SaferProducts incident

Failure type

Fire / ignition

Incident narrative

SaferProducts.gov consumer incident report 20180501-23380-2147388270. Severity: Incident, No Injury. Product: GE Profile GDWT260R30SS (GE Profile Stainless Steel Dishwasher). Incident: While folding laundry upstairs tonight, we smelled smoke coming from the first floor - we were on the second floor. We ran downstairs to the kitchen and toward the smell. It seemed to be coming from the dishwasher. We had a load running. The entire cabinets around the dishwasher smelled of smoke. We realized it was in fact coming from the dishwasher and opened it up. We checked to see if the heating element had plastic or something on it, but it did not. We took everything out and saw nothing on the inside of the dishwasher. We looked under the dishwasher and saw nothing. The powercord was fine. As I went to close the dishwasher, I smelled a horrible smell coming from the DOOR of the dishwasher. We didn't know what to do, so we unplugged the dishwasher and let it sit for about 20 minutes. We went back to check on it and found that one area of the door under the control panel was still warm. So we decided to take the door apart. When we did, we found the black box inside the door with all the wires going to it was black with soot and melted. It was also the exact smell we had smelled upstairs earlier. Clearly the black box/motherboard of the dishwasher had caught FIRE during the cycle and by the grace of God, we caught it in time and stopped the dishwasher before it could become a full blown house fire.