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Earlier I mentioned that the stove doesn't work. This evening we took it apart.
We took out the burners and tested as much as we could with a multimeter. Our major finding was that the previous owners used this thing as a grill A LOT and never ever opened it to clean. I used this opportunity to scrub the bejesus out of a lot of it.
Anyway, the problem we've seen is this: when any of the burner controls are turned on, the "caution, it's hot" light will illuminate and that's it. The burners stay cold. We determined that the modules themselves were fine - they are of a very simple design, too, so we could quickly tell they were fine.
Next we found how to take the control unit facing off. Wow, that's a lot of wires... and a heck of a lot of grease. Sadly, the complexity has so far defeated us. We're trying to figure out, given a multimeter and a broken stove, how the thing should once have worked. There are no wiring diagrams available on the net. The stove manual, which of course we still have, is not very detailed and says only to install the stove "in accordance with local codes".
We got as far as trying to remove the top facing before we realized that was probably the only thing holding the guts of the stove up, so we sheepishly put a whole bunch of screws back in.
More on this later, I hope.
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| Interior Wiring |
We took out the burners and tested as much as we could with a multimeter. Our major finding was that the previous owners used this thing as a grill A LOT and never ever opened it to clean. I used this opportunity to scrub the bejesus out of a lot of it.
Anyway, the problem we've seen is this: when any of the burner controls are turned on, the "caution, it's hot" light will illuminate and that's it. The burners stay cold. We determined that the modules themselves were fine - they are of a very simple design, too, so we could quickly tell they were fine.
Next we found how to take the control unit facing off. Wow, that's a lot of wires... and a heck of a lot of grease. Sadly, the complexity has so far defeated us. We're trying to figure out, given a multimeter and a broken stove, how the thing should once have worked. There are no wiring diagrams available on the net. The stove manual, which of course we still have, is not very detailed and says only to install the stove "in accordance with local codes".
We got as far as trying to remove the top facing before we realized that was probably the only thing holding the guts of the stove up, so we sheepishly put a whole bunch of screws back in.
More on this later, I hope.
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Thanksgiving masacree!
Turns out that the oven was (correctly) wired across two phases, and that one phase was gone (out at the pole.) Engaging the thermostat completed a circuit through the oven to power the streetlight (which was on the "dead" phase.) (I know a similar, earlier story of a laundry dryer having similar effect - house lights came on dimly when the dryer was heating, off otherwise... in that case, a neighbor had apparently backed into the power junction box coming into the house and cracked one of the feeds...)
So, I don't know if this *helps* you at all, but yes, losing a phase is entirely possible. It occurs to me that the circuit breakers I've seen for this are usually a ganged pair (so when one trips it mechanically throws the other one); so you *could* conceivable have lost "half" a breaker - I'd probably try flipping it off and then on again and checking the line with a meter, though I'd then leave it *off* because
The risky scenario is that if the breaker blew because a squirrel ate through one line and shorted it... it may still be shorted and if the (possibly damaged) breaker doesn't reopen fast enough, it could catch fire. That's the reason you probably want to leave it to a (licensed but more importantly insured) electrician...
Re: Thanksgiving masacree!
Okay, now THAT'S good correlative reasoning -- and a darned funny story, too, from the safe "distance" of the future!
And yeah, we have a ganged breaker pair on this one. We've turned the breaker off and on numerous times; whatever's going on, both sides of the breaker are perfectly happy with it. Given the voltages I've seen, this makes me think the failure is out past the breaker box toward the street. Anything inboard of that should be making the breaker very unhappy.
Electrician is scheduled to arrive in nine hours. :)