Fixing the Oven

A few weeks ago, I was happily cooking dinner when the power suddenly cut off. This was a bit of a shock, but it switched back on easily enough, and all seemed well. Then, one day last week, I was about to have pizza for dinner when it occurred to me that the oven was taking a really long time to heat up.

After Googling the problem, an easy explanation was found: the earlier power cut was caused by the heating element of the oven blowing, causing the problems I was then seeing. Fortunately, it seemed it was an easy (ish) DIY job to replace the part.

Last night, my game was cancelled, and so I found myself with an opportunity to do the job. And, in fairness, it was a pretty easy job, in all but two regards: it turned out that one of the screws fixing the old element in place was much tighter than the rest, and proved nigh-impossible to undo, and the three wires both proved not to be quite as long as promised and also to be rather less tightly connected to the element than I'd been led to expect - by the time I was ready to look at which connected where, two of the three had already slipped loose.

But it all turned out okay - I got the old element out, attached the wires to the new one, put the whole thing back together, and the tried the oven. And, sure enough, it did indeed heat up. Huzzah!

It's just unfortunate that that job appears to have taken me the whole of summer to complete.