> Gree has received reports of at least 23 fires, 688 incidents of overheating, and $168,000 in property damage with the recalled dehumidifiers. Sold At:
Home Depot, Lowe's, Menards, Sam's Club, Sears, Walmart and other stores nationwide, starting in 2011 through 2014 for between $110 and $400.
It kinda looks to me like every dehumidifier sold in the USA+ for the last decade, then?
Unless there is a commercial unit with an inverter, and that is the one you are looking to buy… I would stick with residential. You will never go back after using a good inverter microwave.
What makes inverter microwaves better? The only potential improvement I can think of is rapid on-off switching so that lower-power modes are better than 10s on and then 10s off.
Exactly right and holy shit does it make a massive difference.
For one, the “sensor cook” actually works. Like crazy well in my Panasonic.
And two… if you use the power settings as they are supposed to be used it is a game changer. Like the difference in completely cool outside with a frozen center, to actually defrosted and barely warm outside.
Mine just died yesterday after “someone” placed a metal bowl in it. Don’t do that. Otherwise I was happy with it, got it at Costco. Thanks for website, I didn’t even realize fully what I had before it was gone.
Those pictures of differences of cooked food are worth a look. Maybe one day I’ll get to do an actual AB test.
I don't have one, but I just looked them up and they are genius.
First they're way more powerful than most window acs, quieter too, both are made possible because they moved the compressor and hot side outside. They also have the window open way less due to the u shape, making the whole thing leak less heat. All in all it's really genius. Also the price point is remarkable.
That's pretty scary, since the common wisdom these days is that appliances bought from brick-and-mortar stores should be safer/more reliable than the random thing bought off Amazon.
The aggregate safety of appliances bought through brick-and-mortar vs random imports is that failures are more readily tracked by the CPSC and patterns of failures will result in recalls.
If you're one of a small group of people that buys a dehumidifier from a brand that's active for 3 months on amazon; chances are that brand isn't going to be included in the recall notices when the samey design sold with persistent brands at major retailers is determined to be unsafe.
On the other hand, who's got a dehumidifier built in 2011-2014 that still works? I'm on my second one since 2019, and while the dehumidification is still working, the pump seems to be on its way out. On the first one, the compressor stopped spooling up not long after the warranty period ended.
I have an LG dehumidifier, and it is rock solid. It also automatically turns back on and recalls settings after a power failure. I've only had it for two years, but it's been good so far.
Planes are scary. They weigh an incredible amount and need to pick up a dangerous amount of speed while carrying a ridiculous amount of fuel before they can become airborne.
What makes them seem safe is the layers of safety systems we've built around it.
Likewise, anything that connects to 110V lines in your house is equally scary, and news that the safety systems might be entirely inadequate for an entire class of products rightfully gets attention.
After repairing this myself half a dozen times and seeing how they designed their (our) dishwasher with its DD82-01373A one-piece molded plastic part with integrated non-removable uncleanable sensor that we had to replace for $150 because it got a bit of particulate matter stuck in it, we’ve sworn off all Samsung products and try to warn everyone we know that they’re garbage. That plastic part also has a 1/8th turn plastic locking knob that sits inside the washer and is easily knocked off by the errant plate, causing a leak down the side for which one must uninstall the dishwasher to resolve.
yep, the news pools all the crazy outliers spread across big windows in time, geography, demographics, whatever the universe is of interest, and reduces them to a concentrated dose.
I think of all the things you mentioned, cars are the scariest and one where people very much underestimate the risk.
Although the "wrong" food is also very deadly and underestimated, but that one is tricky because it takes a long time to act and the results vary a lot by individual.
Yeah... well, I've gotten a lot of dud products from Walmart lately. The only reason I go there is I'm in a small town and they ran everybody else out of business, so they have a monopoly over most goods unless you want to drive 100km to get to a competitor
Walmart and Amazon sell a lot of the same stuff, sometimes just under different “brands”. https://youtu.be/4UrqlMfwUC4 has more info. There aren’t that many companies making cheap neon curly straws — they probably come from the same factories.
The appliance bought at the brick-and-mortar store could get a recall; the random thing bought off Amazon wouldn't have one is it's at similar levels of setting things on fire.
The dehumidifiers that I destroyed (cut the power cords and mailed them in) a few years ago were replaced with something else. I don't recall the name of them, but they were sent to me as part of the recall at no cost. It would be kind of amusing if the replacements were part of this recall.
Dehumidifiers, refrigerators, and less so air conditioners, all have the same inherent risk of a big compressor that runs unattended for years. (For example, the Ghost Ship warehouse fire was attributed to a fridge compressor)
More than a recall of specific faulty models, it would be cool to know how to evaluate compressor health so one could periodically check whether something is at risk of overheating catastrophically
In my experience, catastrophic failure is extremely rare.
An overheating compressor starts burning its oil. That burned oil sludge then clogs everything internally, and eventually the whole system stops being able to work. It will generally get so hot it automatically turns off on overload at that point.
So first context: I'm not OP, and as a matter of record the Ghost Ship fire was not caused by a fridge compressor. Electrical appliance is the most likely cause but the ATF investigators ruled the fridge compressor out. That being said, sparking near relay blades is common enough and same for sketchy wire bonding. It's not a failure mode of the compressor as much as the relay or the wiring is true, but no other appliance is wired like that and turning on and off autonomously in the average household except maybe AC which are usually less modular and wired at the factory to higher standards than some old fridge or a repaired unit.
Might be a case where many of these fail every year, but sometimes they also have faulty thermo probe and catch fire. If a failed probe doesn't cause the device to stop working then it's entirely possible for both to be bad at the same time, especially if there is no indication that the probe failed.
> it would be cool to know how to evaluate compressor health
The best way is probably to monitor low and high side pressure together with motor rpm and power. But I have never seen a fridge with manometers so ... I would listen for vibrations. Like, you can get to know how your machine should sound when happy. If it sounds unhappy, take it to the dump.
And it's a big irony that LG had to cease production of their otherwise excellent linear compressors globally because they were sued to death by legal trolls in USA.
I noticed a dehumidifier in the basement of the house I moved into. I did a search for the model number - looking for a manual - and found out it was recalled. Same thing - fire risk.
It's really unfortunate because I had a home inspection done after I moved in and part of that is I get an email every month about anything in the home being recalled and that wasn't part of it. Good thing I happened to search for that manual that day. I was able to get a partial refund on the thing, though, so that's good (it was quite old). It seemed to have been in a "fan" mode, not running as a dehumidifier (water tank was empty).
"Fan mode" in an old dehumidifier usually means that the refrigeration charge has been lost.
They (almost universally) do not have service ports, but you can charge them using a bullet piercing valve (search for Supco BPV31) and restore functionality.
Of course if it is prone to catching fire randomly it would make more sense to take the rebate and buy a good one instead of trying to recharge the old leaky fire hazard.
One of the commenters on that article says the manufacturer offered $37 in compensation for a unit they paid $200 for. That doesn't seem reasonable to me.
If a product is considered a risk to home and health, it should be law that the purchasers of that product receive at least a full refund (upon company paid return of the unit).
Consumers should have an option. Accept the replacement value or the manufacturer has to repair or replace the unit at their cost. If manufacturers want to try to source a million used dehumidifiers that don’t have this problem, they should go for it. Don’t dump that responsibility on consumers though.
I suspect though that a unit that retails for $100 costs them $25-$35. It would be cheaper to just replace all of them with new ones.
If the “worn out dehumidifier” was a fire risk the whole time, the manufacturer should consider themselves lucky if they get away with just providing the cost of a replacement now.
PSA: You can make your own dehumidifer using two buckets and some rock salt. You'll have to dump the water manually though.
> Because rock salt is hygroscopic it absorbs moisture from the air. If your plan is to get rid of the humidity in a damp basement, start with a 50-pound bag of sodium chloride to make your rock salt dehumidifier. These can be found at most big box hardware stores. While you’re there, you’ll also need two 5-gallon buckets. Here’s what you’ll need to do next:
> In one bucket, drill several small holes into the side and bottom of that bucket
> Nest the drilled bucket into the other bucket
> Fill the bucket up with rock salt
> Collected water will drip through the holes in the inner bucket into in the outer bucket over time
That's interesting but is sadly unhelpful without knowing how many gallons or liters it's able to pull out per day, or how far down it gets humidity, or how quickly it goes through salt.
E.g. my $200 dehumidifier pulls around 3 gallons of water out of the air per day, on a hot and humid summer day, to keep indoor RH around 55%.
It's very hard for me to imagine a bucket of rock salt pulling 3 gallons of water from the air, or being able to bring RH down to a target ~50% range. And even if it did, it seems like you'd probably spend more on salt over the course of a couple of summers than you would on a dehumidifier in the first place.
Can’t imagine how this would match the capacity of a good sized unit. I have been renting a garage that had some leaks, and the amount of water my dehumidifier extracted when it was damp was enough to have a solid trickle of water out of the attached garden hose (into a drain). This salt dehumidifier might be good for intermittent light dampness, but I can’t see this filling a bucket in a day like a condenser based dehumidifier.
They sold 1,500,000 units and there were 23 fires. I am happy they are so on the ball with this - but is this really the kind of risk one needs to worry about? 652,173 to 1. I just looked it up, and my odds of being in a car accident are 366 to 1 for every 1,000 miles driven. So 366,000 to 1 for every mile. Twice as dangerous as this dehumidifier.
Edit: off by a zero, so my conclusions are weaker than i originally thought.
Comparing it to one of the leading causes of accidental death is not exactly a testament to their safety.
Consider some other product safety issue -- for example, the GM ignition switch recall. 30 million vehicles were affected, and there were 124 deaths.
Or the Takata Airbag recalls -- 67 million vehicles were affected and there were 27 deaths and 400 injuries.
I think the most important part of a consumer safety issue is whether or not the product has a design defect with a known engineering solution that causes injury. It's not really fair to compare these deaths to chance deaths, like car accidents resulting from human err.
Full transparency is probably impractical as soon as the product is complex enough, but whenever inside a product there is one "main component" (such as is the case here), that should be indeed be properly traced - and it would cut the crap from companies who slap their brand on a plastic case hiding mostly the same core component - sometimes at laughlingly distant pricing points.
I'll preface this saying that I'm not an expert on dehumidifiers and don't work one them, but I do have a background in hardware electrical design and thermal engineering.
There are different types of dehumidifiers, typically you'd use a refrigerant based system. Without proper ventilation the compressor can overheat, the refrigerant is also typically flammable, lubricants also. Design flaws and not maintaining the system can cause reliability issues. If a device has been designed by a competent team, there should be a thermal cutoff ie when the motor gets too hot it will shut down. A badly designed system may not have this at all, or the thermal sensor might be somewhere stupid meaning the measured temperature isn't the one that matters, its also possible the cut off is too high. It's also possible a crap compressor/motor is being used and driven too hard for the use case.
Bad wiring is also possiblly an issue.
With a peltier system. They use a lot of power. Components can get really hot such as the power electronics used to drive the peltier cooler.
Another poster mentioned water and electronics together with poor design can cause fire risks. This is absolutely true.
Without actually having these failed devices I can't really give much more insight than that. But I hope it gave anyone a basic idea.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. Most of those home dehumidifiers don't have any user serviceable parts outside of a paper filter. Even inspecting the components would require a laborious disassembly of the device the manufacturer never intended.
I'm more used to working with larger scale industrial equipment where the user/operator can exchange parts and actually change lubricants etc.
As far as home/personal devices the best you can really do is clean out any filters, get rid of dust etc and listen for when the motor inevitably fails or starts to fail at some point.
I have a GE one that looks almost exactly like the but wasn’t in the recall. It seems they overheat. During the summer when it’s humid, the thing is running pretty much 24/7 and while it reduces humidity, it blasts out heat.
But, every 8 hours or so it shuts down for ~20 minutes. Never understood why. I now suspect it’s because it needs to cool down. I’d guess that the component that triggers the cool down is faulty in these listed units.
Usually it's because the cooling coils ice over (up to the point of completely blocking airflow... which could cause overheating) and the downtime is to let this ice melt
I don't know about this recall, but I've learned over the years that dehumidifers seem to be a frequent recall risk due to fires.
One of my dehumidifers (my penultimate one) was replaced because it started giving of a smoking smell, and I learned that it was the subject of recalls because they would spontaneously and violently start on fire.
I got my money back but reading about the history of fire hazards in this product category has made me very nervous about owning any dehumidifier.
The problem is they can also prevent a lot of property damage due to humidity, so it's a sort of pick-your-poison problem.
Many molds are damaging/toxic to humans. GP appears to be using "human damage" in addition/contrast to "property damage".
For our family, I manage the April-November humidity in our home to be in the 40-50% RH range as part of the overall indoor air quality efforts to improve comfort and health.
They have electricity and they have water, so I would guess it has a higher risk than someone without water... but I don't think there is a global problem from humidifier fires (outside here)
I've bough an AM04 heater/cooler device. It was ok. But some 2-3 weeks after warranty has ended, it stopped turning off when achieving configured heat level. It'd turn off the internal fan ("fanless" is false advertising as there's a super loud fan inside, just not visible from the outside) but would still output heat. The effect was the smell of heated/melting plastic and dangerous increase of temperature around the device.
I've contacted Dyson despite the device being (barely but) out of warranty.
They've graciously offered a replacement - a brand new AM05 model. The color would be glossy white instead of matte gray/blue, but the device was supposedly an upgrade with predecessor's problems fixed. I've got no warranty, but I wouldn't expect it. It'd by 2 years after I got the device.
Guess what has started happening with the replacement AM05 model after (again!) just few weeks since the warranty would have ended? It had the exact same defect AM04 had - it wouldn't turn heating off after reaching configured setting, but would cut off just the fan, resulting in melted plastic smell and air temperature exceeding 65+°C close to the seemingly powered down device.
A dedicated site[1] now exists for recalling just these two models: AM04 and AM05. But fuck Dyson - I'll never purchase any of their unsafe devices again and I don't want their free replacement crap.
I think the primary design flaw is that they're built by the cheapest race-to-the-bottom manufacturer that cuts corners whenever possible. Advice like "make sure to only buy a quality one" may be useless if all of the quality manufacturers exited the business decades ago, unable to compete with the cheap flammable garbage that people were actually buying. Note how many formerly reputable brand names are on this list. The companies are hollow shells of their former selves, all buying the same cut rate hardware from some no-name overseas manufacturer and slapping their plastic over it.
There are some reliable manufactures, but the cost is significantly different. I had someone come out and give me a quote for an AprilAire dehumidifier system. The dehumidifier was $2,000, plus $1,000 installation. But they also needed an electrician to expand our circuit breaker.
I ended up going to Home Depot and buying a well-reviewed GE dehumidifier with a pump. Luckily it's not on this list. I'd rather have the AprilAire system, but $5,000 vs $400 was too much of a difference. I could replace the cheap one every a year for over a decade for the same price.
> Or are dehumidifiers intrinsically a fire risk for some reason?
A dehumidifier has the same guts as an air conditioner, because an air conditioner was an invented by directing air over a dehumidifier [1]. So, it's not related to the "dehumidifierness" of it.
It's almost certainly the same factory, in China, sourcing the same faulty components.
Likely a lack of thermal shutoff switch; So if it runs too long, the compressor fails, or the working fluid loses pressure then the compressor doesn't shut off.
Maybe, but most have cut offs for when the humidity gets to normal levels. Even if they don't have that, they become less efficient at removing water when there is less in the air, so you would need a tiny space to get that low (the heat they produce would start a fire first)
If humidity is a serious problem you could consider getting a proper central unit installed. A lot of new construction in the Gulf Coast region is including these in the HVAC systems. It's like a mini 1/4 ton A/C system inside your system. I had one that came w/ the house but it didn't last very long (Honeywell). Replaced it with an Aprilaire unit.
I can tell when my dehumidifier is off or not working because I'll see really bad condensation forming around registers. Keeping RH below 55% is an extreme battle this time of year. My dehumidifier runs 24/7 for about 9 months of the year and the main heat pump runs about 80-85% of the day.
These cost $150. A cheap DIY minisplit is over $1000 (double that if you get one that doesn't need a vacuum). I'd love to have the minisplit HVAC in my shed, but cost drives me away.
Sure, yeah, double it if you want the pre-charged lines. But I found that installing the lines that required a vacuum to be easier than using the precharged lines (as you don't need to be as careful with the lines before you release the charge into them).
Regardless though the minisplit (or central A/C) isn't a good substitute for a dedicated dehumidifier. You're not going to get the RH very low.
that is cheaper than the last time I priced them by a bit. I'll have to save that link, thanks. Though after shipping things are a lot closer (I suppose since others have free shipping they have to up the price)
In addition to the minisplit cost, there's also the cost of the electrical work. Anyone can plug in a dehumidifier into an outlet but drilling a hole into the wall, running the linesets and communication wires for a minisplit is beyond most people's comfort level.
If you rent, that’s not an option. I would happily pay, but the landlord lives in a tax heaven and doesn’t do anything, not sure if he is even a real person.
My dehumidifier isn't on the list but I believe maybe it should be. Several times now it gets into a state where it's very loud, abnormally hot and it turns out the compressor is stuck ON even though the fan is not running. Even powering it down (with the button) will not turn off the compressor.
Unplugging it and plugging back in will sometimes fix the problem. Looked into it and it turns out the power relay is getting stuck in the on position. I have to open the dehumidifier completely to get access to the relay and then tap on it with something hard. This has worked to unstick it, at least so far.
I think maybe this relay isn't up to its task. I was curious about replacing it with something similar but couldn't find anything remotely as small for switching 120 VAC mains power.
For reference, my dehumidifer is a Toshiba TDDP7011ES2.
The relay in question is a Sanyou SFK-112DMP.
I dunno, maybe this will help someone out there figure out what's going on.
Call the CPSC and tell them what's happening — specifically, that the compressor is overheating due to a stuck relay — and ask them if your model is included in the recall, or if not, if the recall involves stuck power relays.
They will, of course, warn you that your dehumidifier could overheat and kill you, which is completely valid. You should stop using it immediately. Accept that going into the call, or else they'll take a lot of time trying to convince you.
But they will also have more details about how, exactly, the dehumidifiers fail, and they'll have more leverage to pursue your concern about a design defect problem with Toshiba.
I recently read that dehumidifiers can essentially serve in place of a tumble dryer but with vastly reduced energy costs. You simply hang your washed clothes in the same room as the dehumidifier and it speeds up the drying process by quite a lot. Think I will purchase one eventually.
I put a small one in my laundry room because it was a little musty with the front loader having to dry out and the door to the room being closed all the time. It drains right into the sink and the room. I highly suggest it.
I have a GE dehumidifier whose model doesn't appear to be on this list-- but it doesn't matter much: I found it almost completely useless, it ran constantly while removing fairly little water. I replaced it with a desiccant based dehumidifier and found it worked much better, removing much more water per unit time and unit energy.
The effectiveness of heat exchanger dehumidifiers falls off very rapidly at lower temperatures, which was exactly when mine needed to run. At lower temps desiccant dehumidifiers work much better.
The GE dumidifier also vibrated the storage container at levels that were audible hundreds of feet away... while the desiccant is essentially silent except for the polite white noise of the air moving through it.
You know what sucks about dehumidifiers these days?
In the past, they had a feature where you could cycle them 4-hours-on, 4-hours-off.. not anymore, now it's either sensor, continuous on, or run for an interval then shut off and stay off.
To answer the question why not use sensor?
They advertise +-5% accuracy on the humidity meter.. except on my current model it is WILDLY inaccurate. I calibrated an analog dial myself and the sensor shows there's a +30% reading difference between the machine and the dial.. no wonder it was never running..
They do use a sensor. E.g. the bestselling dehumidifier on Amazon (HomeLabs) does exactly that. Same as Frigidaire, etc. Mine seems to cycle on/off about 8-10 times per hour -- it turns off when humidity reaches 5 percentage points above its set point, and turns off once it reaches 5 percentage points below.
I've had humidifiers/dehumidifiers in the past that have been off by 20 to 30 percentage points of humidity, but honestly that was never really a problem, because I just set the target off by the same amount. Also it really helps if you have fans circulating the air -- especially with ultrasonic humidifiers, it can easily humidify the nearby air by 20-30 percentage points and turn off, because local humidity really has gone up, but it hasn't spread throughout the room.
I can't change the target by the same amount because the lowest I can set the machine I currently have is 30%. Except 30% on that is 70%+ in actuality. So that means it will turn on for 75-80%. That's way too high. If it let me turn it to 0% or 5% then that would be fine.
Oh yikes. Then that's definitely not in the "miscalibrated" range, that's just totally broken.
And while humidifiers can suffer from moisture buildup next to the sensor which you can fix in a couple of minutes with a handheld fan, that shouldn't be the case with dehumidifiers.
Sorry but it sounds like you just need to get a new one. Hopefully it's still under warranty. Your unit isn't representative of what's being sold these days, it's just flat-out defective.
(I assumed you were talking about a difference of 15-20 percentage points, which is more common to see, although more in humidifiers than in dehumidifiers.)
The problem is you've got to then remove the humidity from the absorbers somehow. Whereas my dehumidifier pumps the water it collects outside the humid area; mine fills its catch basin in under a day when the pump isn't enabled or isn't working (grr). I'd wonder about capacity of those moisture absorbers too, but I guess you can always put a ton of them.
No, that's how a small dessicant fabric bag works that you might stick in a sealed box, but these aren't like that.
They fill up the lower transparent half of the bag with clear water (dessicant invisibly dissolved in it) that you just pour down the drain and throw away the now empty bag.
Each bag can hold .5 or 1L of water; in a stateroom (bedroom), you might have to replace the bag once a month, depending on the humidity on board.
No risk of overflowing, since once the dessicant is used up, it stops working and the bag just sits there, visibly full of water.
Well, lots of airflow, lots of water, fairly warm; slime growth 101 right there. I did find the line blocked, and trimmed it back to a more approriate length that seemed unconstricted. Shop-vac is a good idea. I also need to see if there's a pre-pump filter or something that needs cleaning.
I have one of these, I think (will have to check the nameplate). It was given to me. How would a refund work here? Is there some standard sum involved, or do I need evidence of what was paid for the unit originally? I don't have this.
In my case, I had to take a picture that showed all of my name (on a piece of paper), the model number on the back, and the power cord having been cut. I submitted this and maybe a month later I got a check in the mail. I didn't buy the unit; it was already in my house when I moved in.
Does anyone know if dehumidifiers sold in Europe (UK) in the last 10 years are also dangerous? It’s concerning when you see such a large number of products in a category being recalled.
How does having a reliable twitter-like service help? I can think of a few ways this could work:
1. Government/regulator-run account that publishes a message for every product recall.
2. Each manufacturer is required to run an account that is only for recall announcements.
3. Each manufacturer is required to run a separate account for every product they ship that is only for recall announcements for that particular product.
All of these suffer from problems that I think make them infeasible.
#1 is probably the easiest to get people to subscribe to (since they only have to do it once), but then any announcement for a product they own is drowned in all the noise from products they don't care about.
#2 is perhaps the worst of both worlds: customers have to remember to subscribe when they buy a product from a manufacturer they haven't bought from before (though at least they don't have to re-subscribe for successive products from that manufacturer). But same problem as in #1 where they will likely miss announcements related to their product, since there will be announcements for a bunch of other products too.
#3 is the best from a signal-to-noise ratio perspective, but I don't see a lot of customers remembering to subscribe to a new recall feed every time they buy a new product.
The only way to ensure that people get notified when they've bought products that are later determined to be dangerous is to somehow require that the point-of-sale process includes product registration. But that's terrible from a privacy perspective, among other things.
Absolutely. What governments use Twitter for is too important to be left up to the erratic people running Twitter.
Especially when anonymous users are prevented from participating or even seeing follow-up information, as is the case now.
I don't know much about Mastodon or have an opinion regarding whether it should be used, but I agree that relying on Twitter to disseminate official information is unacceptable. The well has been irrevocably poisoned.
> Have you seen these dehumidifiers? Stop using them or you might die.
I always think this is a funny way to word it. I mean, you're going to die either way. At the most, stopping using them might push it back further. But a car crash might even the playing field too. I think implicitly accepting language like this often indicates that a person isn't accepting the fact of the bigger picture.
Did you understand what they meant? Was the very first thought in your head confusion at the intent, or did that come when some other part of your mind analyzed it (perhaps very quickly! These parts of one’s mind can be trained to be very fast and to operate automatically) for “errors” you could post about?
