GE recalls 244,000 wall ovens

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced the recall of about 244,000 GE, GE Profile, GE Monogram, and Kenmore wall ovens made from 2002 to 2003 due to burn and fire hazards. Read more about the recall in this post from our Safety blog and at the CPSC and GE Appliance sites.

Essential information: If you're in the market for a new wall oven, check out our recently updated wall ovens product page and our exclusive Home Improvement Guide interactive.

New consumer-protection site targets shady contractors

In late September, a crooked home-improvement contractor in upstate New York was arrested for reportedly having swindled more than $80,000 from of an 88-year-old widow.

Hoping to prevent other Empire State residents from falling victim to dishonest contractors, the New York State Office of the Attorney General has launched the Know Your Contractor Web site. The site covers most geographical areas of the state, including upstate regions, where there are no licensing requirements for contractors.

Many people vet contractors by running a background check with the Better Business Bureau, and that advice still stands, says John Milgrim, a spokesman for the attorney general's office. But the New York State site aims to provide several compelling features by:

• listing the name of the principle as well as the name of the company. "In the past, if a contractor got into trouble, he could change the name of his company and start doing business in the next town over," says Milgrim.

• reporting only substantiated claims against contractors, thereby protecting reputable contractors, who make up the majority of the pros out there.

• including consumer complaints and court judgments, so you can find out what your prospective contractor actually did or didn't do,

• and offering helpful hints for homeowners looking to hire a pro. The tips are consistent with our own advice on choosing a contractor.

"This [site] is a simple solution to a systemic problem, and the Attorney General's Web site is an essential first stop for anyone in the market for a home improvement or repair," said Chuck Bell, director of programs for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, who attended the launch event for the site with several New Yorkers victimized by scamming contractors.—Daniel DiClerico

Essential information: Once you hire the right contractor for your project, find the best products and appliances using our exclusive interactive Home Improvement Guide.

Tip of the Day: How to handle door-to-door vacuum-sales reps

In an era when you can buy just about anything with the click of a mouse, door-to-door sales of vacuums seem a quaint anachronism.

But don't be fooled by that image. Door-to-door vacuum sales are big business, with sales reps from Kirby Company moving about $400 million worth of merchandise last year alone. Kirby sells its vacuums to 600 independent distributors nationwide, whose nearly 10,000 sales representatives do in-home demonstrations.

Cleveland-based Kirby sells one model, updating it about every two years. The Kirby Sentria upright (shown; model information is available to subscribers) excelled at cleaning carpets and bare floors in our latest tests and rates very good overall. Kirby is also among the more reliable brands of upright vacuums in our surveys. The MSRP is $1,350, although the distributor has the final word on price.

Kirby's sales methods don't always have the same solid reputation as its vacuums. A Web search will yield many pages filled with stories from disgruntled people about Kirby and alleged scams.

Kirby must be aware of all the chatter—its customer-service policy states that over the last 10 years the manufacturer has adopted a culture of continuous improvement in customer service. The company also requires distributors to sign a contract agreeing to operate legally and ethically. "We can't control every step of the distributor's business, but we have the ultimate power in whether we do business with them," says Rob Shumay, a Kirby spokesman.

"Kirby is extremely interested in customer service. However, not all of its distributors are cut from the same cloth," says Sandra Prebil, a spokeswoman for the Better Business Bureau in Cleveland. "One, two, or three distributors will be really bad. We know that Kirby has stopped shipment to a bad distributor and the company will make good on an order for a distributor who's disappeared. For Kirby, trying to control so many different people is difficult."

Wanting to evaluate the Kirby experience myself, I arranged for an in-home demo through the Kirby Web site. I also called a local rep I found in my yellow pages. In neither case did I identify myself as a Consumer Reports employee. I didn't go into this process intending to buy a new vacuum; I also had an in-home demo from Rainbow, another vacuum company.

A tale of a DOA dishwasher

Last week, I spotted an interesting post on Consumerist.com about a dishwasher purchase gone awry. The buyer related the following tale, and while his story, the beginning of which follows verbatim, might not be common, there are some shopping lessons to learn from it:

"This past weekend, I purchased a $1300 dishwasher from Sears.. They delivered it Saturday morning, less than 24 hours after order. Great! However the dishwasher that they delivered was defective, I immediately called the store where I purchased it, and spoke with the Sales lady.. She told me that Sears has outsourced their customer service to a company called OneSource and that I that she couldn't help me. . . . "

(Read more about the disheartened buyer's experience and the dozens of comments that ensued. Long story short, the guy is expecting a replacement dishwasher to be delivered on July 1.)

Many commenters urged the dishwasher buyer to use the charge-back feature of his credit card, which would give him the right to dispute a charge if he were dissatisfied with the quality of a purchase. But as we pointed out in an article about the consumer rights you have when you shop with a credit card, there are limits to charge-backs, including:

• You must have made a good-faith effort to resolve the problem directly with the merchant before disputing the charge.

• The charge must be at least $50, and the transaction must have occurred in your home state or within 100 miles of your current billing address. The transaction location depends on your state or other laws, which complicates matters, especially if you make a purchase online, by phone, or through the mail.

• The geographic restrictions and the $50 rule don't apply if the card issuer or close business partners sold you the product or service and also do not apply to billing errors.

One way to avoid getting stuck with problem appliances is to inform yourself about the products and the brands you're considering. There are no guarantees you'll be satisfied with what you buy—indeed, Kenmore dishwashers have not been repair-prone, based on more than 112,000 reader responses about dishwashers to the Annual Product Reliability Survey by the Consumer Reports National Research Center, as detailed in our Brand Repair History. But you might be able to avoid getting stuck with an underperforming item or an unreliable brand.

Read our expert advice for buying appliances, and if you're in the market for a new dishwasher, visit our product page to find the latest report and Ratings (with Brand Repair History, available to subscribers). Look for our latest review of appliance retailers and the services they provide in the August 2008 issue of Consumer Reports, online and on sale in July, and see how we test dishwashers (right).—Gian Trotta

Essential information: Read about a plan by Sears to start selling its brands at other retailers. And use our Home Improvement Guide interactive to take a room-by-room tour of the top-rated appliances and most cost-effective improvements you can make to your home.

Tip of the Day: Don’t get ripped off by an alarm company

The scenario: A representative from a home-security company knocks on your door and offers you a free alarm system in exchange for displaying his company’s sign on your lawn. Swayed by the prospect of getting a security setup gratis, you sign a long-term monitoring contact and end up stuck with a shoddy installation and substandard equipment and service.

Learn more about this type of scam—and, more important, how to avoid it—by reading the Scam Alert in the June 2008 issue of Consumer Reports.

Home & Garden blog readers debate DirectBuy

Since mid-September, readers of the Home & Garden blog have been engaged in a heated debate about DirectBuy, specifically this buying club’s sales tactics, membership fees, and product prices.

The folks commenting—some of them DirectBuy members, many people who went to a DirectBuy open house, others who are just interested in the club—have flooded the blog with tales of their own experiences with and opinions of the direct-buying service with the ubiquitous TV and print ads.

Some commenters are fans of DirectBuy and view it favorably. Many have expressed adverse opinions about the club. Still others have taken a measured view and revealed their reasons for not joining or their experiences after paying the membership fee.

If you’re looking for more telling anecdotes about and user-generated analyses of buying clubs like DirectBuy and other retailers as well as general shopping tips, check out our Home Shopping forum.—Gian Trotta

Product certifications are meant to enlighten, not confuse

Ever wonder what the symbols, seals, or sets of letters like "UL" or "CSA" on the back of your smoke detector, microwave oven, hair dryer, or air conditioner mean? Known as certification marks, these logos and acronyms indicate that a consumer product has been tested by this third-party laboratory and that it is certified to meet nationally recognized standards for that type of product. Certification laboratories, like Underwriters Laboratories Inc. (UL, shown)) and the Canadian Standards Association (CSA), must prove that they have the technology and ability to test a product to the applicable standards.

Read "Product Certifications: On the Mark" and refer to the chart on that page to learn more about the certifying organizations and the certification marks for common household goods.