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 the 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.

Controlling humidity cant prevent human damage from mold, as well.

What is "human damage from mold"?

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.

damage to humans from mold

Some molds release toxins that make people sick.

I mean the key risk factors for fires are hot, dry, and windy. And many dehumidifiers are all three, by design.

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

Yup. Your fridge'll do the same thing.

How hot? A dehumidifier will typically raise the temperature of the air flowing through it by 10 degrees F or so.

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.

> Design flaws and not maintaining the system can cause reliability issues.

What do you mean by not maintaining the system?

I have a dehumidifier but beyond cleaning the filter every month or so, there's literally nothing else to do.

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.

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.

You're cleaning the filter. That's more than a lot of people do.

Shit construction?

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)