Video Highlights:
00:01 – Greetings from Jason
00:17 – Child safety and blind chords, what the 2001 reports say
00:37 – The government’s pre-emptive measure
01:25 – Option no. 1 Safety Chain holder
01:52 – Option no. 2 The plastic cleat
02:45 – Contact us to get your free safety clips
Hi, I’m Jason from the company Blockout Blinds and today I’m going to be talking about child safety and blind cords. Tragically, at least 15 have died in strangling incidents since 2001 related to blind and curtain cords. Children, particularly infants can become entangled in looped curtain and blind cords. This includes cords they can reach from furniture, beds, or from their cots.
The government has put in a law since January 2011 that states that any blinds install from this day onwards must comply with the following regulations. What I have here is an example of a blind cord from a roller blind and as you can see it hangs down. The problem is that children get their heads stuck in the cord and unfortunately in some cases have strangle themselves.
So what does the law state? Well, the law states that if the bottom of the cord is at least 1.6 meters from the ground that is fine because they consider that high enough for that children will not get entangled in it. However, quite often we do make cords lower than 1.6 meters off the ground. If that’s the case we’ve got two options. One, which we use commonly is a little plastic safety chain holder. What this does is it clips over the end of the blind chain like such and that gets affixed to the wall. This stops the child from pulling cord out and then getting entangled, so it’s much safer.
The other option which we do to resolve is if the blind is close to 1.6 meters off the ground we can put a cleat like this. A little fuzzy cleat on the wall higher up and that enables the customer to then hang the chain up off the ground and wrap it over around the cleat so it’s out of reach of the child. This is okay as long as no individual loop is bigger that 220 mm because they consider it as the size needed to be able to get a child to put their head through the loop.
All that safety standards now apply to new blind cords. If your blinds were installed prior to January 2011, we really encourage you to check all of your cords in your home to make sure all of them are safe. Also, if you would like some free safety cord holders or cleats and you live in Melbourne give us a call and we’ll send some of that to you free of charge.
Thanks for listening. Until next time, I’ll see you then.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this news and tips update from Blockout Blinds, we’d love for you to leave a comment about “Are your blind cords a danger to your children?”.
