Klein Dickert Co

We rent out a condominium in Madison and recently had a remarkable experience. While our renter was fast asleep one night, she heard the sound of an explosion inside the condo. She discovered that one of the tempered glass shower doors in the main bathroom had spontaneously exploded into a myriad of small glass shards. Fortunately, no was in the immediate vicinity and no one was injured. We replaced the glass door with an old-fashioned shower curtain.
We had never heard of such a thing, but a little bit of on-line research revealed that spontaneously exploding shower doors are not unheard of. In fact, over a 4 month period more than 2 dozen such incidents were reported to the Consumer Product Safety Commission and according to one report 22 people died from shattering shower doors between 1978 and 2012. Apparently, the tempered glass used in shower doors since the 1970’s is very resistant to external mechanical forces, but has considerable internal tension between layers of the glass, so that a small crack or imperfection in the glass from the manufacturing process can lead to a spontaneous explosion.
We purchased this high end shower door from Klein Dickert in Madison in 2006. When we notified them about the incident, the folks there took great pains to not take ownership of the problem, were indifferent, and did not take any steps to assure that this doesn’t happen in other homes, rather egregious behavior for a national chain, let alone a locally owned company. To add insult to injury, they charged us for removing the glass shrapnel from our condo. We are not interested in taking any legal action, as fortunately no one was hurt, and we paid the bill for the cleanup.
Please ensure that the company takes some steps to avoid this happening elsewhere, where someone might be seriously injured. We don't know if this has happened before with products from Klein Dickert or whether this was a rare isolated event..