Smeg range cooker tripped electrics, looks burnt on inspection

[Lizlimpet]

Hi All,

My 1 and half Smeg cooker recently tripped when using the main fan oven. It was during quite a long period of cooking a roast. We reset the electrics and continued without issue. A few days later it happened again and now it does not get hot.

The smaller oven still works.

I assumed the element had gone so this evening took the back off ready to remove the element. On inspection the element does not look like blown ones I've seen on my previous oven, it looks quite good. However, the back of the oven has about three places where either the wires, or the area around the wires looks burned. One of these is where the element connects to the wiring. Another is where the wires look like they connect tot he grill element - I have a feeling we have used this since the fan oven stopped working without issue?!

Obviously this looks like a slightly more serious issue than I initially thought!

I do recall that the oven was quite a harsh heater, and so now I'm wondering whether the thermostat had gone and it's burned out, or similar?

We inherited this cooker when we bought our house and haven't looked at the back before, so don't know if any of these burn marks are old...

Any advice recommended, although we are assuming that we will need to get someone in at this point. Any advice on that??

Many thanks in advance,

Liz

 

[brianmoooore]

Burn marks are just smoke and burnt fat deposits that have leaked through from the oven.
There's something up with the connection to the oven element, just to the left of the fan motor. From what I can make out from the pic, it looks like a developing problem for the future, but it may be the cause now.
Appliance electrics are often internally switched in the neutral rather than the live, so the various element connections may be live when they are switched off at the relevant control, so it is extremely dangerous to have the cooker isolator turned on while the back is off. A customer of mine was electrocuted some years ago because she didn't understand this.

 

[Lizlimpet]

Hi Brian, thank you so much for your reply. I read it at the time and thought I'd thanked you, so I'm sorry that i actually hadn't. I did have the isolator off, but thank you for checking. I didn't know that about the wiring, but am always careful to make sure all electrics are off when I look at something.

We replaced the oven in the end- with a free one we got that seems to have another issue (hence my attendance on this forum this morning!!).

Will post separately..!

Thanks again,

Liz