WIBU to reuse a mouldy infant car seat?

[OhwhyOY]

We have an (expensive) infant car seat we bought for our daughter that we were planning to reuse. It's been in storage for just under a year and we've taken it out to find mould on the shoulder straps. Have emailed Nuna, the manufacturer, as we know you can't use chemicals etc on car seat materials or hot wash them as they are then no longer safe in the event of an accident. They have basically said bin the seat as there's no safe way to clean the mould off. We could buy new straps etc but the mould could have penetrated the shell of the seat and be unsafe.

We are leaning towards buying a new one as clearly we don't want to put our newborn baby at risk either from mould or from intensive efforts to remove the mould that could weaken the materials. However it feels tragic to spend so much money on a new seat when we have one already, and also incredibly wasteful environmentally. WWYD?

NB for anyone that thinks we should have stored it better, I fully agree, sadly PILs kindly offered to store it in their garage and assured me it was safely wrapped in damp proof material. Spoiler alert - it wasn't.

I'm not so sure that the garage thing is rubbish.

Extremes of temperature do affect degradation of plastic. It will degrade faster in these conditions.

Leaving the seat in the car constantly also exposes the seat to extreme temperatures which affects plastic degradation. But seats are made to be in cars and this is accounted for in the manufacture and testing.

But while the seat may be designed to cope with that situation for a few years in the car, is it also designed to cope with that for the 5 years (or however many years) in storage between children to then return to the car?

Also worth remembering that car seats have expiry dates.

Thanks so much all for the advice, think what I will probably do is buy a new seat but wash all the materials on this one and use it as an extra inside seat (so it doesn't matter if the materials are weakened as we aren't relying on it for safety). My toddler (before it went into storage) liked using it as a rocking chair, so I guess will do that with it for a bit until she gets bored of it and then chuck it :-(

NB the car seat was actually originally not supposed to go into the garage, I'd asked in laws to look after it as they have loads of space in their house (we could have put it in our own garage if we were planning that) but unfortunately they decided to move it in there without asking us in advance. :-(

Also worth remembering that car seats have expiry dates.
That’s an American thing isn’t it? I’ve never seen an expiry date on a UK seat. Makes sense for them though as more extremes of temperature there. I used to street park my car in Chicago so DD’s car seat would see 40 degrees in the summer and when we had that polar vortex -30 over the winter!

OP we still use the infant carrier as a chair too, except it’s for the cat! He has it as his bed in DH’s office and spends most of the day snoozing in there 🤣

What about seats that are left in cars that are parked outside?
If it’s the uk then the temperatures aren’t that extreme, and they should be manufactured to withstand normal temperature fluctuations.

…cue someone saying it was 40 degrees last summer…

I did wash my car seats quite often. Disinfectant in with the power and 40 degrees I never thought itvwas unsafe. Our first was a very sticky baby

I heard from someone who worked with Britax that the German Britax HQ (I live nearby and it often gets to 35+ in the summer) had a car seat on their roof for 15 years, they took it down and crash tested it and it performed about as well as the ones that had come out of the factory for quality control that morning.

Of course that's a third hand anecdote, not data, and I can't even verify that it's true, but this idea that car seats are made of such brittle plastics that will break down from experiencing temperature changes over a few years just does not seem right to me.

The idea of expiry dates is an interesting one - there are many good reasons not to use a seat which is too old, the main one being user error. Your car seat needs to be used exactly according to the instructions in order to perform as it is designed and proven to. Over time though the instructions get lost, parts go missing or get damaged and are replaced. People take the covers off or the straps out for washing, changing the height, changing the mode etc and they don't always get put back correctly. People store seats set up for a 1yo and when they get it out for their next baby they forget that there was ever a newborn insert or that you can move the headrest up and down. They half remember how to fit the seat so do it from memory but might forget a particular step. Critical safety warnings which are required to be printed on the seat, like airbag warnings, and features like the isofix indicators which tell you whether the seat is installed correctly, or stickers showing where the seatbelt must pass, can wear away and become illegible.

Families typically have 1-2, maybe 3 children each so the older a seat is, the less likely that it is still in the hands of the original owner who might be most likely to remember things like newborn inserts, strap positioning, fitting quirks explained by the salesperson. You may have acquired the seat without realising that the insert you think is original has accidentally been swapped with one from a pram or so on. One of the original owners might have done something to compromise the seat like cleaning the straps with bleach or had a minor crash without the child in the car and not realised the seat needed replacing (and forgotten about it totally by the time it was passed on). Sometimes if a seat gets damaged people will try to repair the damage themselves, not really understanding whether that is something that will affect the structural integrity of a major component.

And parts just do get worn out with regular use, especially moving parts and children climbing on things.

The older the seat is, the more likely all these things start to become.

And then you have the fact that car seat technology moves and improves all the time. Features that were brand new and cutting edge 15 years ago are standard even in cheaper seats today. A car seat released 15 years in the future will be better than what we have today. European legislation addresses this issue by changing and updating the safety standards about every 10 years, and it's usually legal to use both the current and the previous safety standard, but no older (currently we have 3 legal ones in use). If you're using very old seats then you're using old safety that doesn't perform as well as the seats on sale today. As well as the previous issues with wear and tear.

So yes, it's a good idea to retire car seats once they are worn out or damaged and just as a precaution once they are about 8-10+ years old (especially for the seats you use longer, if you passed on a 9 year old car seat and the next person used it for 7 years for 1-2 kids, then it's really old by the time you've finished with it)

American law deals with this by putting a fixed expiry date on every car seat and you can't legally use it past that date. The dates are fairly conservative - you could cynically say market forces drive this. EU law does not require expiry dates, but it's still not a good idea to hold onto seats for years and years, and many manufacturers will give a guideline for how long to use before discarding, often a range to account for wear and tear. Passing down an infant type seat for a couple of years between children is perfectly reasonable.

Sorry that was a bit long wasn't it

Gist is, EU seats don't expire, it just goes on condition. The idea that car seats will just crumble into uselessness after a certain age doesn't really make sense. However, there is a tipping point at which point it's probably safer to get a new seat and that point is probably about 10 years, less if the seat is heavily used. 15+ years and it's almost definitely going to be an upgrade in safety to get a new seat.

US has expiry dates which are more conservative, which was once explained to me as being possibly because there is more of a thrift store/garage sale culture over there and can be common for things to be passed around and around and around, self-repair being seen as a valuable skill, that plus litigous culture possibly led to the use of expiry dates.

You do realise that cars are also exposed to extremes of temperatures.