Exploding glass oven doors
Consumers left puzzled, worried by seemingly random events of glass oven doors bursting
More than 700 similar reports
Since we learned how this problem is affecting many different brands and consumers across the country, I contacted the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to see what they could tell me about this problem.
The CPSC sent us this statement:
“From 2015 to 2018, CPSC received over 700 reports of oven doors shattering or ‘exploding.’ No severe injuries (beyond stitches) were reported. While CPSC has not issued recalls or warnings on shattering oven doors in recent years, we do take all incidents involving shattering glass seriously. There are standards in place for consumer products that use glass which should lead to the glass breaking into nuggets and not shards, if the product shatters.”
Maybe staffing issues with the tempering process or untrained short staffed unrealistic expectations on how much work and stress and lack of rest and free time of the staff. or even a change in process to save money or get by without needed staff.There is no clear answer to what is causing this problem. We turned to Jason Haraldsen who is an associate professor of physics at the University of North Florida.
“People would immediately say, ‘This has to be happening because I’m heating it up,’ but if it was the heat, it would be happening more often,” said Haraldsen. “It would be a much more significant problem if it was just the heat, so then the question is what is the problem?”
Haraldsen has not tested any of these ovens. He said the glass in an oven is tempered glass which makes it stronger and able to handle more heat. However, according to Haraldsen, “it can be broken much easier if it gets a microfracture.”
“If it gets a crack in it, it will shatter,” he said. “We also like it because if it shatters it will literally shatter into a million pieces as opposed to the shards of glass you would see from a window or something like that.”
Harladson also explained what can happen if there is a microfracture and higher temperatures in your oven like the self-cleaning mode.
“Now all the molecules are getting really agitated by the heat and that can make the microfracture expand to a legitimate crack in the glass, and once that happens then the tempered glass just shatters,” he said........
If its micro crack it seems like it would each time it was heated and cooled down aggravate the condition with the slight amount of expansion and contraction and that could be made worse if the tempering process was off or the testing was mis calibrated.
