There's a war going on. No, not that one. I mean the war between me and my oven. You know what I'm talking about - like the war you had with your washing machine.
This has been a war of attrition, with great battles pitched to and fro over many score weeks (since we moved in, basically).
It has reached epic proportions recently, and perhaps I have delivered the definitive "death blow" in this latest campaign. It's not quite the "Car Kit Phenomenon," but close.
The biggest problem with this oven, and circa 1993 electric model from GE, has been its temperamental nature. Without fail, the oven would heat up, run for twenty or thirty minutes, and then go into "Locked Door" mode, shutting down the oven and . . . locking the door. As you can imagine, it made cooking difficult, to the point where I made the turkey in the BBQ last year and all other dishes were made stove top.
"Locked Door" is supposed to happen when you put the oven into self-cleaning mode to protect you from getting blasted with hot-air if you happened to be dumb enough to open it. Therefore, I assumed there was a problem with the electronic panel, getting a false positive somewhere that was triggering the behavior.
Step One was unplugging it from the 220v wall outlet.
After that obvious, yet critically important step, I changed the heat sensor in the oven. The good news is that it's only held in there with two Phillips screws and an electronic coupler, and after a quick trip to the local Sears I had the part in hand. The bad news was that the part costs $80, and when you test it with heat it becomes non-returnable, and it didn't fix the problem. Dang.
Next was opening up the panel. The whole top lifts up like a car hood and six screws later you're looking at all of the wiring. In fact, there was a little document in there with the schematics to the whole oven - take a look.
I saw where the yellow sensor wire was connected to the oven locking mechanism. I removed the wire and tested - didn't fix it. Actually, I noticed that having that wire disconnected put it into permanent "locked door" mode. Some kind of fail safe - damn you GE!
I reconnected the yellow wire and removed the blue wire going from a similar circuit to the locking motor - trouble. The wire connector snapped off, and again it was in permanent locked door mode. But this time I was hosed as I could not reconnect the wire. Oy. I broke out the soldering iron (by the way, you know you have really screwed up when you have to break out the soldering iron) and made a valiant attempt to reconnect it, but there was little metal left from the lock motor to solder. Hmmmm....
Since both the yellow and blue wires connected to the same circuit - what would happen if I just connected the blue wire to the yellow wire? Since I was facing a service call anyway, I connected them and found that it solved the permanent locked door mode. Great - now I was back to where I started!
Actually, not exactly. The oven now seemed to work fine but although the locked door mode was off. the door was still physically locked. Weird! Well, out came the pliers and I just unbolted the lock hook itself.
Now . . . wait for it . . . the oven works and the door is not locked! Has the war been won, or is this merely a substantial victory in battle?
Epilogue: I searched the web for someone that had this problem, they must be out there, but no write-up. Hopefully someone finds this and takes hope. Some serious caveats - always unplug your appliances before working on them. Also, no guarantees this process will work for you - likely it will result in something getting very broken. Finally, you could at least try a new sensor.
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Posted by: Jordan 1 | August 26, 2010 at 07:31 PM