How I Fixed My Wife's Oven for Less Than $35 Buck$

"It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project."
- Napoleon Hill -

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"If Mama ain't happy..."

Well, you husbands out there probably know how the rest of that saying goes. If you don't, you're no doubt from another planet, or have never been married.

Nothin' says lovin', like fixin' Mama's oven...
Image courtesy of Taylor Grote and http://unsplash.com

"The oven's not working right."

Being an inventor and engineer, my wife ought to be able to expect me to be capable of dealing with simple issues like this, right?

My first step was to dismantle the thing. Easy peasy, right?

Turns out that just pulling the oven out of its place in the counter initiates an all-day job.

Nevertheless, I did my due-diligence, checked out the temperature sensor (proper resistance, check!), the heating element (works just fine, check!), and the internal wiring.

Checking the wiring, I discovered that power wires in one of the connectors had heated up and burned the surrounding area.

"Voila!" I thought, "This is going to do it."

I spliced the offending wires with some wire nuts, and put it all back together.

I thought for sure I had solved the problem. We're back to the "Happy Housewife's Kitchen," right?

Happy Housewife Kitchen Scene
Image courtesy of Oberholster Venita and http://pixabay.com

Nope.

The wife tells me that it still isn't heating up as fast as it ought to, it's going over-temperature, and that it isn't at all repeatable or reliable.

That pretty much leaves the controller board, or some weird interaction between the control board and the temperature sensor. Do we risk investing in a new controller, only to find out that it doesn't work? What to do?

Prices for oven parts are obscene.

$30.00 for a temperature sensor?
$189.18 for the control board?
$6.44 for a screw?

Can you say, "I'm screwed?"

These prices probably rule because every last oven is different, more of a "style statement" than a precision device for cooking.

After much pain and agonizing, and not a little side commentary from my wife... ("Why is it that you can fix everybody else's stuff, but not mine?")

I had a stroke of insight out of the blue. No, not out of the blue; I'm pretty sure it was an answer to a handyman husband's desperate prayers. I figured out how to get the oven working.

Oven - a recent source of my pain.
Original image by @creatr

How did I do it?

Talk about "thinking outside the box," this is literally that. I couldn't afford the Sears Kenmore brand controller, so I went to Amazon and found an off-the-shelf industrial PID temperature controller. that would do the job.

For less than $35, delivered, I got everything you can see at that link; a slick little electronic temperature controller, a thermocouple with a plenty-long lead, a 40 amp solid state relay, and a heat-sink for the relay.

I took the oven out—for what I hope will be one, last time—and installed the 40 amp, solid-state relay between the incoming 240 volt mains and the oven heating element. I used a few odds and ends that I had on hand—some wire, a few wire nuts, and a switch—and hooked it all together, using the simple diagram on the side of the PID controller as a guide.

Thinking outside the box.
Original image by @creatr

It's not a perfect fix.

It's actually kind of a hack job, but I needed to get it done to "take the pressure off" if you know what I mean...

If I were doing it again, I might add a fuse or two. As it is, I'm relying on our household circuit breaker in case of a short circuit. I would also investigate incorporating some of the other existing oven components as part of the "fix," but I simply bypassed them all because they were all suspect in the oven's bad behavior to begin with.

Trusty Fluke Multimeter... Never leave home without it.
Image courtesy of brianmv28 and http://pixabay.com

I'm waiting for the wife to try it.

Well, she did sit down last night and watch the temperature overshoot 350 degrees by about forty degrees F or so...

"But, honey, all thermostat circuits overshoot..."

Hmmm... some apparent skepticism...

"Dear, the PID controller will actually learn how control it better over time..."

No comment.

"When it drops back to 350 degrees, it will start holding that better."

Whew! Thank God!

It did, and—more importantly— the wife saw that it did.

Well, as long as the first cake she bakes comes out OK... We shall see!

Meanwhile, the moral of this tale is simple:

There's more than one way to skin Schrödinger's cat...

Just think "outside the box."

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~FIN~

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