You should have contacted trading standards. They seemed to take it seriously when I bought from a UK supplier a device which had a 3 pin plug with no fuse

I can’t believe that people continue to believe this myth!

Bert

Need some CE labels? Cheap as chips on Ebay. All styles.

Difficult to tell if it meets the standards just by looking. It requires double insulation or reinforced insulation with defined creepage and clearance distances and should withstand a 4 kV flash test. something like a metal shrouded lamp holder would need to be dissected to measure the distances.

Russell

Why so coy about naming the retailer? It's either Aldi or Lidl, much better to name them so we know what to avoid.

It's not unusual to find 'fully plastic' earth pins on double insulated products as their only purpose is to open the gate on UK style 13A sockets and clear plastic on 13A plugs have been around for quite some time though they are not my style.

Martin

You can all stop worrying about the CE mark. It has been replaced by the UKCA mark. Transition period of one year. It will be interesting as to when we see the first one, if the exporters can be bothered with accreditation for the small UK market.

Stay well,

Rod

Believing a trade mark, brand-name, quality mark, or country of origin guarantees anything is a mistake in my opinion.

Even assuming that everything made in Germany is to a uniformly high standard, which it isn't, printing 'Made in Germany' in the manual proves nothing.

If a nice man in a pub car park offers to sell you a new Rolex watch for £50, is it OK if the posh velvet lined box is convincingly plastered with their trade-mark, a serial number, CE and Kite marks and 'Made in Switzerland'?

The right to use the Debenham's name has just been bought by the online fashion company BooHoo. Good luck to BooHoo, but their business is very different to that of a long established upmarket High Street Department Store. The original Skoda firm was a world class manufacturer. Under communism they became a byword for cheap nasty cars. Today, they're a quality company again. Everything changes. As my Granny said 'Never judge a book by it's cover.'

Guarantees are provided by the seller, not by the packaging, or where it was made. If it's no good, send it back.

Dave

i got one of these lights on one of my grinders. had trouble shorting the original clear lead so changed it to 3 core.

Even assuming that everything made in Germany is to a uniformly high standard,

German propaganda dating back to 1930s

empty but original rolex boxes (+ other empty packaging of hi value consumer products) sold for considerable money at the local auction house – their intended subsequent use was obvious to all.

Firstly I agree with comments about the CE mark not being a guarantee, it does not indicate anything other than goods thus marked must comply with all relevent EU Directives and Regulations. Now obviously like all trade marks it can be a false claim by unscrupulous parties, all too frequent these days. Compliance with these Directives usually involves manufacturing to a BS, EN or ISO standard (or BS EN ISO). A bit like the ISO9001 quality system, it gurantees nothing other than you have a good system of recording and traceability etc.

I work part time now as engineering manager and have been closely involved for many years with compliance, lately changing documentation and checking compliance with equivalent UK regulations. They are pretty much as EU ones as they were incorporated into UK law.

So we now have the UKCA (United Kingdom Conformity Assessed) mark.

The CE mark can be used alongside for this year probably.

UKCA applies to England Scotalnd and Wales, Northern Ireland remains as CE mark only.

The UKCA mark is not accepted in the EU so the CE mark remains.

Generally I found this fairly straightforward, I think the main problem we will have is actually knowing where our products are going to ensure the correct marking. With the CE mark previously the problem was theoretically the same but in reality we just put the CE mark on everything and seemed to work ok. Unfortunately our EU friends in their wisdom have decided they will have no truck with the UKCA mark appearing.

Bill D.

This is another problem with trade-marks, people believed Skoda's were nasty, irrespective of their actual qualities. Arguably they were value for money. Example joke of the time:

Q. What do you call a convertible Skoda?

A. A skip.

Friend of my dad's was very fond of Skodas and his hobby was doing them up. His main gripe was the cylinder head bolts would shear during maintenance on some, but not others. He reckoned Skoda had to make do with whatever steel was allocated to them centrally, and because cars were low priority under communism, bolts weren't consistently made to withstand heating and cooling.

Dave