The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Stove repair

replacing the heating element in a Hotpoint ovenThe heating element in our oven stopped working today.

I felt lucky when our local hardware store had a replacement, but I failed to realize part of the connector was touching the frame and when we turned the power back on it melted the connector making the element worthless.

The second trip to a hardware store within the same hour is tough on my ego. Luckily there was one more left, along with a new connection tip to replace the melted one. When I put the second element in I made sure to modify the frame to not allow any more sparking. I was feeling kind of down on my stove fixing skills and I think Phil the guy who owns the hardware store was picking up on it. He said "That happens to a lot of people Mark" with a tone that made me feel 10 times better.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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And he is absolutely right:) In either case, if it had ultimately been a success or a failure, hold your head high. You are a rare breed of person these days that made the attempt(and succeded) to fix the stove, rather than outright replace it. My Husband, also a Mark, would just stare at it and say yep....and conclude that we needed a new stove. (It must be genetic- My Inlaws have killed two ovens in the past 5 years, both heating element issues, and in each time they have bought new stoves. ) Perhaps a tutorial is in order for us not so oven savvy readers? I bow down to your craftiness :D
Comment by MamaHomesteader Wed Nov 21 22:41:38 2012





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