Code could mean your hot water bottle needs to be thrown out

Code could mean your hot water bottle needs to be thrown out People should check before using these potentially dangerous items People who regularly use hot water bottles, especially to stay warm in the winter, are being urged to double-check a clear warning sign. Failing to understand the code printed on every bottle could leave people at risk of burning themselves. Hot water bottles are mostly made of rubber and are typically covered with something soft and cosy. Beneath any cover lies an important reminder that hot water bottles do not last forever and should be thoroughly checked before every use. Generally, it is advisable to replace hot water bottles after a couple of years of use. If people can't remember how long they've owned a specific product, every hot water bottle sold in the UK should have a simple symbol on it to help work out its expiry date. Unlike food in the supermarket, hot water bottles don't simply have a calendar date stuck on them. Instead, there should be a flower- or wheel-shaped mark with numbers and dots. Martin Lewis' MoneySavingExpert (MSE) team shared a post on Instagram. It read: "Every year, burst, split and leaking hot water bottles cause burns." Showing how to read these safety symbols, they said the centre number stands for the year the bottle was made. There should be 12 segments around the wheel, each representing a month of the year. The dots indicate which week of that month the bottle was made - not a specific day. In the online example, the bottle said 23 in the centre, with three dots in the second segment, meaning the hot water bottle was made sometime during the third week of February 2023. You should throw an expired rubber or synthetic hot water bottle into your general household waste (black bin). Natural and synthetic rubber cannot be processed in standard kerbside recycling bins. Take off any fleece, wool, knitted, or cotton cover. Put the cover into a textile recycling bank or local charity/clothing drop-off. Why don't hot water bottles use a 'normal' date system? A hot water bottle does not have a fixed expiration date. Its lifespan depends entirely on when it is first used and how it is cared for. If a manufacturer stamped a simple expiration date on a bottle, it would be inaccurate. A bottle could sit in a warehouse or shop for a year before being sold, meaning a pre-printed expiration date would incorrectly shorten its usable lifespan. To print a standard calendar date on every hot water bottle, factories would have to shut down production and manually change the metal engravings in the mould every single day, or even every week. The established wheel system is permanently fixed into the mould. To update the date, the factory only needs to change a tiny, inexpensive central pin or add an extra dot to the mould at the start of the week.