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Comment by freeone3000 | Hacker News Reader

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freeone3000·

This item causes a house fire while off. What threshold do you choose for "very dangerous"?

Also, it looks like they tried that, and Whirlpool was unable to do a proper repair, so here we are.

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Causing more house fires? Probably 1% of products sold/in use would be a good criteria

1% would be an insane failure rate for something this dangerous. Over half the households in the UK own driers [1] and there are 27.7 million households in the UK [2]. If 1% of driers were catching fire we would be seeing 138,500 extra house fires a year! Even 0.001% is too high.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/289140/tumble-dryers-in-... [2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

Nevermind that your average household probably has at least 10 things hooked into their electrical system. A 1% failure rate for all of them would be rather insane.

I have a hard time parsing this. Do you mean no more than 1% of the sold product should cause a house fire?

Anyway, 75 house fires per year from a certain product is a pretty big number. Comparing this with the total number of house fires is misleading, since house fires have many different causes. I don't have any numbers, but my gut tells me that if you'd compare this with the average number of house fires caused by sudden electrical failures from household machines while being turned off, this would be a pretty big outlier.

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