Attention DIYers. If you think you can handle fixing something like a stove on your own, Bonnie Woolsey has some information you may want to hear. The owner of All American Appliance Service Inc. since 1994, Woolsey has been working in the industry since 1987. In this article, she answers the question of whether a homeowner should try to repair a stove on his own.
No, no, no, and more no. A homeowner should not try to repair a stove himself without professional help.
We are out there all the time with customers who have attempted to fix their stove and they end up blowing it up because of the wiring. The average homeowner does not know that he needs to make sure that the wiring doesn’t touch the bottom of the floor or the oven or it will automatically ground out the entire stove — things like that.
Too many problems can occur when someone tries to take on a major project like fixing a stove on his own, so that is why I don’t recommend that someone try anything like that without first contacting a professional.
What I see many people do is they will go to a place like Home Depot and they will buy a burner that has a label that might say, “Fits Whirlpool” or “Fits Maytag.” So based on that labeling, they think it will be easy to hook up the burner to the appliance they already have installed. So then they try it, and it doesn’t fit.
Each one of these manufacturers has a patented design on their parts, so when you buy burners at big-box retailers they always set just slightly off. And then what the consumer doesn’t know is that when the range and the oven are set slightly off, then that causes the range to start arcing over time. In addition, the arcing will cause the range to start doing things internally that the customer doesn’t see, but in the end those problems are what is going to cost them the most money to fix and repair. So I absolutely do not recommend that customers attempt to repair these types of things like stoves and ovens on their own.
Even though it might seem easy to fix your appliance like an oven or a stove, I have had customers who asked questions like, “Can I just replace the bake element myself?” They figure, it’s only two wires that connect to the bake element, so what could possibly go wrong? Well what happens is they end up undoing the wires, or they didn’t know to tie them off properly, or they forgot to flip the circuit breaker.
These are things that are really basic, but the average homeowner doesn’t do this for a living, so they don’t know the basics. And the next thing you know, the wire that you need has gone down through a hole and it is lost in the appliance somewhere. And now the whole thing has to be taken apart and fished back through.
When you look at how much can go wrong during a project like that, it is just not worth it to try and fix a stove on your own.
