Forum for European Electrical Domestic Safety

In the past 120 years, electricity has become the overarching energy source in our everyday life. Its applications have improved our comfort and safety, multiplying the means of entertaining and communicating.

However, domestic electricity can be dangerous. Specifically, the safety of older electrical installations is a concern in the countries of the European Union, given the low renovation rate of dwellings and their electrical installations. At the same time, the uses of domestic electricity continues to diversify and develop, progressively posing increasingly important challenges in terms of quality and safety of electrical energy used in households.

The safety deficiencies of obsolete electrical installations generally result from the aging of their components, the lack of maintenance and inappropriate usage. The dangers they represent are also clearly identified. The risks of electrification and electrocution are well known, but fires of electrical origin and their consequences are the most worrying.

Data presented (e.g. those of France and the UK) were gathered after extensive research by a network of collaborating expert stakeholders and can be considered to be highly reliable. They clearly show that electrical safety issues constitute a substantial problem regarding fire safety.

Starting from the reliable figures, conservative extrapolations were constructed for other countries in the Northwestern EU. We continued this exercise with the slightly less consolidated data to make even more prudent extrapolations for the other European regions. Even though the resulting figures are not confirmed by assessments in the field, they do provide an idea of the probable size of the problem in those countries. The FEEDS Forum would be eager to collaborate with stakeholders to collect more actual and consolidated numbers for those countries.

Reading fire statistics with the aim of prevention: when analysing fire statistics, the number of accidental fires is obtained by removing arson from the total number of fires. It is an interesting approach in the sense that it counts only fires that could have been influenced by preventive actions targeting the dwelling, its installation and its occupants. This is in contrast to data where arson is included, which falls within the field of crime prevention and is much harder to reduce, if possible, at all.

While investigating the fire statistics through the angle of accidental domestic fires and the potential impact of preventive actions, FEEDS made a more in-depth analysis: first, fires with unknown origin are usually so characterised because no inspection was carried out (for example because doing so was not requested by the insurance company). Therefore, the distribution of causes for these uninspected fires can be assumed to be the same as that of the inspected fires. Second, the figure for arson was taken out to limit the scope to accidental fires only.