Rowenta Iron doesn't accept water?

I got a very interesting problem with our Rowenta Iron that we bought couple years ago. First it stopped working, but since the screws had the special form heads I could not open it to fix. Just recently I decided to buy a set of special screw drivers and was able to return to this problem. Below are 3 photos with what I found inside this iron.

Rowenta Iron, rusty spring, photo 1
Rowenta Iron, rusty spring, photo 2
Rowenta Iron, rusty spring, photo 3

It appeared that the iron with a full support of steam and a huge plastic tank for water doesn't accept any water or steam and simply dies in a few months after we begin using it! I could not believe my eyes. But it was very real and I decided to contact Rowenta and ask them a couple of questions. Here is my email message.

The iron spring, responsible for the wire, was made of very cheap steel. It completely disappeared in a couple of years after we started using it. So this relatively expensive model, we paid over $70 to our local store, is totally junk. I published the photos of what we got after it stopped working and I disassembled this iron. Here are the links:

...

Would you like me to mail this trash to you for further analysis? Is it so-called German quality? Or you simply didn’t expect this iron to be exposed to water or steam? What should I do to this unit? I know that I simply lost my money for nothing. A simple $10 iron that we bought a long time ago still works with no issues at all. If I were you I’d politely send a replacement for this unit and re-think about spring quality for all your models.

I received a confirmation email with this ID:
The reference number for your question is '101024-000073'.

and a short message:

We will respond to your inquiry as quickly as possible. Generally, responses are sent within 1 to 2 business days.

And here is the response that I got in a few days:

Dear ...,

We are sorry to hear that you have experienced these problems with your unit. We have not had any mass problems or recalls with any of our units. Since you are beyond the one year warranty it may not be cost effective to send the unit into a service center for repair. We can offer you a rebate certificate towards the purchase of a new model if you are interested. Please respond to this email if you are interested in receiving the certificate and we will mail it to you.

Best regards,
Rowenta Consumer Service
Reference number 101024-000073

So they officially wrote that they never had any problems with these units or any kind of recalls. So the only one defective spring appeared somehow in only my iron. I don't believe because I saw tons of complaints on the Internet when these irons stopped working with no visible reason. But ok, let's take a closer look at the discount, or so called rebate, that could be granted for this trash to buy a new one. After a few days of waiting I got a piece of paper in a regular mail with:

$20 rebate for a $150+ iron
$15 ... $60.00-$149.99
$10 ... $30.00-$59.99
$5 ... $20.00-$29.99

It seems to be a joke and simply refused to use this so called rebate. It's disrespectful to make the customer pay an additional amount for such a trash giving him such a small rebate.

Here is my last message that I emailed to them to make my position clear:

You wrote that you never had any problem with this particular item. Have you ever tried to search for these problem on Google? Below is the link where people complain about rusty water, rust, etc. It's easy to pretend that this device has no issues. I got your so-called rebate paper, but I will never buy any unit since I'm sure that this device is not the only one having such a serious problem. And it doesn't matter if you accept that or not, it's a real fact. There are also many complaints about the irons suddenly stopped working with no visible reason. The reason is simple - the spring turned into rusty dust.

Google Search for "Rowenta DE480 Rust"


Tha funny fact is - we also got a very cheap $10 iron about 10 years ago and it still works just fine. Comparing to this $80+ junk... I have no more comments to the quality of this more expensive iron.