my ge oven comes on for abot 30 mins then goes off if you slam the door it will come back on what could cause this

[ectofix]

You have posted your question within a forum that only addresses COMMERCIAL cooking equipment.  GE hasn’t made commercial cooking equipment for decades, so I must assume your oven is a residential appliance.

 

AH!  I see you said wall oven…so it’s residential then.

 

Nevertheless, if slamming the oven door is affecting whether it heats or not, then there’s something not right ELECTRICALLY (which I’m sure you have surmised).  Could be a failing heat relay/connection on a control board, a sensor with a poor connection, a heating element connection or internal wiring connection that’s barely hanging in there…or a number of other possibilities.

 

Your problem cannot be diagnosed over the internet.  Additionally, the limited info you have provided doesn’t zoom in on the actual problem, since there are too many possible electrical “problems” that can be affected by slamming the door.

 

You need to call a repair company to look at it.

[fixbear]

You also never said whether it was gas or electric.  If gas it will probably be the glow unit having the wrong resistance for the safety valve.  The main gas valve is in series with the glow unit and senses the current flow of the glow unit.  As the glow unit heats up the current flow changes and lowers till at the right temp to open the valve.  If you have a voltage problem with supply to the oven it will also be intermittent.  

 

  Electric will probably a loose connection on the element.  Bin there, done that.  GE’s are known for both.

 

Either case, it requires a service tech with the proper troubleshooting tools to diagnose and repair.

[ectofix]

A story that’s sorta related to this that I’ll share:

 

While I make my living repairing commercial cooking stuff, I’ve repaired only a handful of residential appliances over the years.  I’ll do this for ME…or for family/close friends who ask me to.

 

Anyway.  My own GE range recently needed fixing.  It looks like this:

 

 

[john]

Sounds like Underwriters Laboratories may have overlooked something.

 

So, I imagine you used wire with a higher maximum ampacity to correct this problem?

 

Outside of the technical arena, I really can’t stand those electric coil burners.Gotta go with gas.

[fixbear]

Even though my wife worked at GE and we got a huge discount on their appliances, I still bought other brands for quality and longevity.  Ou untill 1988, GE ranges where one of the best out there.. Then they got real cheap and a constant problem.  My main is a 1976 JCB500 that I have repaired and keep. Wife of course wants to replace it. But it is modular and has cartridges for Grill, griddle and burners.  Replaces several top burners (10 to 12) and sockets.  Two oven elements,  and rewired one burner cartridge.  Timer is done. I also have a perlic 24 inch wall oven from 1955. The only thing I can find that I could replace it with due to the features it has and the way I use it is a 2 grand Kitchenaid.. It will hold 120F for warming or making Jerky. They both get lots of use.

 

Let’s get back to the insides.  The wire used inside a oven is a high temp wire that is a very pure copper that is silver coated. Not very cheap to buy. But smaller gauges are rated for some higher amps.  I have never seen less than 12 gauge in a domestic electric oven. 14 gauge TFE nickle coated is rated at 59 amps.and 452 F single.  I personally don’t agree with minimal design, but that is today’s way.  But as I had referred to in a much earlier post on wire crimping, It would need a nickel coated bare connector that is properly crimped to carry that. And we know what happens to a high resistance terminal under high load.

[ectofix]

John B (Parts Town Admin) wrote:

 

Sounds like Underwriters Laboratories may have overlooked something.

 

So, I imagine you used wire with a higher maximum ampacity to correct this problem?

 

Outside of the technical arena, I really can’t stand those electric coil burners.Gotta go with gas.

Actually…NO – I didn’t.  I only upsized to 12 AWG – and only to the extent of my repair.  For me to make it totally “right” (in my eyes), I’d of had to rewire the whole friggin’ thing.

 

As the sole occupant within this 1150 sq.ft., 2 bed, 1 1/2 bath house in the country (call it a “cabin” for most) that I moved into six months ago, I don’t anticipate that my usage patterns of the stove will come remotely close to rivaling those of a grandma who would use hers to prepare a Thanksgiving feast for EVERYBODY in the family coming over.  So…I merely got it going again to a level which suits my needs.

 

REGARDING GAS:  I don’t have NG gas here in this remote area, but I whole-heartedly agree with you.  Gas has definite advantages for use in a stove and oven.  However, having my own LP tank outside isn’t presently a viable alternative.  Been there and done that.  Maybe someday.

 

FWIW, I have no HVAC system in this house either.  I’m under a canopy of some VERY large (nearly 100′) Yellow Poplar trees.  Just a window-shaker AC (main areas), a portable AC (for my bedroom) and baseboard heaters in each room.  I have my eyes on mini-split systems for replacing all that, though.

[ectofix]

fixbear wrote:

 

…we know what happens to a high resistance terminal under high load.

Which that WAS a problem.  However, the actual reason that I tore into it was due to the oven not working and ended up that ITS problem was due to the failure of the electronic control (for the oven).  The overheated wiring issue was incidental to my exploration of the problem.

 

Here’s what was aggravating:  The electronic control for this $400 range was $100.  That’s reasonable, so I ordered it.  W-e-l-l…that part didn’t include the adhesively-applied, touch-pad face that has all the aesthetically-acceptable-looking labeling for what buttons were for what.

 

I didn’t know THAT until I got the oven control module to the house.

 

So I had to “pry” the old facing from the old control module in order to apply to the new one in order to install it and get my oven working again.  Subsequently, some of the adhesive facing’s white background-part didn’t survive that extraction and resulted in THIS mess:

 

I researched the price of purchasing that stupid overlay and found that it’s MORE EXPENSIVE THAN THE CONTROL MODULE!.

 

For ME?  Not worth the price.  I PERSONALLY can live with it like it is.

 

Which brings forth…yet ANOTHER story:

 

RECENTLY, a friend of mine, whose oven had quit, had found that its oven element was split in two.  Easy enough.  Needs a new element.

 

He had attempted to remove the oven element from the front.  He thought the oven element was like a modern STOVE element – where you simply tilt it up, pull it loose…then plug in a new one.  W-E-L-L…this proved to be NOT be so simple, so he called me wanting to know what to do next.

 

After we’d conversed, I found out that he hadn’t even unplugged the range or shut off the circuit breaker to it yet.  I subsequently explained what he was dealing with and that I should probably come over there to replace the oven element.   

 

Additionally, it turns out that his range was a merely a fanciful GE stainless-steel variation of a unit very similar to mine.

 

Consequently, I gave him info on who to contact for a new oven heating element.  With that, he then expressed some certainty that HE could go buy it and replace it from inside the oven himself – INSTEAD of pulling the range out and removing the back panel for access.  I said “NO!  I’ll do that!”  Which eventually…I did.  I wanted to specifically look for the same problems which I’d discovered in my own GE range.

 

I arrived some days later after he’d informed me that he had a replacement heating element.  The rest of this I found comical:

 

What I found to be FUNNY?

His wife had scrubbed the dickens out of that stove in anticipation of my coming.  Yet, when I pulled it out from its cubby?  Uh…eeew!  Well…he chose to clean it up later on before his wife saw it. He’d presented to me every tool ( in his opinion) that he thought I would need – duly available to me upon the dining room table in order to complete this task for them.  It was typical collection of plastic-encased, kit-like, hand tools sorted out for DIY stuff….ya know.  The type which, when employed,  took him fifteen minutes to unscrew two meager 5/16 sheet-metal screws…which eventually lead him up to him calling me.

 

UH…no thanks, bud.  I brought my own tools to do this.

 

So, within a all of fifteen minutes, I had pulled the stove out, removed its back cover, pulled the old element connections loose (from the back), inserted the new element (from the front), made the connections (from the rear), did my visual inspection (from the rear), mounted the new element with the 5/16″ screws (from the front) and had re-installed the back cover.  Then I said “Okay, I’ve plugged it back in.  Let’s test it”.

 

He looked at me with a look of confusion (and with an adult beverage in his hand) and asked “So when are you gonna put the new heating element in”?

 

“It’s DONE, old friend!.  Let’s go ahead and test it so you can clean up behind there before your wife sees it”.

[fixbear]

got-a love our throw away society.

[john]

What’d your inspection come up with? Was the wiring on his stainless unit actually sufficient for the power draw, or had they simply not used it like “grandma on Thanksgiving?”

 

fixbear, I think most people would rather not be part of the throwaway society, but residential equipment can be manufactured with replacement in mind (putting it lightly here). As ectofix noted, the overlay for his electronic control cost more than the control module, and the less expensive module already cost 25% of a new unit!

 

And I think since this idea of “cheaply made” is not only sometimes true but also pervades our minds as a society, the general sense is “well, if X is broken, who knows what else is probably broken in here, let’s buy a new one.” 

 

If I had an old piece of equipment, I’d certainly try to save it instead of replacing it.

[fixbear]

believe me,  I would rather have a well built rebuild-able item than a throw away.  But corporate greed and dumb consumers are preventing that today.  Look at Maytag. and Amana.  Both made a good product only to be bought out by Westinghouse and repair parts tripled in one year. They also made you buy groups instead of parts so that say a bad bearing in a neptune washer.  You had to buy the whole drum at a whopping $956.00.  They purposely design it a 10 year life span for major appliances. 

 

And it’s not only appliance manufacturers.  Look what happened to Danfoss. They closed down a plant in Czechoslovakia with 3000 employees and moved all but 150 engineers in Germany to China.  Cheaper to make,  But a lot more failures. Not good when compressors only make a year.  Of coarse the warranty is only one year.