The Passage of Time

All in all, a decade shouldn't be too long in the lifetime of an appliance. At least, it seems like it shouldn't be. Back in 2014 when we ordered all the new appliances for the kitchen, I wouldn't have imagined that less than a decade later we'd be on our second microwave, the ice-maker would go kaput on the fridge, and the dishwasher would have to have its door springs replaced.

(Looks like I never blogged about the fridge: Basically the wiring harness goes through a pinch point by the hinge at the bottom of the freezer door. The repair guy said there was no official repair, but he did find a number of people with the same problem in his research. He tried splicing things together and it did work ... for about a week. We use silicone ice cube trays now. The dishwasher fix was pretty easy and handled as a recall; not a big deal at all, but still a pain in the butt. I also had to replace the rinse-aid door cover because the seal on it degraded.)

Now it's the oven's turn. A while back we noticed the top oven's thermostat was getting a bit inconsistent. Under 350°F it wouldn't only warm up to about 275°F. Above 350°F and it would be better, but not really accurate until around 430°F. A pain, but we worked around it mostly by using the bottom oven. This weekend, we ran a self-cleaning cycle on the bottom oven and then when C wanted to bake a cake last night discovered that it no longer was preheating.

We tried a few different modes and I checked to make sure it wasn't in Sabbath mode. I tried cutting power to reset things (that works for computers, right?). Nothing was working. So I called back in the repair guy. We'll see what he things on Thursday.

Update

So, a fairly simple fix. The regulator that determined when to open up the gas line for each oven had gone bad. Once he secured the parts, Shem had things working well pretty quickly (and we now have to unlearn the little adjustments we'd been making to compensate). He also noted that the spark module, which ignites the burners on the cooktop, seemed to be not working consistently for all five burners. Again, we have a workaround (good-ole red-top matches), but it looks like a fairly straightforward repair so I'll probably swap that out at some point.