SaferProducts incident

Failure type

Fire / ignition

Incident narrative

SaferProducts.gov consumer incident report 20191007-EB5B5-2147377271. Severity: Incident, No Injury. Product: Traeger Silverton (Pellet grill by Traeger, Silverton model. Black). Incident: On August 29 I cooked two salmon fillets on my new Traeger Silverton grill from Costco. This was the second time that I used this grill, I cooked the same items a week prior without a problem. I put the grill on "smoke" for about an hour, then turned it up to 350 degrees for the final 15 minutes of cook time. About 10 minutes after turning it up, I could see smoke pouring from the grill and heard noises coming from it. I opened the lid and flames were shooting out several feet. I shut the lid and turned the grill off, but it was still on fire. I opened the lid again pulled the salmon out, I had about 15 guests at my home and people were screaming. The fire eventually extinguished. The next several weeks were spent with innumerable calls to Traeger, they were completely unphased regarding the description of the fire. They finally agreed to replace this grill with an identical one, (after first offering to just replace the "burnt" parts, but truly did not care about the REASON the fire happened in the first place. So I then called and spoke with the Costco rep for Traeger, [REDACTED] (Sept 23, 2019) and described the grill fire. This resulted in a call the following day from [REDACTED] in the Escalation Department at Traeger. I spent about an hour on the phone with him, taking the Pellet grill apart and texting photos of the burnt parts. I was naive in believing that they would be honest, but this was just a ploy to lay blame elsewhere. [REDACTED] decided that the fire was my fault and there was no defect in the grill design. He told me that the aluminum foil on the drip pan