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Stretching the Life Of Our Oven
I must apologize to my legions of devoted readers for the lack of posts over the past week. I have not been able to access my blog site due to some unspecified error in cyberspace. I called Bluehost and Comcast, and they both said that the problem was with AT&T. I didn’t even know they had anything to do with my blog, but apparently it’s a big complicated world wide web. Anyway, other people have still been able to get to my blog, but from both of the computers at our house, we could not access it. So today is a happy day, because my personal pathway to my blog is working again.Â
Last weekend, we went to see some friends for dinner, and I baked a pie to take along. During the baking process, I heard a pop and hiss noise coming from the oven (never a good sign, especially when you’re baking something to take to someone else’s house…) I waited for the noise to end, and peeked in the oven. The lower heating element had a spot that looked like it was on fire. I figured something must had dripped on it, but the pie seemed to be intact. The hot spot on the element receded, the pie turned out great, and I thought nothing else of it. Then on Sunday, I wanted to bake a casserole, so I set the oven to preheat. 30 minutes later, it still wasn’t ready, and upon further investigation, I realized that the heating element had actually burned itself out the day before - nothing had spilled on it, it had just come to the end of its life.Â
Our house is 21 years old, and I assume the stove is the same vintage. I love to cook and I use my stove every day. I would love a great new stove, maybe with a flat ceramic top, or a stainless steel model… I’ve looked at new ones a few times, but the $700+ price tags always made me remember that my current stove was working just fine. But now it was no longer working just fine. The though crossed my mind to get a new one. But instead I called around and found a store that carried oven parts. The new element cost us $35, and the stove is working just fine again (and it’s cleaner now, because I cleaned the inside while I had the element out). So alas, I still do not have a new stove. But I have a functional stove that should last us a few more years. And I did not go into any debt over the weekend. Right now, our emergency fund has $837 in it. I think I should get that a little higher before I go looking for a new stove.Â
[...] This has been quite a week for our appliances. On Monday, we had to replace the heating element in our oven, and today we had to get a new thermostat. I hope this pattern does not continue. We started having trouble with our thermostat/furnace last spring, just at the end of furnace season. Then summer came, and the A/C worked just fine, no thermostat troubles at all. In October, we turned on our furnace, and it seemed to be working well. But within a few weeks, we knew something was wrong. We have a programmable thermostat, but sometimes we noticed that the temp in the house would be below the programmed level, and the furnace would not be on. We found that banging on the thermostat seemed to help, although this did not seem like a feasible long term solution. We crawled into the furnace space under the house and fiddled with it. Turned out the doors were not mounted correctly, so the door switch wasn’t being pressed in all the way. Fixed that, and the furnace worked for a few days. Then the problem came back. My brother came out and cleaned all the connection points on the thermostat, and everything worked for another few days before it died again. Then my parents stopped by and my father found some faulty wiring in the power source to the furnace. He fixed it, and we had about 5 days of uneventful furnace function - we thought we had finally fixed all the problems. But yesterday, it died again. Just in time for the Blizzard of 2006. It started snowing yesterday morning, and stopped this morning, two feet of snow later. When we woke up this morning, we couldn’t get the furnace to come on at all, and the thermostat appeared to be dead. No amount of banging, poking, aluminum-foil-wrapping helped. It was 54 degrees in our house when I called Home Depot to see if they were open. Amazingly enough, they were (pretty much every non-essential business in the city was closed today). But our neighborhood was completely snowed in - the streets were covered in two feet of snow, and only the main streets had been plowed. [...]
December 22nd, 2006 at 1:09 am