Runaway Oven
Last Thursday I was home and had decided on fish for lunch, so oven was heated to temperature, the fish put in to bake, and a timer set. Well before the timer was to go off, I heard a series of beeps. They then repeated. Uh oh. Something wasn't right. I went to investigate and the oven's display showed an error code rather than a time. I stopped the timer, and pulled the fish from the oven - the edges of the coating were already charred. And the hot-pad stuck a bit to the pan. Things were smoky, too. The oven was much hotter than it should have been. How hot? No idea. I aimed an IR thermometer at the open oven and it simply read 'HI' - too high for it give me a number.
And I tried to turn it off. Nothing. The controls seemed not to work. And the smoke detector (which is not in the kitchen, to avoid excessive alarms from milder cooking issues) went off. So I had that to deal with. I pulled the battery from the detector so it wouldn't annoy me or wake Jay as I dealt with things. I wound up turning the oven off by flipping the breaker. We suspect it might have gone into the cleaning cycle temperature regime, though thankfully without locking the oven door.
Then, with just-barely salvaged lunch, I looked up error codes. Crud. It was "replace logic board" - if it didn't go away. A while later Jay woke up and wondered about the smoky smell. I explained what had happened, and he looked at the paperwork in a bag taped to the rear of the oven (up by the controls, so fairly cool). The code also indicated a runaway condition and the recommendation was: Turn the oven off by cutting power, letting it sit a while, and turning it on again. If the code reappeared, it would time to call for service. If not, then things should be OK.
When I reapplied power, the code didn't show up. I set the clock, and later ran the oven up to the temperature I had set for the fish, and set the timer again. And I stayed in the kitchen to monitor things. The oven stayed at the right temperature, the timer went off, and I shut the oven off. All seemed well, but I am still a bit leery. If something happens once, it can happen again.
We've used it a few times since, and things have gone as they should. Still, I'm a bit leery.