Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Nearly caught my house on fire with this product, and please do note I am not alone, especially lately - check out the customer photos and their dates. Either this product is too difficult to use safely for most consumers, or I had a defective unit. I really believe it was the latter, but if it's the former, you're going to have a hard time keeping this product clean enough to be safe. I bought this smoker in July (five months ago). On the fifth use, it inexplicably overheated, melting the door seal. There was no fire that time. Bradley sent out a replacement door seal, saying that I must have kept the vent closed, but they'd help me this time. I hadn't kept the vent closed, and said I was concerned it was a defective unit and a fire hazard. They continued to assert it must have been a closed vent. I crossed my fingers I had just not noticed my error. It took me nearly 2 hours to replace the door seal, a dirty job that made me swear to myself I'd maintain the smoker perfectly so there would be no potential of user error going forward. Every single time I removed every single removable part and steel wool clean it. I wiped down the sides each time, and removed any obvious grease. Five smokes later and my wife looks out the window just in time - the whole thing was ON FIRE. I unplug it, douse it with water, and finish the turkey breast (not a greasy pork roast mind you, a turkey breast) in the oven. I call them up, assuming the fire was proof I had a defective unit that would be quickly replaced. I figure, hey, they had a record of the first incident, so it shouldn't be much of a fuss. Ahem - no. After a week of chasing, I finally got to talk to Brian, who is in charge of "fire incidents." I explained the situation, the previous problem, my exact experience and use of it, and he said it's because of user error - that I hadn't cleaned the smoker thoroughly enough, and too much grease is why it caught fire. Then he offered me a "deep discount" that he didn't actually reveal. I tried to engage him in simple logic. If you're saying this unit, that has caught fire, is NOT DEFECTIVE, and I'm saying that I've used this as responsibly as possible, what you are saying is either A) I am lying to you about how I maintained the product or B) that this product carries a very reasonable risk of a fire starting through normal customer use. Brian didn't really want to say "A" but he essentially did when he refused to acknowledge the possibility of a defective unit. He said the chances of a defect were "slim to zero," explaining to me about how the components are each inspected before assembly. When I raised the possibility that it had been improperly assembled or perhaps my unit was otherwise defective, he basically said no. When I noted that I noticed others on Amazon were also having this issue, he literally laughed and said every product on Amazon has negative reviews from a few people. This was pretty insulting given the time that I had invested and my earnest belief that I had used this product right and it was a defective unit. But at that point I realized that any company that would rather insult a customer than acknowledge the possibility that they could make a manufacturing error was not worth a minute more of my time - other than helping assure other people aren't in my exact situation. I wish I had taken others' warnings seriously and not written them off as being posted by careless people who didn't bother taking care of the unit properly. You need to know that this product has the potential to catch fire, even if you use it very responsibly - and even if you are as careful as I was. I'm not some random Internet troll - I'm a regular suburban father who wouldn't bother posting this review if the product just stopped working. It's a dangerous product, and even more dangerous that Bradley isn't taking the recent swell of customer fire reports seriously.