Leaky oil-filled electric radiator. Dangerous? (2025 Update)

replying to Dave Osborne, Ukjb wrote: It's certainly not transformer oil, given that it is around £15 a litre, the oil would be worth more than the radiator. Their is no perticular oil. Every manufacturer will use their own modified oil that has certain property's related to the research that perticular company has carried out

My faith in the EU, while great[1], is not absolute. But I do not believe that they would encourage the sale of electric radiators full of inflammable oil. ... A quick Google suggests that in well-regulated markets they tend to use siloxane oils which are not easily combustible. Very old ones might use highly carcinogenic oils I've forgotten the name of (but not inflammable, also used for potting transfomers many years ago), and apparently in the USA sometimes vegetable oils have been used.

But from a uk perspective, burning oil is probably not a risk with a reputable make.

Oil filled transformers do explode!

followed by:- "for full context, visit

When I go to that horrible website the date of the last post in the USENET thread is quite clearly visible in the top righthand corner :-

"posted on October 19, 2010, 9:19 pm"

Why do people have so much trouble seeing it?

I daresay old ones & cheaper new ones use the cheapest suitable oil, which I believe is light mineral oil. It is of course highly flammable if heated & atomised. It would take more than 1 fault for that to happen, which is normally an acceptable safety level for electrical goods.

NT

Another ancient OP you're replying to.

Indeed, though that is from arcing inside followed by release of oil sprays into the atmosphere. There is a *lot* of external energy being supplied to a transformer.

Going back to the OPs suggestion, I don't believe you will get an oxygen rich atmosphere inside in the scenario he describes. With air and oil on a hot element, the oil will oxidise, and "getter" the oxygen.

I think HOH invites people to answer questions on the home page (and probably other places too) where the date isn?t at all obvious or even present. It?s only when the link for context is generated that the date becomes obvious. Look at this example.

Such is the brilliance of the HOH interface, replies are all sorted by date of first post, not the most recent answer so respondents using HOH not only reply to ancient posts, they probably never see any replies to their messages either unless they start a new thread, which they seem loath to do.

HOH is about generating traffic to increase advertising revenue. It?s not designed to ?work?.

Tim

You are right - unbelievable - not the fault of the users after all. What a s*it website.

Yup, if you look at:

I wonder where it derives the ratings from?

(and more to the point, could we game it, so as to make it promote posts of our choice?)

Yup that seems to fit the MO - its very rare to ever get a reply to a new HoH poster on an old thread, whereas sometimes you get one when they are posting on a new thread.

Chances are if it stops promoting the old thread after a new HoH poster has added to it, they can then only find it by potentially looking back through tens of thousands of pages to find the thread again!

I would not object to the former so much, if it actually worked!

I always presumed they were purely random. I've not noticed any pattern to it.

The wiki differences function is broken.

NT

In what way?

try it, it lists every single line in an article, 99% of which hasn't changed.

You get that sometimes when you do a visual edit on an article that was previously source edited. The visual editor reformats the text without actually changing the content, but the diff sees it as a change. subsequent edits should diff ok.

I've had this DeLonghi Dragon just over a year. Today it is leaking oil. Was good for one season.