Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet (translated by The Local) reported the incident after a man began smelling smoke while eating grapes this past weekend.
“I saw it was burning in the grape bowl. ‘How is that possible?’ I thought. Then I saw there was one intense point where [the sun] hit the twigs, and that’s where it started,” Richard Walter told Aftonbladet.
To further demonstrate what had happened, Walter recorded a video on Facebook of the bowl setting fire to a piece of newspaper. Currently, the video has been viewed over 25,000 times.
It appears that the bowl’s shape is perfectly reflecting the sunlight off its curved surface. Just like a young child with a magnifying glass, the reflection is concentrating the sun’s energy into one point, increasing the heat until burning.
Ikea is currently looking into the report and is conducting their own tests on the bowl. “We take take this information very seriously and will now investigate what happened,” said Ikea spokesperson Emil Eriksson.
Yesterday, Eriksson added a written comment to the translation at The Local. “Product safety is always a top priority at Ikea and Ikea products are always tested to comply with applicable standards and legislations. In risk assessment for the bowl Blanda, it has been established that many different parameters would have to converge for the content of the bowl to overheat and that the risk for this to happen is very low. The round design of the bowl further contributes to a very low risk of spreading, in case of any overheated material in the bowl.”
As expected, it is rare that consumers would run into this scenario very often. The food within the bowl would normally be enough to block the serving bowl from reflecting the sun’s rays.
To test out the Blanda Blank serving bowl, it is currently available on Ikea’s website for the discounted price of $4.Check back with Digital Trends for more on Ikea such as its augmented reality shopping app.
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