Whirlpool first issued a safety warning about millions of dryers in 2015 after it acquired the Hotpoint and Indesit brands and discovered some machines had a fault which made them a fire risk.

In July 2019, it was forced to recall affected tumble dryers after government intervention.

Customers with an unmodified, affected tumble dryer are entitled to a new replacement machine which will be delivered and installed, with the old one removed, at no cost to the owner.

Latest figures up until 6 October 2020 reveal 124,000 new customers have come forward since 12 June 2019 following the Consumer Minister announcing the intention to serve a recall notice.

A total of 109,000 cases have been resolved, with 77,000 being replaced free of charge, 19,000 being upgraded, 5,000 being collected and refunded and 7,000 have been modified.

Nearly 6,000 machines are no longer owned by the customer or they have been previously modified.

The statistics also reveal it takes an average of 15 days for customers to receive a refund with an average 40 days from the beginning to end of the resolution process.

Washing machine recall

The manufacturer identified faults in certain models of Hotpoint and Indesit washing machines which were made between 2014 and 2018.

In December 2019 a recall process was initiated for a number of models, and statistics reveal 264,000 potentially affected customers have come forward since the campaign launched.

Of these, 184,000 have been resolved (181,000 replaced and 3,000 modified), 19,000 cases are still outstanding and 61,000 have been identified as not having a machine with a faulty lock mechanism.

More than three million page visits have been made to the Whirlpool recall website, with around half of owners with a potentially faulty machine being registered under the scheme.

It takes an average of nine days for a product exchange, nearly 13 days for a modification with replacement parts, and it takes 39 days on average from start to finish for the resolution journey.