Eleven fires. At least $2.7 million in property damage. The common element was a ventilation fan motor in a classroom heat pump that shorts out when water reaches the circuit board.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission and Modine Manufacturing announced a recall on Aug. 20 covering about 6,061 ventilation fans in the U.S. and roughly 735 in Canada, installed in Airedale-branded school HVAC units. Recall number 26-711. No injuries have been reported.
What’s affected
The fans sit inside Airedale ClassMate DX cooling units and air source heat pumps, and SchoolMate water and ground source heat pumps. These are the units that heat, cool and ventilate classrooms.
Model prefixes are CMD and CMP where the ninth character is C, D or E, and SMG, SMW and CMS where the ninth character is H, J, K, N or P. The brand sticker is on the front; the model and serial are on the underside of the control unit.
They sold through independent dealers nationwide from August 2013 through January 2026 at $15,000 to $25,000 per unit. Replacement ventilation fans sold separately at $250 to $450. Modine manufactures them in the United States and is headquartered in Racine, Wisconsin.
The remedy
CPSC’s instruction is to stop using the units immediately, unplug the ventilation fan or switch the internal disconnect off, and contact the Modine distributor for a free inspection and repair or replacement. Consumer contact is 888-636-8627.
Worth flagging a tension in the record: Modine’s own site states that remediation has been completed for substantially all affected units in the United States. That’s the company’s characterization, and it sits awkwardly next to CPSC’s still-live instruction to stop using the products. Modine also puts the North American figure at approximately 6,500 units against CPSC’s 6,061 plus 735. Use the CPSC numbers.
How it surfaced
Local fire investigators found it. Four separate units caught fire at Arthur Rann Elementary School in Galloway Township, New Jersey, causing significant smoke damage, and Wildwood High School had a fire as well. Per NBC10 Philadelphia, the pattern ran across New Jersey, northeastern Pennsylvania and Washington state between November and late February.
“It was very, very important that we found the cause and that, you know, we rectified it,” said Chuck Uhl, a Galloway Township fire investigator. Cape May County Fire Marshal Rick Lundholm was blunter: “It’s got to be done. You can’t continue to have these fires in the schools.”
Restoration crews were still working at Arthur Rann as of Aug. 25, with roughly 75% of the building expected to reopen for classes.
Why it matters
Two things for contractors and facility owners.
First, the install window is twelve and a half years long. Any K-12 mechanical retrofit or new build delivered since 2013 with Airedale classroom units is potentially in scope, which makes this a closeout-documentation problem: whoever can find the submittals fastest can check the model numbers fastest.
Second, the failure mode is water on a circuit board. That points at condensate management, cabinet penetration detailing and roof or wall flashing above the unit as much as at the fan itself. Anyone doing warranty inspections on these should look at how water is getting there.
It’s the second construction-adjacent CPSC action in ten days, after the recall of 1.77 million attic stairway ladders. Institutional owners running the kind of full-building mechanical replacement seen at the Yale Peabody Museum have a cleaner path here, because a single-source retrofit leaves one submittal package to search rather than a decade of piecemeal replacements.
The $2.7 million damage figure is Modine’s report to CPSC and is characterized as “at least.” A separate “five fires at New Jersey schools” figure circulating in some headlines isn’t the official count; CPSC’s number is 11 fires nationwide.