I'm trying to help my parents resolve some weird issues with their Whirlpool electric self-cleaning oven, model #GBD277PDQ1. Twice now, they report that while trying to cook something the oven has gotten itself into self-cleaning mode and they couldn't find any way to turn it off. Furthermore, the electronic door lock prevented them from opening the door. The first time this happened (about 1 1/2 yrs ago), things got so bad that the oven overheated itself and severely burned all the food inside before they turned it off at the breaker. They wound up with a $600+ repair bill to replace the Control Assembly, Thermo Control, and Thermostat. It's unclear which if any of these parts were secondary failures due to the overheating and smoke.
The second time around, which I witnessed this evening, the oven again got stuck on self clean. We tried repeatedly to stop it with the OFF button. The control display indicated 'Cool' and kept the door locked. This makes sense - that it wouldn't let you open the door until the oven cooled down to a safe temperature - except that we're pretty sure that the heating elements continued to stay on (we saw the glow). Before creating another charred food fiasco, we switched off the breaker. After some time without power, the oven eventually cooled and unlocked the door. Now, the control unit seems to come up in a 'clean' state, with only the time showing and no indication of a clean cycle or oven on in any capacity, BUT the top heating elements immediately come on and don't seem to respond to anything from the control panel. We can't get the darn things to turn off. So we've disabled the oven at the breaker box and can't use it until we figure this out.
Needless to say, my parents are loathe to go through another $600 repair and are very frustrated. We need to either get Whirlpool to address this issue on their dime, figure out how to repair it ourselves for a more reasonable cost, or shop for a new oven entirely.
Any advice would be most appreciated!
Dan