SaferProducts incident

Failure type

Fire / ignition

Incident narrative

SaferProducts.gov consumer incident report 20240311-A89E1-2147340469. Severity: Incident, No Injury. Product: Black and Decker Unknown (no model or serial present anywhere on un (Black and Decker toster oven UL listed number E187786. Model or serial number could not be derived from unit.). Incident: Brand new Black and Decker toster oven nearly causes house fire. After recently purchasing a toster oven from Walmart, a dangerous defective timer mechanism caused the unit not to turn off after the timer had counted down. I used the oven 10-20 times before the failure occurred. It was about 1 month old at the time. I typically cook small pizza in the oven. I set the timer to 8 minutes. The timer controls the power going to the heating elements and turns it off after it makes a ding. When the timer failed, it got stuck one second before it was supposed to ding, causing the 8 minute pizza to cook until a small fire began in the oven and my smoke alarms went off. I was able to turn the oven off by applying a slight amount of pressure to the timer knob, pushing it past zero and causing an audible ding and the de-powering of the heating elements. The issue persists and the oven must now be carefully monitored throughout the cooking cycle. After searching [REDACTED] it seems this is a very common problem with these toster ovens. Timer mechanisms must be built reliably to turn power off.