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Beko has issued an urgent safety warning for thousands of tumble dryers after one model killed a mother of two.
The appliance maker said 3,450 of its 8kg and 9kg tumble dryers could have the potentially fatal fault which is caused by a third-party component.
Beko urged anyone who owns model numbers DCU9330W, DCU9330R, DCU8230, DSC85W and TKF8439A to immediately stop using and their device and unplug it. The machines were sold between May and November 2012.
A voluntary repair programme is now underway “as a precautionary measure”, the company said in a statement on its website.
The statement continued: “As part of our ongoing monitoring we have identified a batch issue with a third party supplied component which in rare circumstances could fail and overheat, which could lead to a risk of fire.
”As a responsible manufacturer, we have decided to proactively contact the owners of these condenser tumble dryers to offer a free of charge in-home check and to modify affected products to remove any potential risk. This is completely free of charge and will take no longer than 30 minutes.“
Beko asked consumers to check the model and serial number of their dryer. Affected customers should register for an engineer to check the machine and repair if necessary, the company said.
Beko apologised for any inconvenience caused and said it would conduct the repairs as quickly as possible.
In August last year a coroner found that mother-of-two Mishell Moloney had been killed in her bedroom after a fire at her home sparked by a defective Beko DCS 85W.
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The 49-year-old died from exposure to carbon monoxide fumes and smoke after the tumble dryer caught fire in the kitchen.
The coroner found that the same model had been implicated in 20 previous blazes but Beko had decided not to issue a recall.
Beko stressed on Tuesday that the fault identified in the current safety alert was unrelated to the one that caused the fatal blaze.
In 2011, fire investigators from London Fire Brigade said that a fire in the capital which was thought to have been caused by a lightening strike, was in fact caused by a faulty appliance manufactured by Beko .
In a statement, the brigade said that the blaze served as an urgent warning of the serious risks posed by up to 500,000 faulty fridge freezers in homes and businesses across the country.
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