Frigidaire dishwashers: what CPSC incident reports show

What this page is counting#

Every number on this page is a share of CPSC SaferProducts incident reports for Frigidaire dishwashers, 2011-2026, n=103.

The CPSC SaferProducts database records reports of harm, not a census of units in service. It is a safety reporting channel: people report what is dangerous, so fire, smoke and burn hazards dominate it. Nothing here is a failure rate, and nothing here says how often Frigidaire dishwashers break — only what was reported, and in what proportion of those reports each part is named. A narrative mention of a part is not that part failing. Method: /methodology.

What CPSC reports say about Frigidaire dishwashers#

This corpus holds 103 CPSC SaferProducts incident reports naming a Frigidaire [dishwasher](/blog/repair-or-replace-dishwasher) between 2011 and 2026, and one part stands well clear of the rest: the heating element, named in 45% of them, or 46 reports. The control board follows in 19%, twenty reports, and wiring or the power cord in 4%, which is four. A hundred reports is a small corpus, so a handful of filings moves any of those shares noticeably and the ordering should be read as an indication rather than a stable ranking. None of it measures how often a part gives out — SaferProducts records what people filed, not what the machines in kitchens are doing, and a narrative that names a part is not a finding against that part.

Which parts the reports name#

Share of CPSC SaferProducts incident reports for Frigidaire dishwashers, 2011-2026, n=103 whose narrative mentions each part. A report naming a part several times counts once.

Method: /methodology.

What the certified listings say#

42 Frigidaire dishwashers are catalogued in the certified-product listings. A certified-product census is not a census of units in service, and these specs are unrelated to the incident reports above.

Method: /methodology.

What an owner can act on#

The heating element dominates this corpus, and it is the one component an owner can examine directly. Open the door and look along the tub floor: the element should be an even dark tone from end to end. A bright scorched patch, a blistered or swollen section, or melted plastic fused to the metal is a stop signal rather than a cleaning job — and the most common way plastic reaches it is a light item slipping off the lower rack, so check the underside of the bottom basket while you are there.

The control board announces itself through behaviour instead. A console lighting a pattern nobody selected, a cycle that restarts on its own, a touch panel that answers some presses and ignores others, or a warm plastic smell lingering after a run all belong to the same signal. Cut power at the breaker before going further; an unpredictable board is not one to leave energised while you look for the manual.

Wiring is named in only four reports here, so treat it as a small sample rather than a pattern, but the check costs nothing. Where the supply enters the machine, look for discoloured insulation, a cracked jacket, or brown heat marks around the terminal screws, and note whether the breaker holds through a full heated-dry cycle. A breaker that lets go partway through is reporting a real condition.

If you are reading the certified-listings table above as a shopper, read each row against its own count rather than blending them. Annual energy use appears twice under different registry field names — 229 to 240 kilowatt-hours a year across 24 of the 42 catalogued models, and 240 to 270 across 18 of them — and the two are different subsets of one catalogue, not a single wider spread.