SaferProducts incident

Failure type

Fire / ignition

Incident narrative

SaferProducts.gov consumer incident report 20150225-D5311-2147435049. Severity: Incident, No Injury. Matched catalog product: Kenmore 790.92803015. Incident: The problem is with a Kenmore flattop electric range. We were cooking dinner and when we turned on the oven the panel behind the display started to spark a lot. We had to turn off the power to the oven to get the sparking to stop. I then opened the top part of the stove to see what happened and saw that one of the wiring harnesses had shorted out and nearly caught on fire. It was very luck that we were close when this happened or it would have started a fire. I called Sears to report the complaint and they were very unapologetic. They essentially told me that they do not care that the product is unsafe because it is out of warranty (the stove is only a little over 2 years old). This all happened around the second week in September 2014, and it took Sears over one month to come and repair the oven, which they charged me more than $300 to fix. I complained to several different Sears representatives that the cost should be covered because this was a safety issue not a warranty issue, but they said they did not agree.