With last week’s cold temperatures and first snow, the weather is closing in for winter here in central Maine. Folks are spending more time inside, and the oil furnaces and wood stoves are starting to get cranked up for the certain arctic blasts to come. Home safety during this season is extremely important to protect you and your family.

One organization that has a wide range of helpful information on home safety is the Consumer Product Safety Commission. They can be quickly accessed at www.cpsc.com. Here you will find many topics and solutions to make your home safer. The CPSC is authorized to oversee more than 15,000 types of consumer products. These products cause annual deaths, injuries and property damage totaling more than $700 billion. Thanks to the efforts of this agency over the past 30 years, there has been a 30 percent decline in deaths and injuries associated with consumer products.

Here are just a few of the topics discussed in clear detail at the CPSC Web site: chimney safety, child-resistant lighters, overheated dryers, household extension cords, new (and safer) electric heat tapes, metal chimneys, smoke detectors and battery replacement, older natural-LP gas brass connectors, a fire safety brochure and a booklet titled “Recipe for Safer Cooking.” Other articles include safer cedar chest locks to reduce child deaths from suffocation, and unsafe window venetian blind cords that can and have ended the lives of young children.

Old baby cribs also merit the attention of the CPSC. Its safety checklist is as follows: Make sure that the mattress is very tight-fitting to the crib. Check that there are no loose, missing or broken hardware or slats. If an aluminum soda can is able to be passed through the slats, the crib is unsafe for children. There should be no corner posts to the crib that are over one-sixteenth of an inch high. Also, no cutout designs in the headboard or footboard are acceptable. The commission’s final caveat in the crib article – “If your crib isn’t safe, don’t use it. Destroy it. It could save your baby’s life” – is clear, concise and direct.

Another valuable portion of the CPSC site is the product recall and product safety reviews. For November of this year, there are 30 listings, ranging from underengineered television wall mounts that could fall and injure people to a national coffee vendor’s ceramic teapots, which, when microwaved, could overheat the handle and burn the hand of the user.

Information is power, and the power of keeping yourself and your family safe is very valuable. Consumers aware of home safety issues large and small, as well as potentially hazardous consumer products on the market, have a tremendous safety advantage over those consumers who are uninformed. As we hunker down for Old Man Winter here in River City, we can do so content in the knowledge that we have done everything reasonable to keep our homes and families more safe and secure. Let the cold winds blow.

Consumer Forum is a collaboration of the Bangor Daily News and Northeast COMBAT-Maine Center for the Public Interest, Maine’s membership-funded, nonprofit organization. Individual memberships $25, business rates start at $125 (0-10 employees). For help and information, write: Consumer Forum, Bangor Daily News, P.O. Box 1329, Bangor 04402-1329.