The 4.5-Yuan 'Gas Saver' That Killed: A Final Verdict Makes the Seller and the Platform Pay

The gadget cost 4.5 yuan — about 60 US cents. It was a steel ring, sold on a shopping platform under the name "energy-concentrating ring" (聚能环), that sits on a gas stove to cup the flame, and its product page promised what a cooking family most wants to hear: it would cut gas use in half (燃气省一半). Lü, a father of two in Yulin, Shaanxi, bought one in November 2023. On the morning of December 25 that year, his wife and their 16-year-old son were found dead in the rented bungalow the family kept for the boys' schooling; the local police log recorded "natural-gas poisoning," with the precise cause left for further investigation. Lü had put a camera in the boy's bedroom to keep an eye on his study habits, and it was that camera which preserved the record of the morning he could not bear to watch.

The family's ordinary straitenedness is part of why the story has hit so hard since Lü began speaking to reporters this week. As the Henan-based Dahe Daily laid out, the elder son was shortly to be married and the younger was preparing for the high-school entrance exam; Lü had worked construction sites near home until that winter, when — facing wedding and tutoring costs — he took a job as an escort on freight runs and moved out of town. His wife worked at a local supermarket. The ring on the stove was saving money for a family counting yuan.

This month, the case reached its legal end. A second-instance court upheld the original ruling, finding the ring to be a "three-no" product (三无产品) — no manufacturer name, no factory certificate, no safety certification — which restricted air to the burner and left the gas burning incompletely, filling the kitchen with carbon monoxide. The factory was found 40 percent liable, the seller 30 percent, and the e-commerce platform jointly liable for compensation; the family bears the remaining 30 percent. Tests cited in the coverage found that with the ring fitted, carbon monoxide in the air reached alarm concentration within four minutes.

What Lü says he did not know — and what gas companies have spent years warning about — is that a windbreak ring starves a flame of the oxygen it needs to burn clean. Xinhua has reported deaths and poisonings tied to such rings in multiple provinces; several municipal gas utilities issue standing notices each heating season, and a senior engineer at Beijing's utility research institute, Lan Tao, has said flatly that the devices can cause carbon monoxide poisoning when combustion turns incomplete. Lü's own household felt it before the deaths: he has said that after the ring went on, family members began feeling unwell, and that he was drawn in by the "half the gas bill" claim on the listing's cover image.

The story has trended across platforms since a Sina Hotspot account relayed his account, including on Baidu's hot-search board, where the verdict's allocation of fault drew the attention: a platform that never touched the physical product still shares responsibility for what selling it did. Safety bloggers spent the day translating the physics into warnings — one widely shared post urged readers to distrust any "gas-saving gadget" and to keep kitchens ventilated — while Lü's interviewers noted that he says he installed the camera precisely because he wanted to help his son study. The device that killed was still being marketed elsewhere online as flame-concentrating and energy-saving.