Dualit Toaster - potentially dangerous problem

KJ123

We recently had a near miss when our Dualit toaster timer failed. My mum was looking after my children, she failed to notice the timer had stuck and thought the toaster had finished as it had stopped ticking. The toaster caught fire. Dualit were not interested and just suggested we purchased a new timer and cited that the toaster should not have been left switched on at the socket. Ideally the toaster should have been switched off at the wall but busy families are not infallible. I will not be repairing this toaster again. This would be the third time the timer has needed replacing in as many years - I really regret not throwing the toaster away after the first time it happened but at £150 I thought I was buying a quality product that was worth repairing. I was wrong, it has been binned and I have contacted Watchdog.

Nick7747

Have had a Dualit for a few years - fantastically good looking, had elements and timer replaced twice but still happy with it. Today the time stuck but of course you don't notice because the toast being removed and the timer still counting down are unrelated.

It could only have been 20 minutes when I went to put in more toast and realised from the smell something was wrong. The plastic handles on the crumb tray had melted and it was so hot that the maple worktop underneath it had burnt.

I see now that the toaster has in my view an inherent design weakness in that the toast coming out and the power being off are mutually exclusive events. Hence the only safeguard is to turn the wall switch off every time you use it. This is the 21st century and such a "fall back" safeguard is crazy - there should be some form of fail safe mode on the timer. Come on Dualit!

I have chucked the thing in the garden and will never have one in the house again. On any other morning it could have been the house or worse up in flames and to re-iterate the point - the turning off of the wall socket after every use is a really lame defence for a lack of contemporary safety awareness in "classic design"

Never again.