Exploding shower door rattles Upper Macungie couple

You may never look at your glass shower door the same after reading this.

Janet and Sam Pellerite of Upper Macungie Township told me their shower door spontaneously exploded at 5 o’clock one morning this past spring while they were asleep. It was so loud they thought a tree had fallen in their yard.

“Thank goodness no one was in the shower or bathroom as serious injury could have resulted,” they told me in an email.

In my seven years as the Watchdog, I’ve talked to thousands of people about all sorts of problems. Exploding shower doors was a new one. But I quickly learned it isn’t unheard of.

In the past year, at least two dozen complaints have been filed with the Consumer Product Safety Commission about shower doors breaking, often explosively, for no apparent reason while no one was around.

“My wife and I were truly thunderstruck,” one man wrote in his complaint. “We wondered how a piece of glass could build up enough energy and force quite literally to blow itself to smithereens.”

There are another dozen or so complaints about doors exploding while being installed, cleaned, opened or closed.

The Pellerites told me their shower was last used about a day before the door broke. They said the door was in good condition since being installed about three years ago.

“We babied it,” Sam Pellerite said. “It didn’t rub when you opened or closed it or anything.”

This isn’t a topic the glass industry is eager to talk about. My calls to the Glass Association of North America were not returned, nor were my calls to PPG, a major glass manufacturer in Pittsburgh, and Kohler Co., which makes shower doors.

But I connected with Mark Meshulam, a building consultant in Chicago whose specialties include glass. He has testified as an expert witness about glass shower doors breaking, and I asked him if doors can break spontaneously.

“Spontaneous is a relative term,” he told me. “Maybe it’s spontaneous, but it really had a reason.”

He described tempered glass as “like a tightly wound spring” that is under a lot of pressure, with that pressure released when the glass reaches a breaking point for one of two reasons — an internal flaw or damage.

A tiny chip or crack could occur if a door rubs because it’s out of alignment; is pricked by a misaligned screw or hardware; or is bumped, especially on the delicate edges, Meshulam said. The chip or crack doesn’t cause a break immediately but over time is “like a little time bomb” that grows as temperatures change and the door vibrates from use.

“All of these little chips and cracks that are tiny, tiny, tiny, they can eventually turn into a failure and it will appear to be spontaneous,” Meshulam said.

Doors also can break due to a defect known as a nickel sulfide inclusion that happens during the manufacturing process, he said. A piece of foreign material gets trapped in the glass and over time, Meshulam said, can cause the glass to break for no apparent reason.

“It’s a very rare thing,” he said.

You can read a more technical explanation and see a video on Meshulam’s website, www.chicagowindowexpert.com.

The Pellerites said their door’s manufacturer, Guardian Industries, didn’t explain what caused their break, but it partially compensated them. It paid for a new door and the Pellerites paid for the installation.

The new door was installed a few weeks ago.

“Guardian has been in the glass business over 80 years and we try to support our customers and end users to ensure they are satisfied, even when the root cause is not known,” Guardian spokeswoman Amy Hennes said.

She told me doors can break for a number of reasons, including being damaged during framing or installation, or from an impact or improper handling. The break doesn’t always occur immediately, and determining the cause afterward is difficult and often impossible, she said.

“Broken glass does not necessarily indicate a problem with the glass itself or the tempering process,” Hennes said.

The Pellerites suspect their door broke due to a nickel sulfide inclusion defect.

“We didn’t go in there and fall against it or anything,” Janet Pellerite said.

Hennes said that’s a possible, though remote, cause.

“Nickel sulfide inclusions are extremely unusual and in most cases are not the root cause of breakage but the possibility cannot be ruled out completely,” she said.

As startling as it is for homeowners, the breaking of glass shower doors doesn’t generally startle product safety regulators.

“It doesn’t surprise us when glass breaks because glass breaks,” said Alex Filip, a spokesman for the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The commission’s first concern is whether it broke into small nuggets instead of large shards that could cause traumatic injuries. The Pellerites’ door broke as it should have. They gathered 74 pounds of glass nuggets.

There haven’t been many recalls of shower doors recently.

Kohler recalled about 100 doors in 2011 because the hinge panel could shatter, and about 10 bath doors in 2010 because they could shatter. There were no reports of injuries with either recall.

The Pellerites intend to proceed cautiously around their new door. Their 1-year-old granddaughter used to lie on the soft bath mat outside the shower.

“That’s never going to happen again,” Sam Pellerite told me.

He believes tempered glass products should come with a warning, perhaps a sticker, about the potential to explode.

“I was aware of the potential for tempered glass to break into tiny pieces when impacted, but totally unaware of the spontaneous explosion potential,” Pellerite said.

They filed a complaint with the Consumer Product Safety Commission but have not yet received a response or seen it posted online. You can read complaints or file a complaint at http://www.saferproducts.gov.

The Watchdog is published Thursdays and Sundays. Contact me at watchdog@mcall.com, 610-841-2364 or The Morning Call, 101 N. Sixth St., Allentown, PA, 18101. I’m on Twitter @mcwatchdog and Facebook at Morning Call Watchdog.