Man claims Nintendo Wii burnt down his RV

While it's not entirely unusual to hear about gadgets starting fires in the home—particularly when it comes to gadgets sporting lithium-ion batteries—it's not often that said gadget is a games console. According to a KKTV News 11 report, a man in Colorado Springs lost part of his RV in a fire that was apparently started by a Nintendo Wii.

While the precise cause of the fire is still being investigated, firefighters at the scene told News 11 that with smoking and "all other possible sources of ignition" ruled out, the only other potential cause was the Wii. Trevor Pellegrin, the owner of the RV, claimed that the fire investigators were around "99 percent sure" the Wii was the cause.

Pellegrin says that the console, which was several years old, was being used to watch Netflix and then was turned off before he left the RV. It was, however, left plugged into the mains. "This is where I live," he said, "this is my possessions. It might not be much, but it’s all I had. And then I lost it all, over a game console." According to Pellegrin, his insurance company is due to check out the scene soon and will take an X-ray of the Wii to confirm that it started the fire.

Oddly, this isn't the only console-related fire to have happened of late. Earlier this month, firefighters in Biggleswade, UK were called to a house fire to rescue the trapped occupants. It was later revealed that the fire was started by an unspecified games console, which overheated after it was covered in clothes and caused a bed to catch fire.

Darren Cook, the officer in charge at the scene, said that "examining the seat of the fire we found that a games console had been left on and then had clothes put over it. This caused the console to overheat which caught the clothes alight and this then set fire to the bed. We would advise people to ensure that games consoles are not left unattended when switched on and any electrical device, even a phone, is not covered up by clothes or anything else."

While there's currently no indication what components in the Wii might have started the fire, if the console was supplied with too much voltage via a dodgy third-party power supply, that could have led to capacitors within catching fire. The most common cause of gadget fires are lithium-ion batteries, which are known to catch fire when paired with cheap third-party chargers.