I've only personally seen one failure like that, a bad washer flooding a friend's house. I would imagine a heat pump dryer would be very unlikely to burn anyth

I've only personally seen one failure like that, a bad washer flooding a friend's house. I would imagine a heat pump dryer would be very unlikely to burn anything down. It is a really big inconvenience when they go offline, but there are still lots of brands that seem to work fine for 10 to 20 years. I'm surprised ultra high reliability isn't more of a consumer selling point. Refrigerators in particular could do it with a redundant compressor and valves, they could share the evaporator and condensing coils. It's not like fridge compressors cost that much to make. They could even use 2 small ones and run them all the time, so if 1 fails you get half power but it still works. Washers and dryers could do redundancy by selling pairs of identical combo units instead of 1 washer and 1 dryer, but I suppose people don't need to replace both at once very often.