A Joint Health Canada–U.S. CPSC Recall With an Outsized U.S. Footprint and a Tiny Canadian One
Credit: Homeowner.ca
On June 4, 2026, Health Canada and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a joint recall of the Vornado SRTH Small Room Tower Heater. The hazard is fire. The trigger is mechanical: over years of use, the fan blade can shift or detach from the motor shaft, airflow across the heating element falls or stops, and the enclosure can overheat to the point of internal ignition if the thermal cutoffs fail to do their job in time.
For Canadian readers, the practical scale of the recall is unusually small. Vornado distributed only eight units in Canada against roughly 212,000 sold in the United States, and the official incident list — 32 overheating reports, 8 fires, and 1 injury — is entirely south of the border. That makes this a low-urgency item for almost everyone reading. It is still worth filing away. The failure mode behind the recall is exactly the kind that quietly defines portable-heater risk, and it is worth re-reading before next heating season rather than after.
If you happen to be one of the handful of Canadian owners — or you bought one cross-border — the action is short. Stop using it. Contact the company. Take the refund.
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The recall covers the Vornado SRTH Small Room Tower Heater, Type SRTH, in two colour and SKU variants: model EH1-0084-06 in black, and model EH1-0084-43 in ice white. The units were produced between 2013 and 2022 and sold from January 2013 to May 2026. According to the Health Canada recall notice, the affected heater is a tower roughly 12.5 inches tall by 6 inches wide and 6 inches deep, with two heat settings plus a fan-only mode. The "Vornado" wordmark and V logo appear on the front; "TYPE SRTH" is printed on the silver rating label on the bottom.
The mechanical story is the part to pay attention to. Inside the unit, a fan moves air across the heating element so that heat carries away from the source rather than collecting around it. Over time, the fan blade can become displaced — or detach from the motor shaft entirely. When that happens, airflow slows or stops. The element keeps producing heat. The enclosure starts to climb in temperature. If the thermal safeties do not cut power quickly enough, the recall notice describes an internal flame potentially breaching the enclosure.
That is the structural pattern behind a lot of fan-forced heater recalls: a moving part that fails silently, an element that does not know it should turn off, and a safety cutoff that may or may not catch the divergence in time.
The distribution split is unusually one-sided. Vornado Air, the recall participant, reported approximately 212,000 SRTH units sold in the United States and just 8 distributed in Canada. The incident counts mirror that asymmetry. As of May 25, 2026, the company reported 32 overheating incidents in the U.S., including 8 fires and 1 injury. The Canadian incident count is zero.
That is not a coincidence to brush past. It is the entire reason this recall reads as low-urgency on the Canadian side. The product simply was not here in any volume. Health Canada is publishing the notice because eight units is not zero, because the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act prohibits recalled products from being redistributed, sold, or even given away once a recall is in force, and because cross-border purchases happen.
If you bought a tower heater from a U.S. retailer or brought one across the border in your luggage, treat it as in scope until you have checked the model number. Recall enforcement follows the product, not the receipt.
The instruction from Health Canada is direct: stop using the recalled SRTH heater immediately, and contact Vornado Air for a refund. Phone support is at 1-888-240-2768, available 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Central Time, Monday to Friday. Email is srthrecall@vornado.com. The recall identifier is RA-82149, and there is a dedicated company recall page consumers can use to start the refund process.
Once the recall is in force, the unit is not legally yours to pass on. It cannot be resold at a yard sale. It cannot be donated to a thrift store. It should not be given to a friend who "doesn't mind taking a chance." That restriction exists for the same reason the recall exists in the first place — a failure mode that does not announce itself until it has already started, in a device people are likely to leave running in a bedroom or basement.
If you suspect you have an affected unit and Vornado has not been responsive, Canadians can report any consumer-product safety incident through Health Canada's Consumer Product Incident Report Form. The notice has also been posted on the OECD Global Portal on Product Recalls, which is where the same case shows up in international product-safety databases.
This is where the recall becomes useful for the rest of us. Almost nobody reading this owns the recalled model. Nearly everyone reading this owns, has owned, or will buy a portable electric heater eventually. The Vornado failure is a clean case study of the dominant risk pattern.
Portable fan-forced heaters depend on continuous airflow to manage temperature. The element gets hot. The fan moves the heat away. If anything interrupts that exchange — a blade that detaches, a clogged intake, a unit knocked onto carpet, a fabric drape that drifts into the housing overnight — the unit's internal temperature can rise faster than the safeties are designed to handle. Health Canada's own danger assessment for portable electric heaters identifies 252 incident reports involving portable electric heaters in Canada between June 2011 and September 2023, including 5 deaths and 10 injuries. Ontario alone averaged 510 structural fires per year from heating equipment between 2017 and 2021.
The recall is one specific reason airflow interruption matters. The seasonal pattern is the more general one.
A simple rule before the next heating season: any portable heater that's more than ten years old, has been dropped, or makes new noises during fan-only mode is a candidate for replacement, not a tune-up.
The habits that protect against the SRTH failure mode protect against most others too. Give the unit at least a metre of clear space on a hard, non-flammable surface. Plug it directly into a wall outlet, not an extension cord or power bar. Do not run it unattended, and never overnight. Replace anything that's clearly aging out of its service life. These are the same notes covered in our overview of space heater safety in winter, and they apply year after year regardless of which brand is in the news.
A handful of recent Canadian recalls underline the same theme. The Merkury Innovations heating and cooling fan recall last year followed the same arc: a moving part, an airflow problem, and an overheating event. So did the SNOOZ Breez 2-in-1 bedroom fan recall before it. The model details differ each time. The mechanism rarely does.
For the vast majority of readers, this recall is informational. Eight units across the entire country is a rounding error in a market where hundreds of thousands of portable heaters are in active use. The notice is worth knowing about, not worth worrying about.
For the small number of Canadians who do own the recalled SRTH model — or who bought one across the border — the action is unambiguous: stop using it, contact Vornado at the recall number, and accept the refund. The unit should not be plugged in again, and it should not be given to anyone else. Once the refund is processed, the legal and safety status of the heater is closed.
Everyone else can carry this forward as a small note for September. Portable heaters earn their reputation honestly, and the Vornado failure mode is a clean explanation of how that reputation gets built — one displaced fan blade at a time.
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About the Author
Ryan is the founder of Homeowner.ca and a proud Canadian homeowner based in Guelph, Ontario. Over his 25-year career in digital publishing, he has focused on transforming complex information into clear, practical guidance that helps people make confident, well-informed decisions.
