Whirlpool told to recall dryers in 'unprecedented' government move | Hacker News Reader

Whirlpool told to recall dryers in 'unprecedented' government move

bbc.com

From the article:

> The fire report states that it's an internal wiring fault in the machine, and all of this was caused - approximately £8,000 worth of damage - when the machine was turned off

Am I understanding this right? This dryer can catch fire while not even running, just by standing there connected to the power socket? That's insane. How in the world can someone mess up some internal wiring this bad?

You may not have looked inside a modern dryer recently but the level of chincy-ness is unreal.

The wires just hang off the parts held by the flimsiest of little twist ties.

I just fixed a blower fan in mine. The plastic fan was held onto the motor shaft with tape.

The fact that this crap doesn't instantly fly apart and catch fire is an admirable engineering feat in itself (in a twisted sort of way).

I love it when you look at something that clearly works and you think "How did this ever work?". Happens to my code often.

If it was an apartment sized stacked unit, did you happen to notice the shaft not mounted in a bearing assembly, but instead turning inside a vinyl cup? Only took mine 2-3 years to fail to metal-on-metal... single male, bi-weekly usage equals <100 loads to fail. $10 part, took ~45 min to tear down, install & reassemble. Will be doing it again sometime this year. I think I can do it in 20 min next time... or I can buy the latest, cheaper built model for $600+... Hmmmm, decisions, decisions.

Yup, this is what major appliances have come to: Scheduled repair expectancy of 2-3 years or several hundred to replace.

My dishwasher started leaking one night - luckily I was nearby when it began. Upon researching I learned that it was caused by a failed grommet that's installed with its garter spring facing towards the water-filled tub, which causes premature failure after 2-3 years. Of course Whirlpool stopped selling the grommet as a replacement part, instead requiring people buy an entire $150 sump assembly.

So I bought a few $5 grommets off a grommets-r-us site and have scheduled a triennial dishwasher disassembly song and dance. Threw a simple leak detector under the washer just in case. At least now I'm pretty knowledgable of the secret life of the dishwasher.

All "bearings" in the machine were plastic sleeves.

The drum is moved by a belt so thin I thought it was a piece of string to tie it in place.

The tensioner on said belt was literally nothing more than a bent coat hanger with a little plastic pulley. This part of the design was important because the "emergency stop" in the even of the belt breaking was that the coat hanger would go flying off into the machine and stop pressing against a little micro-switch glued to the side of the motor mount.

Well, I indeed haven't looked inside a dryer, but I am aware that dryers can burn while running. Indeed, as I just learned, they are #1 cause for house fires in Germany, and insurers will usually not pay if you let them run unsupervised. But burning while being turned off, powering some 5V circuit board... yes, it happens, but 75 times a year? But maybe that 'being turned off' was an outlier and most others were actually running.

I recently fixed the heating element in mine. I was amazed at the incredibly poor design of the thing. It was also full of lint despite clearing the filter every run. So the heating element is sitting there right next to a pile of nice dry lint. It's amazing these don't catch fire every day.

Tape as structural coupling is sad indeed, but from my little experience, most electrical appliances look flimsy somehow (not industrial or construction grade).

Every electronics device has the risk of catching fire given the right circumstances. It just takes one cable or switch being damaged causing it to overheat and set something flammable ablaze. Even your wall socket or wiring in the wall is not exempt. Screw in one clamping screw to loose and the amps running through it will heat the small contact area it makes to melting point. Computers screens or TV's? Even worse, all the dust they collect through their cooling vents are an accident waiting to happen (happened to me with a crt screen in standby mode).

Can confirm.

Had a microwave once, that was not in use, just, turn on and start smoking. I ran outside and flipped the breaker for the house off. If nobody had been home, the house would have burnt down.

Can confirm: had a wall socket next to my bed spontaneously catch fire when I was a kid.

I had a socket in my room as a kid that would get warm even with loads in the range of 30W. I was too terrified to plug my PC into it although the outlet was right next to it. An electrician checked it once but didn't find anything, so at least the wiring and connections inside the socket must have been alright. Maybe somewhere inside the wall close to the socket a wire had a very thin section or something, and the heat spread to the socket eventually.

Presumably it’s a consequence of wear induced by running the dryer, eg one would hope an unused one wouldn’t spontaneously catch fire. But after some nebulous number of runs whichever component that was made a little too close to the anticipated margin fails and produces a short. At that point i assume catching fire would just be down to chance

Now that's another level for planned obsolescence! They're not only making you buy a new product... They're destroying everything so that you have to get everything anew!

\o/

> catch fire while not even running

I owned a Ford F-150 that spontaneously combusted in my garage after being parked and turned off for several days.

The arson investigator traced the issue back to a design defect that kept electricity flowing to the cruise control even while the ignition was off.

Fewer and fewer devices can truly be switched of. Physical switches cost money and “aren’t needed” when you already have some digital interface.

Also, these devices could have a physical power switch, wit the wiring error in that switch.

Free market capitalism.

Crucially, this article provides no way to check if your dryer is affected. We have a Hotpoint dryer in the UK, I'd love to know if it's affected or not.

Edit: it looks like it can be checked here:

https://safety.hotpoint.eu/match.jsp?lang=en_GB

And in other Whirlpool news - Dishwasher catches fire "You don't think the appliance filled with water is gonna catch fire". This one needed a class action lawsuit against Whirlpool but, of course, many peopole didn't know about it since the dishwasher often comes with the house they've bought.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/london-man-whirlpool-d...

And it was a fault in a Whirlpool fridge that sparked the Grenfell fire - 72 dead and worst UK residential fire since WW II - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/department-responds-to-po...

Surely other countries have the same model of dangerous Whirlpool dryers?

Other countries are surely impacted, and probably under other brand names.

We’ve had more than our fair share of whirlpool and Frigidaire appliances under various brand names over the years.

They’re mostly (universally?) awful, though some of the planned obsolescence mechanisms are ingenious. Note they think that 90% of the ones sold have already died and been thrown out for some other reason. I’d bet these fires are an intentionally sabotaged mechanism triggering an otherwise minor fault.

Anyway, here is a list of North American brands presumably affected by this recall, since they all come from the same upper management chain:

Admiral (Canada)

Chambers

Coovert (ac's)

Crosley (top-load/current front-load washers)

Dacor ( 13 )

Danby ( 8 )

Estate

Inglis

Ikea

Kenmore ( see Sears )

KitchenAid ( 4 )

Kirkland

Maytag Epic®

Roper

Speed Queen (Canada only)

Sub Zero (undercounter ice makers)

Whirlpool

Also, this site lists who makes which brand in the US:

http://www.appliance411.com/purchase/make.shtml

I can't suss out if my model is covered by this recall but I found a lawsuit alleging it is flawed from almost 2 years ago (!)

https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Wh...

Anyone know how to check this in the US? Only information I can find is for UK.

I have a GE Hotpoint tumble dryer from about 4 years ago and would like to see if I'm at risk.

The average amount of residential fires in the UK between 2017-2018 that actually required rescue services is around 83,000[0], so only 75 extra a year does seem a bit excessive to do a full recall on; I feel a stop-sale order until the problem was resolved and saving full recalls for very dangerous items would have been a better choice

[0]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

This item causes a house fire while off. What threshold do you choose for "very dangerous"?

Also, it looks like they tried that, and Whirlpool was unable to do a proper repair, so here we are.

Causing more house fires? Probably 1% of products sold/in use would be a good criteria

1% would be an insane failure rate for something this dangerous. Over half the households in the UK own driers [1] and there are 27.7 million households in the UK [2]. If 1% of driers were catching fire we would be seeing 138,500 extra house fires a year! Even 0.001% is too high.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/289140/tumble-dryers-in-... [2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

Nevermind that your average household probably has at least 10 things hooked into their electrical system. A 1% failure rate for all of them would be rather insane.

I have a hard time parsing this. Do you mean no more than 1% of the sold product should cause a house fire?

Anyway, 75 house fires per year from a certain product is a pretty big number. Comparing this with the total number of house fires is misleading, since house fires have many different causes. I don't have any numbers, but my gut tells me that if you'd compare this with the average number of house fires caused by sudden electrical failures from household machines while being turned off, this would be a pretty big outlier.

You appear to have a pretty low quality requirement - do you really think it's fine to sell goods you know can catch fire in normal operation, so long as "only" 75 a year threaten people's lives??

Good for you I guess, but IMO any product having a defect that risks lives, under standard operation, due to engineering defects, should be recalled.

My 13yo car has its third recall on one issue -- but it causes fires; that's a valid recall.

Each of those _750_ fires is a potential death of a family. I think it qualifies as very dangerous.

The fire report states that it's an internal wiring fault in the machine, and all of this was caused - approximately £8,000 worth of damage - when the machine was turned off

This doesn't seem to be the average fire from not cleaning the lint trap though, so may not be a fair comparison.

I guess we need to ask: compared to what? They sold ~5mil units, and recall may affect 500k still in use. So that's a hit of 10% of the revenue from these driers.

If they had 10% profit margin on these driers, that would wipe out that. That's probaly all.

That vs. more people dying.

I completely agree with you, but it's fascinating to compare the attitude here vs. how people respond when simple, proven life-saving measures are proposed for roadways, for example even things as basic as leading pedestrian signals, pedestrian scrambles, road diets, smaller turn radiuses, banning RTOR, etc.

With even the hint of someone in a car being inconvenienced, a cry goes up and the whole thing is dead in the water.

Meanwhile close to 20 pedestrians are killed in the US every single day. We call these collisions "accidents", and throw up our hands about them because how can you prevent an act of god, right?

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