Could your fridge burn your house down? You can't switch them off.

They're packed with inflammable insulation that can give off toxic gas. Here's why they are the most dangerous appliance of all...last year leaving him with nothing but the clothes he was wearing, there was one small crumb of comfort: neither he nor his two children were inside at the time.

Noel had set off for his work as a project manager that Monday morning, while his ten-year-old daughter Molly and son Shea, six, were on holiday with their mother, from whom he is separated.

‘The fire ripped through the house destroying everything in its wake,’ says Noel, 39. ‘All the things I’d worked so hard to provide — our furniture, every item of clothing in the drawers and wardrobes, precious photographs, even the bathroom suite — were gone.

‘I’ll never forget my little boy spotting his lovely red bed in the skip and sobbing at the charred state of it.’

Devastated: Noel Davies, pictured inside his Merseyside home, after his Beko fridge freezer caught fire and destroyed his home

So where did this rampant blaze start? Noel’s fridge-freezer, said firefighters. Indeed, this most basic of household appliances is where hundreds of house fires start every year.

In the past five years, London Fire Brigade has attended at least one blaze every week — 260 in total — involving fridges and freezers. These have led to 71 serious injuries — and seven deaths.

They include 36-year-old Santosh Benjamin-Muthiah who managed to save his daughters — aged three and three months — by passing them through a first-floor window of their North London home to neighbours before succumbing to the fumes.

His wife, paediatrician Dr Jennifer Benjamin, spent two weeks in a coma following the fire in November 2010 which was sparked by a defective defrost timer on their fridge-freezer.