Industry News, A Note on Safety

A recent email tells the story of a number of guests at a wedding suffering burn injuries from a photo booth made from highly flammable materials that caught on fire from nearby decorative candles. Its inevitable that in an industry such as this that is still quite new and un-established, there has been a recent surge of operators running “home made”, cheap and imported products.

At the moment here is no real governing body or industry standard except for those of the venues and event organisers that we work with. These industry standards are now filtering down the photo booth industry with unfortunate outcomes such as photo booth operators being barred from venue access on the night of their clients events. In order to avoid this kind of headache there are a few things you can do to make sure you are covered:

• Opt for a photo booth that is made from non-flammable or low flammable materials such as metal. Avoid booths that rely on construction from wood and fabric.
• Ask about compliance with Australian Electrical Safety Standards. The standards in Australia are comparatively more stringent than the electrical standards in some other countries. This can be a major concern where products made overseas can contain exposed live 240v and/or the conversion to Australian 240v has been done to a substandard level. Even some of the most expensive photo booths from overseas do not comply and present a risk to all users and operators.
• Safety Tag Tests must be done on all extension cables and venues are asking for this more and more. The reason for this is simple; an extension power cable that has been used over and over and has been run across walk ways under tape can suffer internal and external damage and end up exposing dangerous 240v.
  Always opt for a reliably field tested product. Make sure your photo booth supplier has tested their product in the rental space, in Australia – not overseas. Poor design and flimsy construction can lead to people being hurt and suing for compensation.
• Ensure you are carrying current Public Liability insurance. Some venues will ask for this before the event.

The takeaway points here are to a.) learn from other companies misfortunes and to b.) help ensure that we protect our industry from bad reputations.