No joke.
Before the key hit the doorlock after after I got home from my Thursday morning meeting, I could hear an alarm frantically chiming somewhere inside the house. WTF? Didn’t sound like a smoke alarm. I fly in the door.
Takes a minute or two to find the screaming alarm’s source: the oven. Takes some more time to find the dog, who’s cowering in the back of the house.
I can’t tell why the oven is hollering. It’s flashing an error message on its little electronic control pad: F 7. Very meaningful. I hit “Off/Cancel” and it stops. Thirty seconds later, it starts up again.
Call the appliance repair company. Answering lady suggests throwing the breaker switch. Fortunately, the stovetop, having been switched from electric to gas, is no longer on the same circuit as the oven, so the only appliance that’s shut off by this maneuver is the hysterical oven. Forthwith, she sends a repair dude.
Repair Dude arrives in something less than 45 minutes. He studies the thing and then opines that it needs a new control board thingie. Motherboard. Whatever it is that electronic ovens have. And he says that the reason it’s busted is that the self-cleaning cycle is too hot for the electronics in such an appliance, and sooner or later if you run the self-clean it will burn out the controls. I say it’s been months since I ran it; most recently I had the broiler on, a couple of days ago. He says it doesn’t matter; inevitably this piece of hardware will crash, and that is the cause. You should never, he emphasizes, run the self-cleaning cycle on an oven.
Of course not. Why would you own a self-cleaning oven if you intended to use the self-cleaning feature?
He says replacing it will cost something over $400 (pretty close to $500, actually). Replacing the double oven unit: about $2600.
I say I’m unemployed. And besides, the control panel thingie was replaced (by a different company) not very long ago.
He says (incredulously), well, didn’t the guy who installed it tell you never to run the self-clean cycle? These things can heat up to 800 or 900 degrees! Get yourself some Easy-Off and read and follow the directions.
I say, I have paid my dues and I am never cleaning another oven or defrosting another refrigerator.
He laughs, being soi-même a man d’un certain âge. Then he says, well, in that case, here’s how to make it self-clean without self-immolating: Set the oven temp to 500 degrees. Leave it on about 45 minutes. Then come back, turn it off, let it cool down, and just wipe the oven out. It works just about as well as running the self-clean cycle.
Is he right? Apparently so: there’s a class-action lawsuit against Whirlpool, maker of the Kenmore oven that’s in my kitchen.
So that’s pretty amusing: Basically, today we manufacture self-cleaning ovens that are just for pretty.
The breaker switch for the oven is now permanently turned to “off,” and the oven has been reduced to new cupboard space. After changing out the doors and window, I have no money to fix the thing, and won’t for at least three or four more months. The painter, who’s set to show up right after summer class ends, will clean out my short-term indulgence fund, and long-term savings have been so reduced that I will run out of living money on November 1, 2012. I expect not to repair the oven until I’m ready to move out of the house, which could be quite some time. With any luck.
Thank God I had enough sense to buy a propane grill!
Wow when it rains it pours in your house!
@ Evan: LOL! Ain’t it the truth! And it never fails in the summer, when I have zero income.
I’ve never had a self cleaning oven but I do profess that I use the ‘warm stuff up’ and then wipe it down strategy to clean just about everything. BBQ grills, the Foreman grill, the pancake gridle, and yes the oven. We had one instance where a cheesecake dripped over during baking. Wasn’t a big deal then but the next time we went to use the oven it smelled as if the gates of Hell had opened up and came right out the oven. Plus, the genius builders put the smoke alarm about three feet away from the oven so I surely made some firefighter’s head explode when I disconnected that. I kept the oven warm and cleaned it out and it came out just fine, and in probably a lot less time (and with a lot less gas) than it would have running a cleaning cycle.
I would definitely look into a class action lawsuit and I’d also call Whirlpool directly and see if they’ll do anything for you. If it’s a design defect and they know it, they might cover you out of warranty, especially if you mention your ‘well read blog that shows up high in search engines’.
Wow! Now you have me searching for details on my range to see if there are issues with the self-cleaning cycle. So far it looks good. I’ve used self-clean twice on the Jenn-Air range that I’ve had since 2009 and haven’t had any problems. I’ll keep an eye on things, though.
@ Linda: It’s not the range, it’s the heat and the amount of time the oven’s control panel is exposed to the heat. Apparently many (if not all) models will die when you apply the self-cleaning cycle.
And you wanna really scare yourself? Holy mackerel! Google “oven exploding glass”…
You could probably buy a new basic stove/oven for less than the repair. HomeDepot had clearance appliances another 20% off today here.
@ Barb: I wish!! It’s a wall oven. Wall ovens are stupidly expensive to begin with, and then just to gild that lily, Satan and Proserpine installed a double oven! They come as a unit–you can’t replace just one!
Ohhhhhhh god. A middling price for a double wall oven is indeed around $2600.
However, I happen to know that S&P bought the cabinets at Home Depot (along with everything else, except for the tiles, which they purchased from one of the sleaziest tile retailers in the city). What I’m gonna do, whenever enough time and energy present themselves, is see if I can get HD (or a skilled finish carpenter, one of whom I happen to know…) to come up with a pair of doors and a couple of shelves for that space, thereby creating some much needed new kitchen storage, and then get a single oven for the top space. That would be SO much preferable!