Hi fellow Hiveians,
Today I wanted to share some pictures of how I fixed my electric oven the other day!
Fixing things is one of my passions. I have been doing it for decades at this point in one aspect or another. The most recent iteration of fixing something is the electric oven that we have in our house. Now I'm not at all a fan of electric ovens for many reasons, one of the primary ones is that it's not an efficient way to cook things compared to gas but we are dealing with what we have right now, and this is it.
About a week or more ago, my wife was trying to cook something in the oven. She had left it on but when I went back to check it, sadly nothing had happened. The oven said it was trying to preheat but it wasn't working. What was the deal? I unplugged it and plugged it back in and it kind of worked, so I left it. A few days later, same thing but this time nothing worked and it was officially busted. Now granted, the oven does have a top rack as well, which does some of the heating but most of it is the bottom rack.
I bought the part online after watching a video, and determining what the oven that we have is, and it came in finally. I had the little man, my little helper for any of these jobs, ready to go!
So reading online, this is a fairly common issue to occur. What happens is most of the time, some part of the bottom piece breaks. This is called the "heating element" and it's the same thing on a toaster basically. Just a metal coil that has a wire running through it and it heats up quite a bit. It wasn't heating and the most common cause of that is a break somewhere, with the second most common thing being something with the rheostat but I wasn't going to mess with that yet. The rheostat is basically what controls the voltage going into the heating element and it is a candidate but a less likely one.
Looking around the interior of the oven, I was first glad that I happened to clean it a few months ago lol. It was kind of gross and filled with old crap from the cooking we've done in it over the years. Thinking back - the oven is indeed 6 years old so it's really not too bad that the heating element lasted that long - it's a fairly decent amount of time considering how often we use the thing! Time to dismantle the thing though and get the broken thing out. I used a screw driver to get the bolt off, it's one of the bolts that's the right size from the screw drivers that have detachable bits - I don't know the exact measurement but I think it's 3/8ths nut. I took the bolts out and it slides forward into the oven.
When I moved the thing - that's when I noticed the problem! The heating element was definitely the issue here. You can see that it cracked and tore, creating a fault in the electrical current that runs through the thing. I was glad that I saw it, which made me feel better that I found the root cause of the issue. I would've felt a little hesitant with the whole thing if the heating element looked like it was in great shape. It took a beating though over the years and this isn't surprising at all.
One of the things that I was surprised about was that the connectors for the new heating element came bent. They weren't just in a different angle but an extremely awkward angle that didn't really make sense to me. I wasn't sure if I should but I straightened the things out because that's how the old heating element was. I hope I didn't break them by doing that LOL but it didn't seem like it. I did get a decent look at the stuff inside - it looks like it's ceramic coating the wire, and on the outside of the ceramic is the metal heating element. Pretty nifty stuff!
I got the connectors straightened out and hooked them back up. This was how I found them when I opened the thing up so I made sure to get them in the same position that they came out in. When I said that the connectors being bent in a strange way was confusing - this is why. If I had left the connectors the way they delivered it out of the box, they would be pointing straight up towards the ceiling instead of straight back to the wall. I think that would've been a pain in the ass to get back into place and secured, so I'm glad that I straightened the things out.
I then screwed it back into the wall of the oven, plugged it in and gave it a test! It thankfully heated up but it did give off a fair bit of smoke which was unfortunate, as my son hates the smell of smoke hahaha he is traumatized by the smoke detectors.
The repair job here cost me 30$ and saved me from having to buy a 650$ brand new oven! I am fucking thankful for the ability to look at a problem and find a solution instead of just throwing in the towel and buying a new one. This has saved us quite a bit of money but it's also helped me empower my son by showing him how you do things!
-CmplXty. Real human written content, never AI.
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