I bought some No-Pudge Fudge Brownies at Claudia’s a couple weeks ago, and decided to make them for our trip to Canada this weekend. All they needed was a container of vanilla yogurt, mix ’em up, and throw ’em in the oven for a half hour. That I can do, no problem. Preheated the oven, stirred the powdered mix together with 6 ounces of vanilla yogurt, put it into a lubed-up pan, and opened the oven—
Why is only one little bit of the heating element glowing red? How odd.
I turned the oven off — I’m kind of skitchy with appliances that don’t do exactly what’s expected of them, especially when it involves electricity and lots of heat — and waited for the oven to cool again. I figured that maybe something funky had been spilled onto the heating element, and I could just clean it off and be on my brownie way.
So, once the oven was cool enough, I got a sponge (for lack of anything more abrasive) and got to work on cleaning the heating element. Carefully.
But apparently not carefully enough. Where the element looked like something had spilled on it and simply needed cleaned off, the element easily snapped in two like chalk.
Um… I think I broke it? Maybe it was already almost broken. At any rate, now we need a $35 – $40 part for our oven before I can a.) make brownies, which are now sitting raw in the refrigerator; or b.) test out any luau recipes. Oh, or c.) make any more tropical-scented candles.
So, why do I say “crisis averted,” when my oven doesn’t work now? If I hadn’t noticed the weirdness with the heating element, I could have set the oven on fire with my brownie-baking. As it is, we’ll just have to buy a part and either try installing it ourselves or pay someone to do it for us. We won’t have to buy a whole new oven, or a whole new kitchen.
Crisis averted.
That’s why you call me…don’t pay a repair guy.
As I just said on Twitter, before I saw your post, this happened to us about a month or so ago. However, it wasn’t that only half of it was glowing red, but that part of it had melted and was glowing white in the bottom of the stove.
I had already taken the part out about a year ago to have it tested to make sure it worked, as our oven had an issue cooking things correctly. The only thing to be careful of once you’ve unsecured the heating element pieces and pulled it out, so that when you disconnect the wires, they don’t go back into the wall of the oven. I used tape and it seemed to work fine.
With that said, I agree with Kris; it’s something that shouldn’t require a repair guy, and the longest wait will be finding the part. Best of luck!
I don’t really twitter, so I must be reading your mind. But I do have to say that the smell of fresh-cut grass still makes me feel like I’m back in corps, ready to run around with a horn because a man with a megaphone and a slurpee says so.
@Dan – Weird. 🙂 I’m planning to start the run-one-walk-three-minutes plan on Monday evening, so we’ll see if someone’s fresh-cut grass gets me thinking that I’m in running block again.
@Kris and @Sean – I ordered the part today from partselect.com, so it should show up this week. From what I’ve read, it’s fairly simple to install. The hardest part will be figuring out which breaker controls the stove. I’ll post an update once we get it in.