Slow heating oven

Never known a fan oven with more than one main element (for fan heating).

Tim

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My daughter’s fan oven takes an absolute age to get up to temperature and I suspect just can’t get close to what it should do.

I’m curious as to what kind of fault could cause very slow heating. I find myself repeated turning it down to see what (indicated) temperature it’s reached which confirms that it is slowly heating up.

Sorry I can’t tell you the brand but the control knob has multiple pointless and cryptic symbols. Does that help? ;-)

Possibly a NEFF if this is anything to go by.

Tim

Without knowing the temperature it can get to, and the status of whether the element is powered, usually when a tell-tale light is illuminated it's impossible to tell.

Is this in fan mode, conventional mode, or what?

One of the oven elements has failed?

Ours (NEFF) has the facility for "rapid Fan heat up". I would assume a second element comes into use.

More likely it has more than one element only one of which is working

You might remember some light bulbs, incandescent ones, the filament would get thin at end of life. The bulb would operate dimmer, because it could not draw the rated power any more from the supply.

If the heating element has thinned out, that could account for a slower heating effect.

If you had a Kill-A-Watt meter, you could (very temporarily) put the device on the meter, and see whether the measured power, is "ballpark close" to the value on the tin. Or, whether it is off by quite a bit. The shunt resistor in the meter, cannot take large currents for very long, without getting very hot itself.

Since an oven-like device is resistive and not a reactive load, you can use a clamp-on AC ammeter onto a cheater cord and measure the current flow that way. That's if you happen to have a clamp-on meter and not a Kill-A-Watt meter.

In a pinch, if you have a Smart Meter, you can alternate between oven on and oven off, and check the delta via the register on the interface. But that's only useful, if the Smart Meter is conveniently close to where you are working. Or, maybe you can station a helper, next to it to write down the numbers.

Paul

Does it use more than one element and one has failed?

Depends what you mean by "an absolute age to get up to temperature".

My Neff Oven takes 8 minutes to get to 200°C.

So I bought a £20 Air-Fryer.

So, lightning speed by comparison. ;-). After half an hour it might manage

Tim

Is the fan actually running?

That's possible. I would guess, in descending ordee of likelihood:

1. One element of two open circuit
2. Element gone 'dim'
3. Very leaky door seal

Seems like the thermostat is working if you can turn it down and hear it click off. Can ground truth with some bread - won't brown at 140.

It may be hardwired but a clamp meter should handle that.

Luckily our smart meters have a portable In Home Display for this.

Theo

Also, some have an N pulses per kilowatt-Hour LED. That's a much faster technique. Not least because, my smart only reads to the unit - no decimal digits any more!

Or, if you have the old spinning disc type meter, just time how many seconds it takes for the paint blob to recur. With mine, dividing the seconds into 21,600 gives the power in watts.

My (non fan) Lamona has a switch for top, bottom and both elements. My old (similar) oven took 20 minutes to heat up to 180 C; it should take about ten minutes, so I assume one of the elements had failed. I suppose I could have checked that by switching to top or bottom.

Why not put the display in kW mode and just read the power directly?

I assume all smart meter displays can do that? We were assuming a smart meter IHD.

nib

I get a bar chart with 30 second updates with my smart meter, plus app.

I'd love to know how to do this on an Octopus GEO IHD. It came with no instructions so I've trawled through the IHD's options and can not find any way to read the meters.

On my Octopus GEO IHD, that bargraph is not calibrated, except for the greatest hour bar.

So, no substitute for a conventional meter reading.