The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced today a recall of 39,000 bottles of Marshall Gardens PatioGlo Bio-Fuel Gel. As with other recent recalls of gel-like fuels, the bio-fuel poses a risk of burning consumers if it is poured into a lit firepot.

According to the CPSC, Marshall Group of Elkhart, Ind. has received four reports from consumers—three of whom received burns serious enough to require hospitalization.

This recall involves pourable gel fuels packaged in 32 oz. clear plastic bottles and sold with or without citronella. The label on the container says “PatioGlo bio-fuel gel” or “Citronella PatioGlo.” Additional information that may be on the recalled products’ labels:

As with the recent gel fuel recalls from Bird Brain and various other manufacturers, consumers are advised to immediately stop using the fuel and return the bottles to the company for a full refund.

For additional information, customers can contact the Marshall Group (toll-free: 855-270-8482, website: MarshallGroupCorp.com, e-mail:recall at marshallgroupcorp.com).

Marshall Group Recalls Marshall Gardens PatioGlo Bio-Fuel Gel Due to Burn Hazard [CPSC]

The hot dog days of summer may be behind us. But autumn has always been the best time to find deals on gas grills. For example, Ace Hardware Superstore is currently selling a Weber Genesis-series gas grill that’s high in our Ratings for a few hundred bucks off the estimated retail price. Home Depot, meanwhile, has knocked $50 dollars off a Char-Broil Red model that we recommend. Besides saving big money, buying a new grill now might inspire you to discover the thrill of cold-weather grilling. Here are seven tips for finding the right grill and using it wisely as the temperature drops.

Invest in heavy-duty construction. If you plan to keep the grill out all year, you want a model with high-grade stainless steel. Note that the numbering system is a bit counterintuitive, with lower numbers being the higher grade; in our tests, 300-series stainless steel is less likely to corrode than cheaper, 400-series stainless. As for the assembly, look for welded joints on the cart, as they’re sturdier than nuts and bolts.

Get a high-quality igniter. Should the igniter break, lighting your grill with a match will be next to impossible when the winter winds are blowing. In our tests, electronic igniters work better than push buttons or rotary knobs.

Use the cover. It will protect the grill from harsh weather. Vented covers are best, since they allow air to circulate around the grill, preventing condensation and corrosion. During warmer months, skip the cover if your grill is in a very damp or heavily shaded area.

Position it wisely. Your grill should be at least 10 feet away from the house or nearby trees and shrubs. And if you can place it in such as way that these objects block most of the wind, your grill will heat more evenly.

Leave more time for pre-heating. Even with an effective screen, the grill will take about twice as long to heat up in frigid weather, so plan accordingly. Remember to oil the grates before grilling. Fold two paper towels into a tight pad and dip them in a bowl of neutral-flavor vegetable oil, like canola. Use a pair of tongs to draw the pad across the grates.

Check the fuel. Long heat-up times mean you’ll burn through more fuel than during warmer months. Look for a grill with a gauge showing how much propane is left, or consider a translucent tank.

Think about cooking times. Strip steaks and rib eyes are done in 6 to 8 minutes, so you’re not out in the cold for long. Fish also needs little time on the grill. On the other hand, roasting a beef tenderloin might take 30 minutes or longer, but the low-and-slow technique will let you duck indoors for long stretches.

In yet another sign of the times, Costco is raising its annual membership fees by 10 percent on November 1. And while that’s only $5 to $10, depending on membership type, it’s a sizeable chunk of change when you consider Costco has more than 22 million members.

A basic or business membership will cost $55 a year, and the top-level executive membership, which includes an annual rebate, will cost $110. A basic membership at the competition costs $40 a year at Sam’s Club; at BJ’s Wholesale Club, it’s $50.

It seems unlikely the increase will scare off Costco members. Our supermarket survey of more than 32,000 subscribers found that out of 59 supermarkets, Costco was among the top rated, scoring high in satisfaction despite having minimal service, carrying mostly bulk items, and charging a membership fee just to get in the door. Costco’s strength was its prices. Our readers also like to shop at Costco for small appliances.

You’ll see Kirkland products, Costco’s store brand, in many of our Ratings. The prices are appealing, but performance varies. Kirkland Signature car batteries rated a CR Best Buy as did its brand of chardonnay. Kirkland Signature dish liquid and Ultra High-Efficiency laundry detergent are rated Very Good, but the Gel dishwasher detergent is only Fair and at the bottom of our Ratings. And while the Kirkland Signature 100 percent Colombian coffee was among the cheapest, it was so-so overall.

For years consumers have clipped badges from boxes of Cheerios and sacks of Gold Medal flour and sent them to their local school. The school earns ten cents for each badge redeemed and up to $20,000. Now Ford has become the first automaker to join the General Mills’ Box Tops for Education program. You can buy a car to earn points but you don’t have to.

Here’s how it works. Go to Ford’s website and earn 25 eBoxTops for watching five Ford videos, and 10 for requesting a brochure. Buy a new Ford vehicle and you earn 250 credits. The offer ends December 1, 2011 and the coupons must be redeemed by March 31, 2012.

Since it began the program in 1996, General Mills has given U.S. schools more than $400 million, according to BoxTops4education.com. At first, the program included only General Mills products but it later expanded to include products made by Hefty and Kimberly-Clark, among others, and purchases from retailers such as Barnes & Noble, JCPenney and Lands’End. More than 30,000 schools participate. Now there are three different programs and a school can be awarded $20,000 by each.

Ad Age reports the program has become a valuable marketing tool for General Mills’ brands, and a company study found that 51 percent of consumers said the Box Tops brands had increased brand loyalty, and 27 percent said they switched to brands they had never bought because of the coupons. In a recent survey of what Americans eat for breakfast we found that 29 percent of Americans said they ate cold cereal, with Cheerios, a General Mills brand, the runaway favorite. Maybe it’s the Box Tops.

Food and wine can be more than the sum of their parts when they’re compatible. Yet finding a perfect pairing isn’t always easy on a busy night at home, or in the midst of a jam-packed food and wine show like the one I attended recently in New York.

That said, if I could find wines close at hand that worked well enough to complement the particular food I was sampling at the sold-out New York Food and Wine Show, chances are you can, too, even if your cellar or nearby wine store is fairly modest in its selection.

Our wine experts have prepared a free guide to pairing food and wine, including advice on foods that complement some popular varietals and a rundown of food/wine myths and realities. With a flood of foodies filling every nook of Manhattan’s cavernous Pier Sixty, I usually couldn’t take my sample of food or wine—much of it from outstanding city restaurants and celebrated wineries, respectively—and easily browse nearby booths to find its perfect partner. So I resorted to three strategies, any of which might also be handy to you:

Ask an expert. We wine drinkers often don’t avail ourselves of the wine-pairing assistance available at most good restaurants and wine stores. At the show, when food was being served by what appeared to be an actual chef, I asked for wine-pairing suggestions.

For the most part, I got informed and sometimes surprising results. Though the white-wine-with-seafood rule of thumb doesn’t always hold, I still might have reached for a white wine with my sample of grilled octopus from a Greek restaurant booth. But the chef instead suggested pinot noir. The 2009 vintage from Argyle—an Oregon producer that has done well in our past Ratings of this lighter yet often complex red wine—was a great match for the octopus’s smokiness.

Consider the preparation, not just the main food. A food’s sauces and spicing can be at least as important as the food itself in selecting a suitable wine. With a sample plate of fusilli and shrimp in marinara sauce in hand, I approached the booth for Chateau Ste. Michelle, the Washington state producer whose cabernet sauvignon is a recommended wine in our current Ratings of the varietal, available to subscribers. Like me, the CSM rep thought red would work best, despite the fact that shrimp is more often paired with white wines. And the company’s 2007 merlot was a fine match, finding it (as the rep asserted) to be drier and more restrained in its fruitiness than many merlots, especially in the $15 price range of this wine.

Think dessert, too. There are more wine options than simply very sweet (and typically quite expensive) dessert wines. Several booths were featuring low-priced bottles of moscato, the off-dry white wine that I enjoy with fruit or almond desserts. (The varietal has received a market boost in the past year or so from mentions in some rap songs.)

You don’t expect complexity from bottles of sweetish white wine that cost $10 or less. But the moscatos I tasted from Jam Jar of South Africa and Folonari of Italy were fun, and both avoided cloying sweetness.

Cookies for wine? That’s the idea with Cookies and Corks, an online bakery that suggests a number of specific varietals for each of their cookies. I sampled their Peanut Butter Chocolate cookies with a chardonnay. It was interesting, though I think I would have enjoyed it more with a sweeter Gewurztraminer, another of their pairing suggestions.

Vacuuming is no fun and doing it with a balky machine that isn’t cooperating makes it more of a chore. But don’t assume you need a new one before thoroughly checking yours out. Sometimes what seems like a big problem is something small you can fix yourself. And you may have caused it too by making one of these five common vacuuming blunders.

Tossing it when it loses suction. Full bags aren’t the only reason a vacuum’s suction can suffer. If the hose is clear, check the filters found on bagged and bagless vacuums. If the brush roll barely turns, check both it and the drive belt for tangled string or hair. The drive belt itself might need replacing, too.

Sucking up water or wet messes. Had a flood? Avoid the risk of electrocution and leave your upright or canister in the closet. Use a wet-dry vac—be sure to plug it into a ground-fault circuit interrupter (GFCI) outlet—if you have standing water or even damp debris.

Assuming the motor has blown. Many models have a thermal switch that cuts current to the motor if it begins to overheat. If your vacuum shuts off during use, check for a full or clogged bag or bin or a dirty filter. The switch should reset itself, though some models have a reset button for that purpose.

Vacuuming hard, sharp objects. Nails, screws, coins, and even paper clips can rip bags and filters and damage the machine itself. Sweep them up with a broom before vacuuming.

Using the brush on bare floors. A powered brush is critical for deep-cleaning carpets. But the revolving bristles can scatter debris. Worse, they can scratch the finish on hardwood and the plastic wear layer on laminate floors. Most vacuums now let you switch off the brush when you need to.

If you’re shopping for a new vacuum, we’ve posted Ratings from our latest tests of 95 vacuums. In all, that’s 29 bagged and 34 bagless uprights, along with 24 bagged and eight bagless canisters. Subscribers to consumerreports.org can also view the repair history of the major vacuum brands.

Making risotto or a sauce requires prolonged stirring so wouldn’t it be nice to have a kitchen helper that does the job for you, freeing your hands to prepare the rest of the meal. That’s the promise of RoboStir and StirCrazy, two battery-powered gadgets that mix your food automatically “so you don’t have to.” Or maybe you do: In our tests food burned and splattered when left to the whims of the whirring robot.

The three-legged stirrers stand on silicone feet in a pot or pan. Movement depends on vibrations generated from the rotation of a weight attached to the motor. While it’s fun to watch them skitter across a table, when we put them to the test they tripped up. We tried them in a simmering pot of tomato sauce, a pan of sauteed onions and garlic and when heating cheese sauce.

The results? Burned tomato sauce, splattered oil and separated cheese sauce. And the devices weren’t exactly quick on their feet—they can get stuck in one spot, stop moving as foods thicken or end up on one side of a pot that’s not level. As a result we judged them a “Don’t buy: Performance problem.”

One task the stirrers did easily was mixing thin watery food. Gruel anyone?

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The U.S. market for small wind turbines, including the roof-mounted variety you might use to lower your home’s electricity bills, grew 26 percent last year, according to an upcoming report by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). But industry experts worry that quality-control issues could hamper long-term growth, a point underscored by Consumer Reports’ recent test of a small wind turbine aimed at residential users.

The New York Times reported over the weekend that Proven Energy, a global leader among small wind turbine manufacturers, based in Scotland, is a aware of a potential defect in one of its turbines. Our tests of WindTronics’ Honeywell WT6500 Window Turbine, $11,000 installed, didn’t reveal a defect per se, but the amount of power generated by the turbine was a fraction of what the manufacturer says we should have measured. Read “Alternative energy update” for the full details.

Concerns over quality could be allayed by a new certification program in the U.S. Based on an AWEA standard, the voluntary effort is designed to give consumers a way to compare the performance, noise, safety and other features of different models of small wind turbines. The first certifications should be issued in six months to a year—soon enough, the industry hopes, to keep sales of small wind turbine headed in the right direction.

Some of Manhattan’s pickiest interior designers and architects are choosing engineered flooring over solid wood for home renovations. Yes, layered flooring has risen a few steps above its tacky, plastic reputation and is gracing the floors of some of the city’s swankiest homes, reports the New York Times. One variety, sprinkled with 24-karat gold, costs $100 a square foot. But in Consumer Reports flooring tests we recommend two types that cost $6, sans the shiny stuff.

Won over by the ease of installation and the resistance to warping and an improved look, designers are installing engineered wood floors in older homes as well as in condominiums where the flooring can be glued directly to the concrete slab. Even Clodagh, a veteran Manhattan designer who is an expert on natural surfaces, has stopped turning her nose up at engineered floors. “I can’t always tell the difference between engineered and solid wood floors,” she told the Times.

Engineered wood uses a layer of real wood, such as oak, or bamboo over structural plywood. One knock against it is that it can’t be refinished more than once or twice because the top layer may become too thin. Solid wood flooring can be sanded and refinished multiple times. Engineered wood also has environmental benefits because a piece of wood that would produce one solid plank can be used for four or more engineered boards, says the Times.

In our flooring tests, we tested 12 and recommended two: Teragren’s Synergy Strand with Xcora Java and Armstrong’s Century Farm Hickory Natural GCH452NALG. Both were excellent at resisting scratches and the Teragren didn’t stain easily or fade when exposed to sunlight. (The Armstrong scored poorly on the sunlight test.) Both were good in the wear tests but only fair in denting. Overall, the scores were similar to those for the prefinished solid wood we tested.

Starbucks gave it nary a mention when I stopped in this morning for my weekly Pike Place Grande. Dunkin Donuts also found no grounds for participation. But apparently 7-Eleven, Krispy Kreme, and other businesses celebrated National Coffee Day today with free cups of coffee and related items.

Prior to today’s four-hour free-coffee event, 7-Eleven hosted an interactive game on a Facebook page that “allowed fans to dip a ‘drip’ (a.k.a. obnoxious person) into a giant 7-Eleven coffee cup set up live” at Union Station in our nation’s capital yesterday. Wonder where they found an obnoxious person in Washington?

For those of us who, from time to time, ponder the efficacy of intravenous caffeine, every day is National Coffee Day. But it can’t be just any coffee, or coffee made any way. Purists like the folks who test coffee and coffeemakers here at Consumer Reports know that to truly appreciate good coffee with all its flavor and complexity, you have to drink it black.

Which is why National Milk Day and, if not just in our dreams, National Sugar Day are held other times of the year.