Sometime before July 2007, Toro realized it had a problem with its popular Power Sweep electric blowers. Little pieces of plastic were breaking off inside and shooting out the nozzle of the leaf blowers. Sometimes those missiles hit people, hard enough to inflict bruises and scratches.

It was happening with blowers made between 2000 and 2002 at the El Paso, Texas plant. The pieces came from the impellers, the internal fans used to force the air. Bloomington-based Toro determined the material used to make the impellers was too brittle, so it switched to a nylon material, said Joe Newberg, Toro’s manager of product safety and government relations. The leaf blowers are now made at the company’s Juarez, Mexico, plant, across the border from El Paso; they retail for about $35; and they shoot only air now, he said.

In July 2007, the company issued the first recall notice for an estimated 900,000 leaf blowers, one of the largest recalls in Toro history. The recall was done in tandem with the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the federal agency, which issues a steady stream of recall notices for products that could wound or kill people. At that time, the company had received “154 reports of broken impellers, including 21 reports of minor cuts and bruises resulting from projected impeller pieces.”

Blower buyers could trade in their defective models to get a new one. But Toro wasn’t getting many takers.

“We were still having enough incidents reported to us — less than one a month, but still a concern” because of the injuries, Newberg said. The company decided that “before closing this program out, we should make one more attempt to contact customers.”

The CPSC issued the second recall notice on Dec. 11, noting an additional 8 reports of impeller mishaps and 7 injuries since the first notice.

Newberg wouldn’t tell me how many of the 900,000 recalled blowers have made it back to the company, but said the percentage was in the single digits.

“This is a fairly old product,” he said. “We’re not sure how long people really maintain these in use for replacing them.”

The small number of returns in such a massive recall raises questions for me about how many consumers ever find out that a product they’re using has been recalled for safety reasons.

To that end, the Consumer Product Safety Commission today announced a new deal with Target to use gift registry kiosks to alert customers about recalled products. “Through the kiosk system, guests in Target stores will have easy access to notices of new or past recalls for all product categories and can print copies of safety and recall notices to take with them,” the CPSC says.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 11:13 am and is filed under Buyer beware, Dangerous products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.