This is quite a dramatic headline we picked up, that washing machines are the source of more appliance fires, at least for London Fire Brigade.
The figures are very interesting, though, when you start to dig into them, and when you look at this graph, you might see why:
What’s striking is the decline in appliance-related fires in the region over time, which would seem to indicate that safety is improving. The peak was 361 incidents in 2018, dropping to 234 in 2024.
Of course, this is merely a snapshot of one region, but it is one of the largest and most densely populated areas of the UK, so it is liable to be very indicative of national trends and figures; we’d not expect huge deviation.
But what’s most striking for us is the breakdown of which appliances were the cause of the incidents, shown in this graph:
For a start, the one we’d expect to see as the number one cause from our experience is cooking products, but none are listed here, and we don’t know why that is.
As for washing machines being in the top spot, we’d not expect that as they aren’t the biggest risk in our view, although people seeing smoke or whatever, panicking and calling it in as a fire may explain some of that, even if it wasn’t a particularly huge risk as such. It is very probably enough to give people a huge fright.
Tumble dryers and fire risks we’ve been over countless times over the years and the rest are very low really.
The thing is, we don’t know what caused each of these, the severity, or if there was any real danger, as it seems all that’s recorded is “the incident”, as in, so far as we can gather, the brigade was called out because of something with these products. What we don’t know is how may of them posed any real danger as such.
We say this as, over the years in service, we’ve all had reports of hugely exaggerated stuff, my washing machine went on fire… when you get there, there’s a slight smell of burning from the motor arcing and such, it’s incredibly common and why, without more data, it’s not possible to guage the risk or indeed how much real value that these statistics hold as there’s no conteext to them.
That said, there is still a need to highlight to people that they need to maintain their appliances correctly and treat them correctly so as to avoid any potential issues or even danger.
