Beko should have acted faster on fridge freezer fires
If you own a 5 to 11 year old Beko fridge freezer (not a standalone fridge or freezer), check your model number, as they have been linked to 20 fires in London over the last three years.
The London Fire Brigade has put out an urgent fire warning to owners of up to 500,000 Beko fridge freezers, following a tower block fire last week.
Newer models don’t have the fault, so don’t worry if you’ve bought one in the last four years.
Although Beko has taken some steps to contact customers with the affected models, it hasn’t acted very swiftly – it knew there was a problem with these fridge freezers last June. Why did it take the company over a year to make this safety problem public?
Do you own a Beko fridge freezer?
The fault relates to the fridge’s defrost timer, which can fail and overheat when water gets into it, leading to an electrical malfunction.
Beko says it has tracked down and sent letters to 200,000 customers, and made modifications to 11,000 appliances so far. But ultimately, more needs to be done to ensure all customers are protected; not just those Beko has contact details for.
If you have a Beko fridge freezer that is 5 to 11 years old, check the model numbers on Which.co.uk to see if yours is affected. If it is, call Beko immediately to ask what steps need to be taken.
Do you own a Beko fridge freezer? Have you had any problems with it so far? Did you receive a letter from Beko asking you to get in touch, or maybe the company has already modified your fridge freezer?
Post a Comment
Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked
Patrick Steen
You may be interested in the Electrical Safety Council’s new online tool to make the process of discovering if you have a recalled product and also how to deal with its removal, much easier http://www.esc.org.uk/recall/
wavechange
This is a good example of a service that could have been useful but is far from helpful. Having photos is useful, but all the ones I have looked at are small and blurred.
With such a large list of recalls it would be helpful to have an index that is easy to use, but some of the descriptions are not very useful. For example there are are various entries for ‘AC/DC Adaptor’ and another entry reads ‘Counterfeit Pink Styler sold at Superdrug’.
In an ideal world we would all register our purchases with the manufacturer and the manufacturer would contact us if they recall a product. I don’t believe many people do register their products unless there is an incentive, such as a free extended warranty. Maybe we need a smartphone app to make it easy to register our purchases to receive information about recalls.
hayley
i bought a beko fridge freezer 20th april 2012,last week the smell of rubber burning woke my husband up early hours of the morning,it was the fridge freezer. which had tripped my electrics in the kitchen,the model number is cf645 and the serial number starts with 12, this is not one of the recalled numbers so its obvious there is faults with newer models too. beko sent an engineer out who said it needs a new compressor and timer.