broiler element melted in friend's electric oven

[eLiu]

Hi guys,
We were preheating the electric oven at my friend's place. Suddenly there was a loud buzzing sound and a very bright light coming from inside the oven. It looked and sounded kind like an arc-welder, lol. We cut the power but the damage was done--there was a little piece of something on the oven 'floor', on fire. Not that cutting the power mattered--the clock was already off and after checking the breakers, we noted that the stove & oven breakers had both tripped. They're off now.

After it cooled down (and we brought in a bunch of fans & opened doors to vent the fumes), we looked inside and noticed that ~2-3cm chunk of the broiler element was missing. In fact it had melted and fallen down, releasing lots of smoke in the process. I'm guessing it's fused to the bottom of the oven now.


Cliff's:
preheated oven
broiler element melted, tripping the breakers
melted piece of broiler element now stuck to bottom of oven
seems like some kind of bad electrical fail?

So my questions are:
1) How hard is it going to be to remove the melted piece? Will the oven still be usable?
2) Are the fumes from that melted element poisonous?
3) Is this failure like just parts wearing out? Or is there probably some kind of electrical problem with the oven? Surely it's the latter... I can't imagine parts wearing out = catastrophic failure, lol
4) In short is this something we can fix or do we need to call a repairman? I'm guessing the latter.

Thanks,
-Eric

 

[Glitchny]

1) dunno
2) doubt it
3) Not sure how common it is, but it happened to my friends oven (same thing with the element glowing white and buzzing) on new years eve a few years ago. IIRC it wasn't a big deal for him to get it fixed, not sure how he went about fixing it though.
4) Probably call someone.

 

[PottedMeat]

You can definitely fix that. Get the model no. and look it up on one of those appliance repair pages. If you're lucky it's a standard part you can get from Lowes/Home Depot.

You should be able to just pull out the oven, disconnect the wiring for the element on the back, remove the element, put in new one.

The element was probably damaged by bits of food or there was a mfg defect.


I've had a bottom element do the same arc welding thing, was easy to replace.

 

[olds]

remove screw
replace element
cross fingers
turn it on

 

[Wyndru]

Yeah get the model of the oven, online there might even be instructions on how to fix it yourself. I changed mine a while back and I think it was only like $80 and not difficult at all to do. The repairman will charge you a lot more for the part and labor on top of that.

 

[Spikesoldier]

sounds like you had your own fukushima meltdown.

i know, im bad at 4/1 jokes

 

[waffleironhead]

I think your friend needs to move to a new house at this point.

 

[Anubis]

1) dunno
2) doubt it
3) Not sure how common it is, but it happened to my friends oven (same thing with the element glowing white and buzzing) on new years eve a few years ago. IIRC it wasn't a big deal for him to get it fixed, not sure how he went about fixing it though.
4) Probably call someone.

i asked Bob about it, he said he didn't fix it it just started working normally a few days later

 

[eLiu]

Cool, I figured replacing the element wouldn't be hard, but I was afraid there'd be some more severe electrical issues back there but that sounds like it won't be the case?

Also how do we remove the melted piece of heating element from the bottom of the oven? Should we just leave it there? Is there any risk of damaging the oven from just like aggressively chiseling at it/does it matter?

 

[twinrider1]

The main element of my oven caught fire once. At the time the part was cheap, under $20, and was almost as simple as a surface element to replace.

If I couldn't get that fused piece off with a paper towel I'd use a piece of wood or plastic to scrap it off. Stiff enough to scrape with but won't gouge the surface.

 

[alkemyst]

pics of oven?

 

[eLiu]

pics of oven?

too lazy, lol maybe tomorrow.

I think my friends want to call an electrician or something but it seems like the issue really isn't that bad. It just looked pretty awful when shit was going down, haha.

 

[Redfraggle]

An oven in an apt I was in did that to me once. Scared the hell out of me. You don't really expect to be cooking your dinner and suddenly hear zapping and seeing bright light coming out of your oven like a wormhole has opened up in there ya know?

 

[BoomerD]

An oven in an apt I was in did that to me once. Scared the hell out of me. You don't really expect to be cooking your dinner and suddenly hear zapping and seeing bright light coming out of your oven like a wormhole has opened up in there ya know?

No, buy if you're reasonably prepared, you can jump in and catch the wormhole before it disappears!

 

[zanejohnson]

how are radiation levels in and around the top and middle rack?

 

[BoomerD]

how are radiation levels in and around the top and middle rack?

That depends on how baked you are...you, of all people, should know this.

 

[AlienCraft]

What's for dinner now?