SaferProducts incident

Failure type

Fire / ignition

Incident narrative

SaferProducts.gov consumer incident report 20120204-BBB8E-2147470584. Severity: Incident, No Injury. Matched catalog product: Kenmore 790.3690.3900. Source model text: 79097423900. Incident: Yesterday evening, the right rear burner on my Kenmore Elite Smooth top range did not get hot after I turned it on to high. I waited a few minutes, still didn't even get warm. I thumped the burner thinking something was loose - immediately, all the coils on this burner (visible under the ceramic top) became red hot poker red and hotter than these burners have ever been. with about 1/2 inch of the beginning of the coil becoming even redder, and seemed to flare up and flicker a little. Made a filament type noise while it was flickering, like when you shake a lightbulb. This alarmed me. I've never seen a smooth top do this. Turned it off and didn't use it. The other burners seemed to be working as usual. This morning I re-tried the right rear one - same thing - became immediately very hot with the same flickering up and filament sound. Oddly enough, this very same burner, which is my favorite and the one I've used mostly, did not seem to be getting as hot as it should for a few months now and the burner did not seem all that responsive to knob temp. changes. I attributed that to the fact that it is the most used burner, so I didn't complain. But this business of now overheating and flickering is scary and probably dangerous. I called several numbers this morning to report this to Sears/Kenmore, including the one in the pat response from Sears on this website - all were totally useless, unless I wanted to pay over $100.00 for a service call. All numbers, including the local Sears