Looftlighter - chocolate teapot

When designing a product it’s a fairly basic rule of thumb that you specify materials which are fit for purpose. So you would think that an electric fire lighter would be made of stuff that doesn’t melt. Think again, for my new Looftlighter outer casing is now missing the first 30 mm from the ‘business end’, and I can only assume it hasn’t been nibbled by rodents.

The casing is perforated aluminium, and a quick check on Wikipedia tells me that this element melts at 660.25 °C. That’s only a few degrees more than the melting point of magnesium which, as every schoolchild knows, can be lit with a match.

It’s not that the Looftlighter has melted itself. You could probably operate it indefinitely without overheating provided you didn’t poke it near the thing you wanted to light. But once the solid fuel in my fireplace begins to catch fire, it gives off a fierce roaring flame, fanned by the hot air blasting from the Looftlighter. It’s this which has consumed the fire lighter. Clearly, I have held the tip too close to the fire, or held it there too long.

I should have realised that the supplementary instructions (a photocopy of a photocopy x several generations) included in the box were an oblique warning of this risk. They tell you to withdraw it a bit once the charcoal or other fuel starts to glow and spark. They don’t explicitly say what will happen if you leave it too close for too long. So whilst I accept my part in the early failure of this gadget, I do feel that, by making it out of the wrong material and then not clearly warning the user, the Looftlighter people are primarily to blame here.

I am not suggesting that they use some exotic alloy from the space programme. Iron melts at 1,535 °C and our old gas poker could be left buried in the burning coals for as long as you wanted. And whilst we all smile at apocryphal tales of packs of peanuts with ‘may contain nuts’ warnings, I do think they should spell out how easy it is to melt the Looftlighter. Disappointing.