SaferProducts incident

Failure type

Overheating

Incident narrative

SaferProducts.gov consumer incident report 20190131-C57FC-2147382974. Matched catalog product: Kidde Smoke Alarm model P4010DCS-W and p4010DCSCO-W. Source model text: i12040. Incident: My wife noticed that there was a brown spot on the side of one of white smoke alarms on the ceiling. It looked like the plastic was starting to burn. I pulled the smoke alarm apart and found that a large resistor, labeled D7 on the circuit board, was where the heat was originating from. The green circuit board was black covering a couple square inches of circuit board around it. I then went and checked the other 13 smoke alarms in the house and 12 had similar brown spots on the exterior white plastic. One had just slightly discolored plastic (barely noticeable) and I opened it up too and found the circuit board also blackened around that same resistor, but in this case the resistor looked very different. It was a different brand, but similar size to the orignal one. I found that the build date of this smoke alarm was 4/30/2010 whereas the original one I had looked at had a build date was 5/5/2009.