Saturday, May 24, 2008

Beware of your Dishwasher

By Rebecca Talley

Thursday night my son loaded our dishwasher and started the wash cycle. My husband and I were upstairs when a daughter rushed into our bedroom and shouted, "The dishwasher is on fire."

We thought she was mistaking steam for smoke, but decided to check it out. Sure enough, the dishwasher was in fact on fire. We hurried to disconnect power to the unit and found that the control panel had caught fire and had even melted in places. We have no idea why.

This dishwasher was a Kenmore with a stainless steel tub that we purchased in late 2003 from our local Sears store. If you happen to own a Kenmore, you may want to be careful when you run it, in case it catches fire.

Not too long ago, a house in our area burned to the ground. The cause was a faulty dishwasher. I shudder to think what might have happened had we not been home.

Be careful when running electrical appliances because you never know when something might malfunction and put your home, or worse, your family, at risk.

4 comments:

Annette Lyon said...

Yikes! Glad you were home. I've heard of that kind of thing from dryers (which is why I never run my dryer when I'm not home), but never from dishwashers (which I do run at times when I'm gone). I don't think I'll do that anymore. Thanks for the heads-up.

Stephanie Black said...

Oh my goodness! I'm so grateful you're all okay! What a scary thing to happen.

Shirley Bahlmann said...

That seems really weird. When I think "dishwasher," I think, "water." It's hard to imagine something with so much water burning up. That's scary stuff, though. When my dishwasher went out last fall, we hand washed for several months before replacing it. Maybe that's the safest thing of all!

Rebecca Talley said...

It was very scary.

We offered to let our kids hand wash, but for some weird reason, they all declined.

It had to be a short or some faulty design because the fire was in the control panel which is completely self-contained.