All you chefs at home will know gas stove tops are the way to go for a professional cook, plus they just look cool.
Joanna Neal, from Hawke's Bay, bought a Westinghouse 5 burner gas cook top back in February.
"It was a great price and for two months I used it on a regular basis, and it was perfectly fine", she says.
Until one day while Joanna was cooking, "there was an enormous bang".
Joanna thought someone had put a brick through her window. There were no bricks. Joanna’s glass stove top had just exploded.
"I felt something shoot past my cheek," she says.
"It was a huge shock. I could see the glass was sprayed all across my units, kitchen top, and also on the floor."
Joanna thinks if she had been closer at the time, she would've been pitted with small shards of glass that could have got into her eyes.
"Some of the shards are very small so I was a little concerned about the dogs," she says.
Her dogs are thankfully fine, but she decided to do some growling of her own.
She got in touch with the retailer she got it from, Harvey Norman.
Joanna says the Harvey Norman employees she spoke to were shocked and one of them said they had never experienced anything like this in 21 years.
"They also asked my husband when he rang whether I'd dropped something on it from a height".
If this story sounds like a blast from the past, that's because it is.
Fair Go has a bit of history involving exploding glass. First it was ovens, and now it’s stove tops.
"It's not something you would expect from a fairly new appliance that had only been in two months," Joanna says.
But Harvey Norman ended up telling her the hob was part of a bad batch.
Joanna says she was surprised by this news and questioned why she was sold the hob if there was a problem with it.
If it was part of a bad batch, did this mean there were others?
Joanna googled the issue and came across the Westinghouse Australia website.
"I clicked on the reviews and I read possibly two or three accounts of the same thing happening," she says.
"They also use the word explosion."
Fair Go found more than a few reviews of the same model of Westinghouse exploding in other homes, and interestingly all were from Australia.
We asked both Harvey Norman and Westinghouse, a brand under the Electrolux company, about whether this product should be recalled.
Despite us asking, Harvey Norman chose not to comment on this issue, which Fair Go thinks is disappointing.
It also means Fair Go can't reassure customers about the lengths Harvey Norman is taking to make sure there aren't other faulty hobs out there.
However, Electrolux were happy to comment.
It found there were two models of Westinghouse ovens affected, and says: "We identified NiS (nickel sulphide) contamination in the raw glass material in the two models produced before glass supplier improvement measures were implemented in May 2021."
It's now fixed the issue, and says for the models that are already out there, people shouldn't be too worried because: "Based on a series of factors including sales volume, incident rate and severity of injury, it was determined that the overall probability of injury and associated gravity of risk were sufficiently low."
Electrolux says that's because its safety glass is designed to fall safely into blunt cubes, so limits any chance of hurting people.
But Joanna would argue otherwise and wanted to leave a review about the product on the Westinghouse Australia website. But her review was declined.
"My husband also tried to put one on his was also declined.
"I was pretty frustrated, and it made me think, gosh this is all about sales and sales over safety," she says.
Electrolux says that's not the case.
When it looked into the review issue, it discovered some issues with automatic filters and other publishing processes, and says: "We are currently in the process of correcting this oversight".
Review or no review, the Neals still needed a new cooktop, and while Electrolux did offer to replace theirs for free, the couple weren't convinced.
"I didn't want to run the risk really of having that again," Joanna says.
So instead, Joanna says they've decided to pay an extra nine hundred dollars and get an AEG cooktop, which was installed on the weekend.
She got it through Harvey Norman, which has done what it has to under the Consumer Guarantees Act (CGA), but nothing more.
Joanna has learned to do more research the next time she shops for appliances.
"It did make me more determined to make sure that the new product I get, I've done my homework on it and I check safety," she says.
"It might look the part, the price might be good, but seriously consider that this might happen to you".
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