Dapol Water Towers - Product Recall

[Peter C]

I thought I'd post this here, for anyone who may own one of these water towers and hasn't heard the news yet.
Dapol are recalling the following items:

• 4A-002-002
• 4A-002-004
• 4A-002-006
• 4A-002-008

From https://www.dapol.co.uk/OO-Gauge-Water-Tower-Product-Recall:

Dapol undertakes stringent testing on all of its products and only grants permission to go into production when we are confident that a product meets the very highest quality and safety standards.

Subsequent to these approvals we have discovered that a substandard component has been used during production of our operating water tower. Under certain circumstances, this component has been shown to fail when used with a 15vAC power supply.

Therefore, we are issuing a product recall for these items and request that you contact your place of purchase to arrange return and refund for this item.

Replacement product with correctly specified components will become available in due course.

Affected products:
4A-002-002 Water Tower Chocolate & Cream Conical Motorised
4A-002-004 Water Tower Light & Dark Stone Conical Motorised
4A-002-006 Water Tower Chocolate & Cream Flat Top Motorised
4A-002-008 Water Tower Grey Flat Top Motorised

(Please note any issues in the spelling of the above message are my fault as I've copied it from the supplied image on Dapol's website. Image supplied is original image from the website and is included for those who want to read it from the forums)

Well-known railway modelling YouTuber Jennifer E. Kirk has mentioned it in the beginning of tonight's livestream:

I don't own one of these products so I can't speak from experience but I'm putting this here to see if it will help anyone - there might be people who use these forums but haven't read the news yet.

Thanks,

-Peter

 

[Jamesrob637]

This video may help too:

 

[Peter C]

Yes - it might. Thanks for posting it.
I believe the issue is that the factory in China fitted capacitors which were designed for 10v - not the 18v Dapol specified and said it was good for on the box. Therefore this issue is not with Dapol, as I've seen some people suggest. Apparently the water towers are able to work on 3v, meaning if, for whatever reason, you don't want to remove the water tower from your layout and send it back, you can run it on a lower voltage. This has all come from the beginning of the livestream I linked to in the first post.

-Peter