SaferProducts incident

Failure type

Fire / ignition

Incident narrative

SaferProducts.gov consumer incident report 20140922-58636-2147440756. Severity: Incident, No Injury. Product: Craftsman 139.53918d (Belt driven residential 3/4HP DC motor garage door opener). Incident: Two weeks before the incident date, the spring of my garage door broke. I had the spring replaced within 2 hours after I noticed. Shortly after that, I noticed that my garage door opener was making some unusual purring when opening, but I did not make much of it. A few days later, the lights on the unit started to fail to light up. They eventually did after a few seconds. This happened a couple of times. A week before the incident, the backup battery of the garage door opener went bad. I got a replacement battery, and the day I replaced it, before I installed the battery, I noticed that the lights of the opener where flashing slightly. A small burning smell was in the garage, but since I had just come back from a commute, I did not make much of it. I installed the battery and the unit reported the new battery and indicated it was charging. Later in the evening, as I was going out in the garage and the lights turned on, I started to see smoke and afterwards, a flame of up to 5 inches tall came from the side of the unit. I managed to unplug the power and the fire ceased. I also unplugged the battery, since I saw some led lights in the unit still on. When I did that, the battery was not warm at all. I don't think the unit should have caught fire like that.