Our ‘new’ oven (maybe)

We picked up a new oven this evening. It is a glass top Whirlpool, and was on Craigslist for free. The outside was not too dirty, and cleaned up well, but the inside of the oven is filthy. The previous owner says she did not know whether it is a self-clean oven, even though it says SELF-CLEANING OVEN in large letters next to the oven display. The cook top works well, but the people giving it away say that the oven controller stops working intermittently. They say that once the oven turns on it works well, but about 10% of the time it gives an error code instead of turning on.

We brought the oven home and cleaned it up, then I took it apart and looked at the controller circuit board. I found new ones online for about $230, a used one on eBay for $150, and an online service that will repair the controller for $100. I do not want to pay $230 to fix a "free" oven, but the $100 repair may be in line with what I am willing to pay to fix this up. In fact, we may even be able to sell our old oven and recover much of this $100 repair cost. (There's nothing wrong with the old oven except that it does not have a glass top). The controller circuit board was a little dirty, and looks as though it may have tin whiskers; I wiped it down with alcohol, reassembled the oven, then installed it.

Immediately, the oven worked. I preheated it, then turned it on, then turned on autoclean, then turned autoclean off. I could not figure out how to latch the door for the autoclean cycle. Then I tried turning the oven back on and got an error – E1 and F5. I did a little more research and found two things . . . I could not latch the door because it is an automatic latch, and these two error codes appear to have something to do with the door latch being jammed. Going back to the oven, I cleared the code, wiggled the latch by hand, then was able to turn the oven on and preheat it. Finally, I set the oven for an autoclean cycle; it is currently auto-cleaning.

My hope is that the latch is jammed because the inside of the oven is so dirty, and running the autoclean cycle will fix it. This is, of course, the best thing that can happen at this point. The worst thing that can happen is that I'll have to reinstall the old oven and haul this new one off to an appliance recycler.