Here are some common reasons why your oven may be faulty and how best to avoid an oven repair:
1. Do not use it as a heating appliance! Obvious as it might be, a lot of people use the oven as a heating device, much to their peril. This is rarely so in a hot and humid country like Singapore. However, in places with extremely cold weathers, such cases may occur. At best, it could cause some lasting damage to the oven element since the heat emanated inwards from the coils doesn’t circulate well within a residential unit. At worst, it could contribute to dangerously high amounts of carbon monoxide emission causing a very silent death!
2. Avoid aluminum foil linings – Sure, you don’t like the tedious cleaning chore of half burnt crumbs and food droppings sticking to the oven surface. However, the highly reflective foils can cause too much or too little heat to be reflected at different angles, causing the food to overcook or undercook at random. Besides, they damage the drip pans, or may even melt with heat below the coils and cause fires.
3. Keep checking the oven gasket – Periodically checking the oven gasket ensures that there isn’t any dissipation leakage or faulty oven doors. A clear sign is escaping vapors condensing on the oven door or “oven sweat” as they call it. Instead of a cheap oven repair, you may end up causing lasting damage to your oven.
4. Self-cleaning feature vs manual cleaning – This remains a polarizing view between experts. However, we insist it is better to manually clean up spills, the drip pan, and any food splatters instead of putting the oven through the self-cleaning cycle. In particular, determining the optimum time, or intensity for self-cleaning cycles is tricky, it may end up putting the oven through extreme conditions (temperature up to 800F) for longer than expected, causing coils to melt, or electrical fires. This results in unnecessary oven repair services, wasting both your time and money.
5. Do not clean the oven dials or coils – Counter-intuitive as it may seem, cleaning the dials or coils is not required. It can even damage your oven. The dials and coils are designed with compounds meant to withstand high thermal variations. Cleaning with regular chemical liquids or wipes may leave residue, alcohol trace, or mechanical damage, causing unequal heating. Occasionally, the cleaning liquid may get inside the electrical switches and short-circuit it. When such incidents happens, you will definitely need to engage an oven repair service.
