first national newspaper interview since taking charge, Mark Carney tells the Daily Mail that he is alert to the ‘damage’ that could be caused by uncontrolled mortgage lending and surging house prices.

The Canadian, who was a postgraduate student at Oxford University, says: ‘I lived in the country in the late ’80s, 1990s, I saw the boom-bust cycle in the housing sector, the damage it can do, the length of time it took to repair. I’m very alert personally to this issue.’

New Bank of England governor Mark Carney has said he is alert to the 'damage' uncontrolled mortgage lending and surging house prices could cause

Mr Carney said the Bank now has a 'toolkit' to restrict mortgage credit and even raise the amount of capital that banks and building societies must hold to restrain home loans

His comments come against the background of sharply recovering house prices. They climbed 4.6 per cent in the three months to July, the highest annual rate for more than three years.

‘We are watching it closely and we will as appropriate make our views known in terms of the degree of this risk and the potential action that should be taken to address it,’ he adds.

Mr Carney says this could involve using the new powers of the Bank’s financial policy committee, which he chairs. In the past the Bank’s response to a potential housing bubble would have been to raise interest rates.

The governor says it now has a ‘toolkit’ to restrict mortgage credit and even raise the amount of capital that banks and building societies must hold to restrain home loans.

‘We have the responsibility to assess emerging vulnerabilities in the economy such as housing, make those assessments and recommend action,’ he says. ‘Interest rates are principally an instrument of monetary policy for achieving the inflation outcome and there are other tools that address risks.’

His comments come against a great deal of scepticism about the extension of George Osborne’s Help to Buy scheme, which was unveiled in the Budget. 

Mark Carney's comments come against the background of sharply recovering house prices - they climbed 4.6 per cent in the three months to July, the highest annual rate for more than three years

Under that plan, designed to kick start house building, homebuyers will be able to access ?135billion of mortgage subsidies from January 1 next year. Mr Carney recognises that heading off a credit or housing bubble, of the kind seen in the run-up to the 2007-2008 financial crisis will be a ‘challenging task’.

In what might be taken as a veiled warning to the Chancellor, he says even with new tools ‘it would be difficult to achieve if there were a host of government policies or other events that are pushing in the other direction’. In a wide ranging interview the governor, described by Mr Osborne as ‘the best central banker of his generation’, also puts some distance between the Bank and the Government over the future of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Delays and reviews by successive governments mean that RBS is still 80 per cent government-owned and its future is uncertain with MPs demanding a split between the ‘good’ lending side of the bank and its ‘bad’ largely investment banking arm.

Mr Carney also put some distance between the Bank and the Government over the future of the Royal Bank of Scotland

‘It is absolutely imperative that the uncertainty around RBS is dissipated, absolutely imperative,’ he says. The Bank chief says that if Britain’s economic performance is to be improved ‘there has to be an increase in bank lending to new business with good ideas or existing businesses that have a good expansion plan’.

That is why the Bank is seeking to free up ?90billion in new lending by easing the requirements on the amounts of cash banks must hold.

Turning to savers, Mr Carney says that keeping interest low and bringing unemployment down to 7 per cent by 2016 – the Bank’s target – is important to them too, despite low returns.

The sooner the economy is restored to growth and unemployment is brought down ‘the sooner there is normalisation of interest rates and savers will earn a return,’ he adds.

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