An associate product manager for Monoprice has made a statement addressing the recent notice that UL issued, alerting the public to Monoprice cable that uses the UL mark without authorization and lacks certain fire-retardant materials. In the Comments section of our news story about the UL alert, as well as in an email to Cabling Installation & Maintenance, Monoprice’s Chris Apland detailed the company’s side of the issue.
“Unbeknownst to us at the time, Monoprice’s former vendor for the product in question was inappropriately labeling our product certifications,” Apland explained. “Monoprice terminated our relationship with the vendor in question when we discovered these malpractices. We apologize to both UL and to our customers for any confusion this may have caused. To our knowledge, there have been no safety problems reported with these cables.
“Monoprice has a new process in place to evaluate that all UL certificates on our products are legitimate,” he continued. “We have since quarantined our inventory of the mislabeled product and have contracted with a new vendor to only sell verified UL CMR/CMP/CM bulk cable. We also now employ a double certification process to avoid such occurrences from happening again.”
Apland added that Monoprice’s “new vendor provides a higher quality Cat 6 bulk cable that includes the critical fire retardant material called for in the UL complaint. Our new vendor also has certificates from authorized UL testing centers.
“Apparently, UL was not aware of our recent new processes when issuing their statement,” Apland said. “However, we have since been in contact with UL through our China office, and have made them aware of the situation. We have informed UL of our new improved UL evaluation processes in place, and are awaiting their updated response.
“Monoprice takes the legitimacy of our products and certifications very seriously, as we do the safety and well-being of our customers,” Apland concluded.
You can read the original story, now including Apland’s comments, here.
