If you run a heated blanket in your rig, check the back of the remote for the word JKMAX. The Consumer Product Safety Commission published recall 26778 on September 17, 2026, and it covers every heating pad and heated blanket the brand sold: about 195,000 units, with models named as JKMAX-002, JKMAX-7284B, JKMAX-6284B, JKMAX-10090B and JKMAX-8490B.
Read the numbers before you decide whether to bother. JKMax is aware of 577 reports of blankets smoking, melting or burning because the internal wire heating elements overheated, and 53 of those were burn injuries. Set the two CPSC figures against each other and that is roughly one reported incident for every 340 units sold, which is our arithmetic, not theirs. This recall did not come out of a lab. It came out of 53 people who got burned.
Why the same product is worse in a rig
Smaller box, fewer exits. The blanket is on the bed you are in, the bed is a couple of feet from the wall, and the wall is the vehicle. A house gives you rooms and doors between you and a fire. A van gives you one door, and often a single window that the bed is built across.
Then the power side. In a house the blanket sits on a branch circuit protected for the house. In a rig it is usually running off an inverter or a pedestal, and neither of those is watching for this failure. Inverters protect against overload and low battery voltage. A heating element drawing its rated current while melting its own insulation is not an overload, so nothing upstream objects. It keeps feeding it until something else stops it.
Which puts the weight on your alarms. A rig typically carries one smoke alarm and one carbon monoxide alarm, both within a few feet of the bed, and that is the whole warning system. Worth testing them this week regardless of what brand your blanket is.
What to do
Look at the remote, not the blanket. If it says JKMAX, stop using it and contact JKMax for a full refund. Refund only. There is no repair, no replacement unit and no firmware fix available on this one, so the only way to comply is to stop using it and take the money back.
What we cannot tell you
CPSC does not publish a wattage for the recalled blankets, so we cannot give you a number for what one costs you overnight. Read the rating on your own label and do it yourself: watts times hours is the watt-hours at the outlet, and the battery has to supply more than that because the inverter takes a cut on the way through. Our post on inverter idle draw has the published efficiency figures for one common brand, and the power budget guide sets that against everything else in the rig. Run your own numbers through the solar calculator before you decide whether the blanket or the furnace is the cheaper way to get through a cold night, and see what the furnace actually pulls from the battery for the other side of that comparison.
The wider point for the end of September: a heated blanket is a genuinely good answer to cold nights, because it warms you rather than the air inside the rig. It is worth owning one that does not have 577 reports against it.