oven turns itself on!!!

[mirage154]

stove has been working fine. Awoke to smoke alarm going off and oven on high. Igniter constantly lit and the oven on full blast. No amount of fiddling around with oven control affected it, finally just pulled plug on unit. That stopped it but this is scary! what if that had happened when we weren't home??? is this a normal occurence, that an oven and igniter just turns themselves on?? PLEASE respond to [e-mail] I don't check gmail to much.

KENMORE MODEL# 362.7516190 SERIAL # 5M174172P

[Winston]

Are you in the U.S.?

The CPSC would be interested in knowing about that.

--Winston

[ransley]

Oven has set clock?

[Dan Kuechle]

I think something similar may have happened to out Maytag oven. This is a US model that runs opposite polarity 110 vac to each side of the heating element to get 220 vac and has the oven body connected to the neutral and to earth ground. The problem is the cheep controller used for the heating element...it only switches one side of the element off, leaving the other side "hot". If something fails and a "ground" connection is made through the heating element supports, the heating element heats up, and in our case arcs and burns and smokes and can't be turned off unless you get to the other non-switched "hot" side by unplugging or flipping the circuit breaker. In our case this happened when the oven was on (just before trying to cook a big dinner for a bunch of guests - of coarse). A new heating element got the oven back to "normal".

Dan

[Stepfann King]

You have gremlins.

[JC]

"Stepfann King" wrote in message news:Xns9C529274574steffankinghatedbyO@193.202.122.128...

If only a wife...

Oh never mind, just wishful thinking.

[Michael Dobony]

Igniter implies a gas stove, not electric.