My partner smelt a strange smell coming from one of our second bathroom today. I went to investigate and could smell burnt plastic too.
I had a look at the inverter in the outside bathroom and yep that is where the smell was coming from.
It turned out that the fan was cooked. And I mean cooked, it had caught fire and melted leaving just chunks of charred plastic.
Fortunately there was no other damage, so a good clean up of the circuit board, a new fan and this time an inline fuse sorted the inverter out.
I will be fitting inline fuses now to my other inverters too.
I have had fans die in the past but never catch fire.
Fortunately this was a cheap lesson.
Pete

At least you were home to catch it, I have a few fans stop working but never had one burn, obviously its possible, I did have a 230vac fan get jammed from some plastic blown in form a storm and it blew the fuse,
I will check a few fans I have perhaps some have a thermal cutout.

Hi Aaron, i was surprised that the power supply from the inverter board was not damaged, the fan must have just sat there cooking for a fair while. I now have a 1 amp fuse inline with the fan. That was the smallest i had at home, I will get some smaller fuses and more fuse holders in town next week. I certainly don't want that to happen again. As you say , glad we were home and that the inverter is in a metal case not a plastic one.
cheers
pete

I'm surprised its ok too, I plan on checking the Locked rotor current on a few of these fans, some are rated a bit different.

I put a fan on the back of the X axis stepper on my CNC to help keep it cool and when I installed it the fan worked fine  

Now the following weekend turned on the main switch then walked 2 steps to the shed computer to fire up Mach3 I heard a nice BANG and the fan let out the magic smoke and started to catch fire. So cut the power straight away and blew out the fire with no more problems. Now the fan was one of my old 24 volt fans and it was hooked up to the battery bank rail as I just use the shed battery as the power source for the CNC so after sitting for all those years the fan decided it had a good life and it was time to say goodbye in top fashion.

HI Bryan, so it sounds like it could be a common problem that we need to look at.
I have 3 home made inverters that need inline fuses, so tuesday I will be getting them.
Pete