General > General Technical Chat
Coin cell safety improvement a world first in Australia
CatalinaWOW:
Well intentioned, but everything has consequences. I have personally demonstrated one for this rule more than once. Most things using coin cells are small and thus the compartment cover and the screw are very small. When removing the screw it is sometimes launched, or captured by the residual magnetism in the screwdriver or lost by simple poor vision and carelessness. At the least this eliminates the safety feature and often makes the compartment cover not stable. So the whole device becomes another addition to the waste stream.
Other consequences. The tiny screw also requires a screwdriver not owned by most people buying these things. Thus the device immediately goes in the waste stream, or a specialist business is created to change the batteries, or a huge market for the screwdrivers is created with all of the hazards associated with that from mining through safe storage of the screwdriver. These cells are largely used in hearing aids, and those are used most often by the elderly who likely won't be able to deal with the replacement. That leads to a few hours or days without hearing until a relative or specialist can get the change done, with all sorts of additional health risks from that lack of hearing. Finally, the risks are low, but a toddler might find and ingest that lost screw from the battery compartment cover. It can't be good, though probably seldom results in death.
In an ideal world we could calculate how many deaths all of these consequences create. It is a tiny, but non-zero number and might easily be larger than the number of children killed by these batteries. But in our real world we have only appeals to emotion and "What about the children?" trumps "WOW, that is a useless and wasteful inconvenience." every time.
Rick Law:
--- Quote from: NANDBlog on December 23, 2020, 08:24:21 am ---
--- Quote from: Rick Law on December 23, 2020, 02:15:33 am ---
--- Quote from: NANDBlog on December 22, 2020, 11:59:04 pm ---
--- Quote from: ratatax on December 22, 2020, 07:09:31 pm ---"one child a month"
Yeah so who cares. Natural selection. If we needed to prevent any misuse of any product everything would be forbidden, even spoons.
--- End quote ---
Nah, if would be a different story, if it would be 12 year olds.
There is a stage in children's development, where they experience the world by putting things into their mouth. It's better at feeling things than their hands. Freud and stuff.
Same way, I slow down and be careful about birds and cats on the road. They have no idea about the danger.
I care less about jaywalkers and cyclists who are breaking the rules. They all know it well what they are doing.
--- End quote ---
12 year old or 1 month old, it still would be natural selection - based on parental behavior. Same as a tigress that would not feed the baby tiger, her gene is terminated.
Nature is more cold and efficient than modern human society...
--- End quote ---
I dont know if you ever saw a 3-4 year old, but they can throw a glass cup (that they get a hold of somehow) on the floor, swallow a battery and run into the the side of a table in 20 seconds (an start crying). You literally won't notice it happening because you are picking up the shards, so they don't kill your child.
And if you think that: This one was dumb, I just make another one...
No you wont, you will be devastated, crying 20 years later on Christmas eve. These things stay with and ruin a family.
--- End quote ---
Hey, I never said I liked that... I just repeated a fact that natural selection also work based on parental behavior.
Yeah, it would be devastating to loose a child. I do know how difficult it is to fully watch a child 7x24. Nature being what it is, luck also plays a great role.
But, not everything in the world can be fixed by a new law or a new regulation. As CatalinaWOW pointed out, everything has consequences. I would add, politicians' cost benefit analysis often fail. See how a typical politician's net-worth sky rockets after taking office while the society declines. I must make the assumption that much of what they did, the benefit is to the politicians themselves more so than for society in general.
An EE firm as it is today would need a number of lawyers in the building already. Keep adding more regulation will eventually disable the entire industry. There must be some rules. Where and how we draw the line is the question.
VK3DRB:
--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on December 23, 2020, 06:23:06 pm ---Well intentioned, but everything has consequences. I have personally demonstrated one for this rule more than once. Most things using coin cells are small and thus the compartment cover and the screw are very small. When removing the screw it is sometimes launched, or captured by the residual magnetism in the screwdriver or lost by simple poor vision and carelessness. At the least this eliminates the safety feature and often makes the compartment cover not stable. So the whole device becomes another addition to the waste stream.
Other consequences. The tiny screw also requires a screwdriver not owned by most people buying these things. Thus the device immediately goes in the waste stream, or a specialist business is created to change the batteries, or a huge market for the screwdrivers is created with all of the hazards associated with that from mining through safe storage of the screwdriver. These cells are largely used in hearing aids, and those are used most often by the elderly who likely won't be able to deal with the replacement. That leads to a few hours or days without hearing until a relative or specialist can get the change done, with all sorts of additional health risks from that lack of hearing. Finally, the risks are low, but a toddler might find and ingest that lost screw from the battery compartment cover. It can't be good, though probably seldom results in death.
In an ideal world we could calculate how many deaths all of these consequences create. It is a tiny, but non-zero number and might easily be larger than the number of children killed by these batteries. But in our real world we have only appeals to emotion and "What about the children?" trumps "WOW, that is a useless and wasteful inconvenience." every time.
--- End quote ---
Very good point about the small screw. I wonder if the legislators even thought about that. Maybe a better idea is to have a latching mechanism that does not use a screw but is child proof that can be tested to standards.
Years ago, Australia used a dangerous 240V mains plug with unshielded 240V active and neutral pins, where toddlers could easily get their fingers in contact with the live pins if the plug was half out of the wall socket. People had been electrocuted due to the bad design of these mains plugs. In about the last 20 years a plug with shielded active and neutral pins has been made mandatory for that very reason. All power cords now have plugs with shielded pins, although through eBay one can import products from China still that uses illegal plugs. There was a time when no-one thought it was dangerous to drive without seat belts. Now they are pretty much required throughout the world - first country to make them mandatory was Australia. Such legislation saved many lives.
Your last paragraph sounds like it came straight from the mouth of Dr Groeteschele.
CatalinaWOW:
--- Quote from: VK3DRB on December 23, 2020, 10:53:18 pm ---
Years ago, Australia used a dangerous 240V mains plug with unshielded 240V active and neutral pins, where toddlers could easily get their fingers in contact with the live pins if the plug was half out of the wall socket. People had been electrocuted due to the bad design of these mains plugs. In about the last 20 years a plug with shielded active and neutral pins has been made mandatory for that very reason. All power cords now have plugs with shielded pins, although through eBay one can import products from China still that uses illegal plugs. There was a time when no-one thought it was dangerous to drive without seat belts. Now they are pretty much required throughout the world - first country to make them mandatory was Australia. Such legislation saved many lives.
Your last paragraph sounds like it came straight from the mouth of Dr Groeteschele.
--- End quote ---
I guess I don't understand the Groeteschele allusion.
Safety belts were evaluated and there was clear data to show that they reduced overall injuries, even though there were certain circumstances where they increased injury. A case where data was available better than the appeal to the "What about when I am trapped in my car underwater" emotion. Same sort of arguments for air bags. They kill some people but the overall data says that they save lives. And the situation was improved further when the data was refined to show that the deadly airbag incidents were tied to a particular set of body characteristics and a disarm switch was provided (at least for the front seat passenger) so that those with those characteristics could be made safer. I am not familiar enough with the Australian shielded pin plug to comment, but will relate that for years there was an ongoing controversy about the safety of twist locking electrical plugs vs the US non-locking standard. The argument was that the locking plug made partial exposure of the conductors less likely and elimination of machinery shutdowns due to accidental disconnection was a safety plus. On the other side was an argument that tripping hazards were made more extreme by a non-breakable attachment and that keeping power applied to a piece of machinery that was dropped or moved by a forklift for example was a hazard. As far as I know there was never data to answer the question and no compelling emotional argument either. Just faded away over time with the twist lock version virtually disappearing over here.
Perhaps a real data analysis was done on the coin cell issue, though it hasn't made news here in the US. And here in the US there are quite a few safety rules made without considering whether they actually improve safety. One that I believe has finally been corrected was one that forbid employers from providing iced or chilled water to their workers. It had a huge impact on me and my fellow workers as I worked my way through school in and outdoor steel fabrication yard where we didn't really know how hot it was because the available glass bulb thermometers went to the top and popped. Something well over 120 F. It finally was recognized that the rule had propagated from a time before mechanical refrigeration, when ice came from lakes and ponds cut and stored during the winter for summer use. And when no real provisions were made to assure that the ice wasn't cut from animal latrines or contaminated by rodents in storage.
james_s:
I like the twist lock plugs for heavy duty stuff where the cord is a big heavy thing that tugs at the plug even under normal circumstances. I wouldn't want them for small domestic stuff. As far as safety, they only work when they are actually locked, the machine will receive power just by pushing the plug into the socket.
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