Most tools, appliances, and other home products work pretty well for a reasonable amount of time. There are lemons that slip through the system. But most products are scrutinized at some point by retailers, testing companies, consumer labs or government agencies.
At Sears in Hoffman Estates, you might picture engineers in white coats analyzing the metal of a socket wrench, or computing the lift capacity of an engine hoist used by back-yard mechanics. Engineers check product specs, of course, and conduct some practical field tests.
A problem with socket wrenches, for example, is that some consumers misuse them. When a bolt is frozen, they fit a long pipe over the handle — it’s called a cheat bar — to gain extra leverage. That makes sense in theory. But it stresses the tool beyond its design limits so the handle suddenly fractures, causing an accident. To defeat this problem, testers make sure the tool will break in what engineers call a soft failure. Before the handle shatters, the ratchet gears grind to a halt. There’s no snapping metal, just crumbling gears as the misused tool breaks down in a controllable manner.
With the engine hoist, testers scour auto graveyards for the heaviest car engine: a monstrous, rusting, Ford Thunderbird 427 cubic inch V-8. (By comparison, the 2010 Ford Mustang comes with a 281 cubic-inch engine.) Technicians hang it on the hoist, push the hoist around on its casters, start the engine swaying, try to make the hoist tip or break, day after day, for months. When it stays steady holding the monster engine, the hoist goes into stores.
How would you test a rocking chair? Sears technicians put a 200-pound weight on the seat, a 1-inch-thick block under one leg to make it rock out of kilter, and attach a mechanical arm that pushes the chair back and forth thousands of times a day, week after week. If the joints separate; no go. If they hold up; no problem.
Real-world tests are also used at Underwriters Laboratories in Northbrook. For thousands of household products, UL checks basic performance, then creates the worst foreseeable scenarios in test kitchens and bathrooms just like yours, even rooftops that they purposefully set on fire to test the resistance of shingles and other building materials.
For an electric mixer, a technician jams the blades with a stick, turns the unit on high speed, drapes a cloth over the air inlets of the motor, sets it in the corner of a kitchen counter where there’s not much air circulation — and waits. This mimics an implausible but possible household scenario. What if you dropped a spoon into the mixing bowl, it caught in the blades, you heard the phone ring, tossed a dish towel that landed on the motor, and then left the room. Would the mixer overheat and burst into flames, or would the internal safety circuits shut it down?
There are also consumer testing labs, like Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports. They have been testing products since 1936, and evaluate more than 3,000 a year in 50 specialized labs.