QUEEN CREEK (3TV/CBS 5) -- Nicole Sanchez and her kids were cooking dinner and watching a movie. “All of a sudden, I hear this boom, and I’m like, ‘What on Earth is that?’ I go running into the kitchen, and I slide on the glass,” she said.
It took Sanchez a minute to realize what had actually happened. “Our oven just exploded! Glass flew as far as behind the fridge,” the Queen Creek mom told On Your Side. “It was like a big boom and explosion of hot glass.” Small Glass Beveling Machine
Sanchez was stunned. She’s had the Frigidaire appliance in her home for about three years. “I called them. They said, ‘Oh, it’s not under warranty anymore, so there’s nothing we can do. It’s considered cosmetic,’” Sanchez told on Your Side. “And I’m like, ‘Hold on. Cosmetic is like a scratch. Cosmetic is not hot flying glass that explodes in your kitchen.’”
According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, the agency has received 450 reports of oven doors shattering from 2019 through 2021. A review of more recent reports on SaferProducts.gov reveals several additional complaints, many of which involve Frigidaire models. “My oven door shattered/exploded as I was standing in front of it cooking. No injuries. Thankfully, I was wearing long pants when it occurred as the glass shattered against my legs and feet,” one consumer wrote. According to another report, “The outside glass of my Frigidaire oven door spontaneously exploded. The oven was not on at the time of the explosion. Our oven is only 1.5 years old and no visible damage before the explosion.”
Frigidaire’s parent company, Electrolux, told On Your Side it takes safety seriously and said its products comply with household cooking standards. “These standards recognize the glass used in every manufacturer’s oven door may infrequently break and so require the glass to break into small fragments with rounded edges if a failure does occur. Although we know that glass breakage can be startling, our compliance with these standards has ensured that when it does occur, the potential for injury is substantially reduced,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to On Your Side. “The main causes of glass failures are either imperfections in the glass or damage caused during use. When we assemble our ovens, we always check for imperfections and take extreme care to ensure that the glass is not damaged during the process; however, sometimes, the imperfections are not visible. In these situations, the failure will normally occur early in the product life and would be covered under the manufacturer’s warranty.”
“Following the first year of purchase, failure in the glass has been typically due to damage caused during use. Frequently, damage to the glass is caused by using the door to push in the oven rack or by an object accidentally hitting the interior or exterior glass. Both examples may cause a weakness that could lead to failure over time,” Electrolux added.
“It doesn’t say anything in any of the manuals or anything online that the glass could possibly explode,” Sanchez said. “I think there definitely needs to be a recall or at least a warning issued to people.”
In a statement, the CPSC said, “While CPSC has not issued recalls or warnings on shattering oven doors in recent years, we do take all incidents involving shattering glass seriously,” adding, “No severe injuries (beyond stitches) were reported.”
“Tempered glass is very strong, but when it does fail like this, it can explode into lots of mini pieces, and though it’s intended not to cause lacerations, it certainly does,” said Sean Kane, the founder of Safety Research & Strategies, which advocates for consumer safety. “It’s particularly frustrating for consumers because, in most cases, they have no indication that anything was wrong, and then you have a significant failure, and if you’re down near that oven, it can be quite explosive, and you can get shards of glass in your face.”
Despite hundreds of reports of glass failures, Kane says recalls are difficult to initiate. “Especially with something like this,” he told On Your Side. “There’s this intermingling of where does the defect originate from? Is it in the design? The manufacturing? Or is it something that happened afterward? It can originate with manufacturing. It can be damaged in transit. It can be subsequent damage that is even invisible to most eyes. You could have some tiny flaws that were in that glass that could cause these kinds of problems that will take time and many heat cycles to occur,” Kane told On Your Side.
Electrolux said though Sanchez’s oven was out of the warranty period, the company is offering her a discount on parts for replacement glass. The company also offered tips to help prevent oven door glass from breaking:
Sanchez can’t help but think of the what ifs. “The scary part about that is my little guy was just looking in the window about 10 minutes before this happened,” she said. “It’s really scary to think what could have happened if his face would have been in the window when the glass exploded.”
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