Every notice should lead back to its official source.
This page explains the source, transformations, category rules, and limitations behind Home Recall Watch.
Which sources does each feature search?
| Feature | Sources | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Product recall search | CPSC, FDA, USDA FSIS, NHTSA, US Coast Guard, EPA | Searches imported notices from all six agencies. History and notice types vary by source; no live VIN, lot or serial-range eligibility check. |
| Model-number lookup | CPSC only | Matches model numbers explicitly named in indexed CPSC notices. Confirm serial numbers, date codes and product variants on the official notice. |
| Brand directory | CPSC only | Groups brands and manufacturers in the CPSC catalog. Food, medicine and vehicle brands must be searched in the main search. |
| My home | CPSC only | Checks your saved product list against CPSC recalls when you visit. Food, health and road-vehicle notices are not included; no background or email alerts. |
| Statistics & CSV | CPSC only | Counts and exports indexed CPSC notices, including reannouncements. Totals exclude the other agencies and do not represent every U.S. recall. |
| Product types, hazards, retailers & archive | CPSC only | Organizes the supported CPSC consumer-product catalog. Other agencies have their own category pages and main-search filters. |
Retrieval and freshness
Recall data is retrieved from the official CPSC Recalls API in a scheduled daily refresh, validated against the application schema, and stored as a snapshot that the entire site is built from. The published snapshot was retrieved on . The displayed refresh date refers to this snapshot, not a live query.
If a refresh fails validation — including the API returning an error response or an implausibly small dataset — the previous verified snapshot stays in place. A fetch, validation, build or deployment failure can delay new records. If the retrieved records are unchanged, the published snapshot and its displayed date stay unchanged.
Additional federal sources
FDA announcements use the agency’s product classifications. NHTSA rows are grouped by campaign number so the same vehicle campaign is not counted once for every model. USDA recalls and public health alerts, Coast Guard campaigns and EPA warnings retain their source-specific scope. Safety warnings are labeled separately from recalls.
The imported history is not identical for every agency. A source can be partial or unavailable; failed refreshes retain its last successful data. A manually verified seed listing is identified separately from a successful automated retrieval. See source coverage and refresh dates.
The main search includes imported notices from all sources. My home, model-number verdicts, brand pages, statistics and the CSV currently use the CPSC catalog. The site does not perform a live VIN, lot or serial-range eligibility check; those checks belong to the linked official source.
Validation and safe display
Incoming records are validated against a tolerant schema because older CPSC records can contain optional or differently shaped fields. External text is treated as untrusted: markup and control characters are removed, whitespace is normalized, and excessive field lengths are bounded.
Links are accepted only when they use HTTP or HTTPS. Official-notice calls to action prefer CPSC-hosted URLs. The site does not render raw HTML from the API.
Model-number normalization
Model values supplied by CPSC may be separated by line breaks, commas, semicolons, or repeated across product entries. Home Recall Watch splits common separators, trims surrounding whitespace, and removes exact duplicates while preserving meaningful letters, digits, and punctuation.
A comparison key may ignore case, spaces, and non-semantic separators to improve matching. The displayed value remains traceable to the source. No missing model number is inferred or generated.
Category classification
The site categories are deterministic application groupings, not a claim that CPSC uses the same taxonomy. Keyword allowlists and exclusions examine verified product names, types, descriptions, titles, and model text. A record that cannot be classified with the supported rules is not placed on a category page.
Search and ranking
Search favors exact model-number and recall-number matches, followed by verified brand, product, title, description, and hazard text. Multiple terms must all match after normalization. Filters are applied before pagination; an empty query returns the newest supported records.
Category pages and brand pages organize records but do not change the underlying CPSC facts.
What “Last verified” means
“Last verified” describes when the displayed dataset was retrieved or validated by this application. It is not the publication date, a new CPSC decision, or confirmation that a specific product unit is affected.
Recall notices can change. Always open the official notice for the final product description, status, and remedy instructions.
A recall date is when CPSC announced a notice. A CPSC publication update is a source-record date. Neither is used as the modification date of a Home Recall Watch page. Page modification dates are omitted from sitemaps and page metadata where we have no tracked history of substantive page changes.
Corrections and limitations
Home Recall Watch can contain processing errors or data that lags the newest official notices until the next successful refresh and publication. Use the contact page for site corrections and the correction policy. Include the page URL, agency reference number and disputed field. For a question about the recall itself, use the contact information in the official notice or contact its issuing agency.