My Xmas gift burnt down my room

Dillon Tooth in what remains of his room after a toy plane started a fire. Photo / Natalie Slade

A remote-controlled toy plane given to a teenager for Christmas nearly claimed his family's lives after it set their house on fire in the middle of the night.

The blaze scoured the walls of 17-year-old Dylan Tooth's second-storey bedroom, burning all his clothes, Christmas presents, and even his Christmas bonus. He was not in the room at the time. The remainder of the Glen Eden house's top storey suffered serious smoke damage.

Investigators said that if the family had not had a fixed fire alarm network, which set all seven alarms off when triggered, they may have died.

Mother Michelle Hart says she was woken by one of the smoke detectors at 1.20am on Monday.

"I sort of groaned, thinking it was the battery, but when I opened the door to [Dylan's] bedroom, there were flames a metre high coming from his bed.

"I screamed at the kids to get out, ran downstairs to get a saucepan ... I thought I was going to put the fire out. But in the time it took for me to get back upstairs, the whole upper floor was filled with thick, black smoke."

Ms Hart and two of her children rushed out of the house and watched helplessly from the street as flames engulfed the top storey.

By the time the fire service arrived the windows had exploded on the top floor, and the bedroom's window frame had fallen out.

Ms Hart believes the 1m-long RC British Bomber Plane, which was being charged at a power socket, was the cause of the fire.

"I saw the plane charging earlier in the night. When I saw the fire later that evening it was in exactly the same place that the plane was."

Senior station officer Neville Trevarton, who is a fire investigator, believed it was "pretty clear" the model plane set the house alight.

"It was witnessed in its incipient stages. All the fire patterns match the accounts given to me by the witnesses. It's pretty conclusive as far as I'm concerned."

Mr Trevarton planned to approach the seller and manufacturer of the toy to investigate whether the incident was a one-off.

He will then consider forwarding the case to the Ministry of Commerce for a full investigation into the product.

The plane was bought from online store 1day.co.nz for $150. The Herald was unable to contact the website's management yesterday.

The plane is no longer for sale at the site but is available on other bargain online stores. It is produced by the LanYu company of Guangdong, China.

Mr Trevarton praised the use of a connected alarm system at the home, installed by the home's makers, Habitat for Humanity.

"It caused a miraculous save. The fire was upstairs, which is always a problem, because you've only got one way out. One adult and two children would have been lucky to get out had that system not been in."

A smoke detector in the bedroom set off alarms in other rooms. Without that system, smoke would have built up before the three people became aware of it.

Ms Hart tearfully said she felt lucky, but also distraught.

"All our clothes are gone, the bedroom is burned down to the building paper. Sticky soot is stuck over everything. It's terrible."