wiredfool

Mood: Calming Down.
Music: Burning Down the House (Talking Heads)

Well now. That was a nice little arc welding experiment in the oven just now. And me with a nicely heated stone and pretty well proofed bread. I was getting ready to stick a couple of loaves in, and I noticed quite a bright light from the bottom of the oven. Closer inspection told me that I didn’t really want to look directly at it. It was slowly spiraling the element fading in and out of view. Lots of sparks too. A couple of minutes after turning off the oven, I decided that I’d really rather have it stop. I wasn’t actually sure if it was an arc or just burning aluminum, but after putting a soaked cloth diaper on it and both not seeing it stop and half of the element still glowing red, I had Rose kill the breaker to the stove. That and the wet cloth stopped it. I was prepared to use the dry fire extinguisher, but I really didn’t want to coat the kitchen in the chemicals if I didn’t have to.

I know that we’ve fried the element, as it’s in a couple pieces. I suspect the controller’s dead, since it didn’t kill power to the element when I turned it off. And the bread is quite interrupted. Grrr. I wanted bread.

I doubt it’s going to be cheap to fix the controller, and I really don’t think that it’s going to be cheap to replace the whole stove.

Update — Replaced the main bake element, and things seem ok. The controller seems to work, the oven seems to heat up faster, and there’s no more scary arcing. For now anyway.