Model UT3053, a rechargeable hand warmer sold on GobiHeat.com, is the subject of a recall covering about 5,500 units in the United States and about 47 more in Canada. The Consumer Product Safety Commission posted it on October 1, 2026, saying the lithium-ion battery and electrical components can overheat and ignite.
No incidents have been reported. The warmers were offered from October 2024 through August 2026 at $20 to $40, close to two years of sales, with CPSC listing none of them as the scene of an incident.
Battery and circuit failure inside UT3053
CPSC said in its CPSC notice that the lithium-ion battery and electrical components in the warmers can overheat and ignite, and the outcome it names is a warmer that burns, with fire and burn injuries to follow. It identifies no particular cell, no charging fault and no manufacturing lot, and it records no report of a warmer that actually caught fire.
Dragon Gear Inc., which does business as Gobi Heat, is based in Severance, Colorado, and had the warmers made in China. CPSC lists GobiHeat.com as the place of sale, with no retail chain or marketplace named in the notice.
The count has two parts that should not be merged: about 5,500 units in the United States and about 47 in Canada, so the full population is about 5,547 by addition. The notice gives no incident, injury or property-damage count for either country, and the 5,500 figure applies to the United States alone, so the Canadian units cannot be folded into the top-line number without changing what it measures.
The category is crowded. A rechargeable warmer is built from the same ingredients as a power bank: a lithium-ion cell, a charging circuit and a casing small enough to ride in a coat pocket, with a heating element added. Each of those parts can fail on its own, and the Gobi Heat and Kobayashi notices name the battery and its electrical components together instead of a single cause.
Lithium-ion cells in pocket-sized heaters
A rechargeable hand warmer packs a lithium-ion cell and a heating element into a pocket-sized case that spends its working life against skin and fabric. CPSC has been tracking battery fire risk beyond e-bikes for years; its July 2023 public forum on lithium-ion batteries opened with e-bikes, e-scooters and hoverboards and flagged “the growing consumer market for other products containing such batteries” as a concern.
The OCOOPA action shows what happens when that risk materializes at scale. In July 2026 CPSC announced that OCOOPA Direct was recalling about 1.5 million rechargeable hand warmers sold in this country, and its notice reported 1,480 overheating incidents, 15 fires, 350 burn injuries and one death, an 83-year-old in San José, California, in February 2026. Those warmers were sold from September 2018 through May 2026, which makes the Gobi Heat recall, at 5,500 units, about 0.37 percent of the OCOOPA total. Health Canada followed in September with its own OCOOPA notice for 23,000 units, adding that no Canadian incidents or injuries had been reported as of August 27.
One detail links that case to this one on paper only. The model number UT3053 sits in OCOOPA’s recalled lineup on both the CPSC and Health Canada pages, next to UT3056, ZLS-118, ZLS-118S, ZLS-118D, H01 and H01(PD), seven models in all, with sales running from September 2025 to May 2026 in the Canadian notice. The Gobi Heat notice gives UT3053 as its sole model. None of the pages explains how two brands came to share the same model number, and the notice gives no incidents for the Gobi Heat units.
Same-day recalls from other hand warmer sellers
Gobi Heat was not the only hand warmer maker on CPSC’s October 1 list. Kobayashi, the company behind HotHands, recalled about 77,000 HotHands rechargeable hand warmers, model H163650, plus 72 sold in Canada, in a parallel action. Its battery and electrical components carry the same overheat-and-ignite finding, and it too lists no incidents. Those units were sold from July 2025 through August 2026 at Bass Pro Shops, Meijer, Target, The Home Depot, Amazon.com and other retailers, for $30 to $40.
Set side by side, the two October 1 notices differ mostly in reach. Gobi Heat’s 5,500 domestic units are about seven percent of Kobayashi’s 77,000, a gap that matches the difference in where each was sold: one brand’s own website against a list of national retailers. The Kobayashi notice is the larger of the two by a wide margin, yet neither lists a single incident, which leaves both recalls resting on what the batteries could do and not on anything the units have done.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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