My wife and I recently found ourselves shopping for a new electric range. The unit in our home was original to the home and, thus, 18 years old. It was still working well, but my wife yearned for some of the modern conveniences included in the more contemporary models.
We also have a young son who is testing boundaries, and the existing stove did not have the tip-over protection that newer models include as standard. That little bracket on the back foot is not sold separately, by the way, so adding it to the existing appliance was not an option.
We did our research and found several models we liked. One feature we really wanted was an oven door lock so we could keep our son from opening it. Many models had the lock feature and we made sure the model we settled on had it as well. However, in talking to the salesman, we found that the designers had limited the lock's use.
Several of the options include a button labeled "Oven Lock" or "Control Lock," but this only locks the electronic control panel. The only way to lock the oven is to turn it on self-clean, and, even in self-clean, many do not lock until the oven reaches 400 to 500 degrees. To the best of our knowledge, there are no models on the market with an electronic lock that can be actuated by the owner without activating the self-clean cycle.
This means that the actuation of the lock is available to the main processor and there is a button labeled lock, but the smart folks did not put the two together. I realize that few people need the door to lock as the population interested in this feature is limited to those with little people at their feet. However, I am having trouble making sense of who would want to lock the control panel. If a child can reach the control panel, he is either tall enough to unlock it himself, or he is sitting on the counter top or stove. So the lock is of no use.
If my 20-month-old son is sitting on the stove, he can't turn on the oven controls but he can turn a knob for the stove top and get one powerful seat warmer going. Maybe the microprocessor ran out of storage to make that connection happen. We enjoy our new stove, so far, but I am still at a loss for how the monkeys didn't see that the oven lock button should actually lock the oven.
This entry was submitted by Nathan Taylor and edited by Rob Spiegel
Tell us your experiences with Monkey-designed products. Send stories to Rob Spiegel for Made by Monkeys.
My experience with OEM oven door locks is that the door lock is JUST for the pyrotectic oven cleaners, to keep a superheated oven from being opened, and singeing your eyebrows. The door lock is usually not offered on non-cleaning or catalytic self-cleaning ovens, as the lock is not intended as a child lock.
I do understand that a door lock operated from the higher, more out-of-reach control panel could additionally be a desired feature for child safety.
Unbelievable! You're begging for the nanny state to enelop us at an even faster rate! How about some parenting instead of bumping the cost of kitchen appliances? My grandson is passing through the toddler stage unscathed and it's because he's been taught boundaries rather than relying on technological boundaries. What he's learned will serve him well as he continues to develop and become a functional member of society. Will your son only leave things alone if he can't access them? Really?
Wow, a strong opinion. I fail to see, however, how this would bump the cost of the appliance, all the features are alreayd there. I understand the importance of parenting and attending to your kids, trust me. If you did as well you would understand accidents sometimes happen.
My point was that a free (or nearly so) change could be made to prevent a child being burned. I didn't ask for governement regulation (you might look up the meaning of nanny state) just the option to buy something I think would be useful.
I also bought outlet covers and a baby gate for the top of our stairs, guess that was a mistake huh?
Unbelievable. The opportunity exists to make a common kitchen appliance safer for young children at no cost other than reprogramming the microprocessor and yet someone regards doing so as symptomatic of the "nanny state."
One of my sons was seriously burned on the palm of his hand when he was a toddler. We had food baking in the oven and I was washing dishes at the adjacent sink when he came over to see what was happening. i saw him trip and extend his hand to catch his fall, placing it flat on the glass of the hot oven. I immediately realized he was being burned and picked him up, turning the sink faucet to cold, and running his hand beneath the water. However, the momentary contact with the hot glass raised a blister over his entire palm.
We spent the next several hours at the hospital emergency room waiting to be seen while he cried in pain. If I could have avoided the entire accident at little cost, I would have thought that money very well spent.
I see that having that additional feature programmed into the existing door lock at virtually no cost as a desireable option. I don't want to see a government regulation requiring you buy the oven with that lock feature.
The only negative I see is that it may provide a false sence of security to parents. From Big Al's blog, his son was seriously burned by catching himself with a hand against the hot glass on the oven door. Even with a door lock, the hot glass will still be exposed. Parent's must realize that, even with the lock, the burn risk is still high; unless, they also choose an oven without a glass window.
I'll second that it really falls back on the parents, but dishwashers have had mechanical locks for ever. No one complained that it was too much work to lock the door prior to hitting the start button. I'd say that would be a reasonable solution if going electronic seems too problematic.
So, jmillion, you're suggesting that children should be allowed to be horribly burned or injured for no other reason than to learn a good lesson? What doesn't kill you ... Or perhaps that should be their fate if their parents (or grandparents) aren't clued in to the dangers around the home? We evolved in a different pool of dangers than now exist so our natural instincts are not always sufficient, and providing children a safe environment to learn is our responsibility as guardians.
But, the point of the post wasn't that the cost of the oven would go up to add a safety feature; it wouldn't. Everything existed to provide the safety feature without any additional cost. The manufacturer just didn't bother to connect the dots.
Providing parents with common sense tools to protect their children in that phase between being able to do things and knowing not to do them does NOT a nanny state make.
At last! I can't tell you how many kids I knew growing up that died in oven related accidents before they could blow themselves up with their chemistry sets. Good thing my parents were foresighted enough to teach me not to touch hot things. Now if it's clothes dryers, that's another story. My brother and I spent many an enjoyable afternoon spinning around with the laundry.
The only appliance related injury that happened to any of my schoolmates was a refrigerator tipping over on a fool who was swinging on the door. This was about second or third grade. When I heard about it I wondered how he could have been that dumb.
When we recently purchased a new stove it came with an anti-tip device that would have been a serious challenge to install on our glazed-tile tiled floor. The two angle brackets would have been much simpler, and an even easier method would have been a steel cable and a serious eye-screw into a wall stud. But since neither of us are prone to standing on the oven or the oven door, we elected to ignore this feature. I did use a wall-attached anti-tip device when I installed a new stove at another persons house. That device was very similar to what I described in my previous posting.
Yikes! You spent many an enjoyable afternoon spinning around with the laundry? I hope this is a joke. It makes me simultaneously claustrophobic and sick to my stomach to think about it.
@jmillion. I think you are over reacting. Kids do stupid things and taking precauton is not nanny state, it is part of parenting. So your toddler has been taught boundries so he will never do something stupid. Yet he probably still believes in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and magic. Did he not learn those boundries or is that part of the growth factor that separates kids fro adults. My parents certainly never taught me to put a hairpin in an electric outlet, but I did it because my fellow 4 year old dared me to. Kids do stupid things. Just look at some of the idiotic things done in front of a video camera so it can be posted on You Tube.
So there is a lock on an oven door. How big of a deal is that? I put on my seat belt, wear a helmet on my motorcyle and a life vest when water sking. Guess that must be nanny something.
@jmillion I agree with you about parents today depend upon way too many other people to do their job of being parents. I was born in the mid 1970's and was taught to not talk to strangers, cross the street without an adult, etc.
I think it would be great if a company did add this as a safety feature I also feel that parents need to teach their children what they can and can not do from a safety stand point. Another example of this is the anoying "no need to speed" signs in neighborhoods I see frequently. I would love to put up a sign that read "need for speed, parents stop relying on everyone else to watch your children, get off your lazy darieaire and watch your own children"
I think that only allowing the lock to function during self cleaning is probably intentional to prevent a suffocation hazard for children playing with the oven. You can't dispose of a refrigerator without removing the door or blocking it open for the same reason.
When my kids were little, we used to buy locks for cupboard doors and other places for safety (either for the safety of the child or the safety of the what was inside a cupboard). These devices are not expensive. KidSafe has an oven lock for a mere $4.99: http://www.kidsafeinc.com/product/48408/Oven-Front-Lock.html
Doesn't everyone know that the U.S. constitution says that it's Governments job to protect all of us from ourselves? We need far more legislation and laws to make sure there's nothing that could possibly harm anyone in anyway. We also need far more lawyers to make sure anyone that is involved in causing harm is fined millions and permanently put away to prevent them from ever harming again.
I've done a few oven controls, and the door doesn't lock right away so that the user can attend to a fire, if one should occur. Also, remove anything that may be in the oven when the self-clean starts. The door does latch after a certain temperature (the number escapes me) because at such high oven temperatures, around 950F, your clothes can actually ignite, which UL always frowns upon. The control does lock to prevent the oven from turning on, but the range control and oven control are usually two separate controls, so the feature set doesn't carry over. This may sound like monkeys at work, but a low-end oven will still have a control but nothing but traditional gas valves or an infinite switch for the range. A high-end unit will have the same oven control, but a real electronic control for the range.
This is amazing, coming from an engineer. If there really is some need to provide an anti-tip feature on a stove, two angle brackets, available from a large number of stores, both hardware and home improvement, can provide a far better anti-tip function than that bracket intended to grab a rear foot of the stove. Really, it is very simple: one bracket screws to the back of the stove about an inch below the top edge, then the second bracket is positioned above it and the mounting location marked on the wall. Pull the stove out and mount the second bracket on the wall, push the stove back into place and bolt the two togather, and the stove is tip proof. Of course, I have never heard of a stove tipping unless a really stupid person stood on the door, or there was an earthquake. At some point an individual should choose to be responsible for the results of their actions.
As for burning ones hand on an oven door, do they really get that hot? I agree that they get quite warm, even hot to the touch, but not hot enough to cause a burn quickly. More importantly, a door lock would not protect against touching the hot outside. Of course the inside will indeed be hot, that is how they work. A manually operated oven door lock may be a worthwhile accessory, but an automatic oven door lock would make sure that in the event of a fire in the oven there was no way to put it out. The one time I had one I quickly opened the door a bit and threw in a cup of water, and immediately closed the door. The steam that formed smothered the fire quite well.
As for the dangers available to a child on top of the stove, if the parents are that lax in training and supervision they should probably not have a stove in the residence at all. I have never heard of a kid on the stove getting burned. BUt if it did happen, I would expect it to happen in California.
The oven door and sides do not get hot enough to burn you normally, except in pryotechnic oven cleaning mode. The glass however can get very hot (>120 degrees F.) particularly with the oven closed and set for baking at 425 to 450 degrees F..
The oven door latches that I have seen are not automatic, but manually pulled across; however, they automatically lock above a set temperature of roughly 600 degrees and above.
I don't see that a child would trap themselves into an oven; unless, a second child manually latches them in there after they climb in, or the oven falls on its face. Most ovens have some venting, and seals that are not as airtight as on a refrigerator as well (not that I recommend climbing into an oven, even if it is off, but I believe it is less of an asphixiation hazard than an empty refrigerator).
I never mentioned the hazard of a child entering an oven, I was addressing some comment about a kid on top of the stove. The racks in most ovens would make entry difficult, while still possible.
At least some of the self cleaning ovens had a feature that kept the door locked when the cycle was initiated, and did not provide a means to cancel the self cleaning cycle. OUr family's choice has been to avoid purchasing this feature.
I have had a stove with the oven control front and center where it might be possible to accidently turn the oven on, but the ovens beginning to heat would certainly let anyone cleaning the inside become aware that something was amiss.
I will have to check the glass to see how hot it gets, but I can't imagine touching hot glass long enough to sustain a burn. Perhaps that reflex has not developed in some individuals.
I apologize . . . it was Tom W. that talked about a child possibly playing in the oven and getting hurt as with a refrigerator. I agree that even a small child would likely need to have the racks removed or at the lowest position to even have a chance of getting all the way in.
In regards to tipping: If a child were trying to climb in, they could tip the oven it over on themselves while on the door. I also have seen tipping as an issue when a large turkey in the broiler pan was rested on the door of a lighter single range/oven. I do agree that a bracket could be fabricated and installed fairly readily to any oven; even if, it did not come with that anti-tipping feature from the factory (Heck install some interlocking channel irons, or some styles of drawer slides).
I'll admit, I could have made the bracket if need be but you either are not married or missed the real reason we bought a new oven.
Take another quick look, I am sure you can find it (my wife wanted a new one, and I will add she waited some time before we made it a priority).
I have never noticed the glass on the door of our oven being hot enough to burn so I cannot confirm that. However, the tip function is not for those smart enough to know better it is for children, google it and you can read about the issue. I am not saying I endorse the lawsuits, only that I prefer my son not test the issue.
I agree that a child burned on the stove top could only seemingly be traced back to the child not being supervised. The discussion of that was with regard to the usage of the control lock and what circumstances it woudl be useful, I know of few whcih led to the silly example.
My son also managed to burn his hand on the oven door glass.
The emergency room doctor explained to me that a child does not have the same skin thickness (callouses) as an adult. So an adult could put their hand on the glass, feel it is hot, and remove their hand before being burned. A child's hand would be burned almost instantly.
I would suspect this feature would add cost to the oven because the present door lock is probably only designed for a low number of lock/unlock operations for cleaning and to make it used for every time you want to open the door to check if the food is done, to put food in and take it out... would add thousands of lock/unlock cycles over the life of the oven so the locking mechanism would have to be engineered for the added usage.
It would also be nice to disable the "child proof " lock function so when the kiddos grow up and it is not needed.
In addition, this feature could also affect the long term reliability of the oven as well because if the lock fails to lock, the oven would lock you out from baking anything until it is repaired or it could lock your food into the oven which will probably exceed Betty Crocker's recommended baking time.
Remember the Maytag Neptune front load washer door locking debacle? That reminds me... If you have a Neptune front load with a timer knob you need to replace your wax motor if it is the original one before it damages your Q6 triac and R11 resistor on the control board.
The console lock is most likely for cleaning. So you don't accidently turn things on when you are scrubbing the spaghetti sauce off the console. My HVAC controller has a similar feature.
The door on a dishwasher has no choice but to have a mechanical latching arrangement. Otherwise the normal situation would be flooding every time it was used. The difference is that nothing except common sense is preventing the latch from being released at any time.
An oven lock would wind up being controlled by a conceited processor that believed it was much smarter than anybody else. How well would you like your dishwasher if you could not add more silverware two minutes into the wash cycle? One oyher thing is that dishwashers are anchored because they would tip when tyhe rack of dishes was rolled out, at least much of the time it would tip.
Also, I have never heard of any dishwasher injuries.
... but it never occurred to me to climb inside my mother's oven.
A child-proof interlock would be more of an annoyance than a help, and as America's population ages and has no small children at home, it would impose an added cost on ovens that everyone must pay, but only a very few need. My suggestion: Improvise a way to keep the oven door shut, even if it's duct tape. You'll only need it for 12-18 months until the child grows out of that phase. It will also avoid the problem of the oven door lock getting stuck due to an electronics glitch and having an expensive service call to fix it.
Yes, I mentioned in an earlier post there is a lock for about $5.00. After the kids reach a certain age, you can detach all of the little protective items. You're right, Andrew, you only need them for a specific period of time.
Your right Andrew - it's amazing that any of us lived to adulthood without a plethora of "protective" devices. Of course, my mom would have had an eye on me at that age and I would never have had the opportunity to do anything that was that dangerous. And if I tried, I would not have had a little 5-minute "time out" either.
I can't speak for all areas, but in the metro Atlanta area, anti-tip brackets are REQUIRED to be installed by the building codes. I found this out when purchasing my house (a 2-year old resale) in 2003. The home inspector's report noted that although the stove was equipped with the latch, the mating bracket was never installed. This was added to the "punch list" of violations to be remedied before closing the sale, and it was a trivial thing to have done. BTW, we are in our 60's, and certainly didn't need this done then (later our 1st grandchild was born and we were glad it was). Codes vary in the requirements on retrofits and remodeling, but anything that requires a building permit usually mandates an upgrade to current code.
It never would have occurred to either my wife or myself to even consider this; our previous homes all had cooktops and wall-mounted ovens, etc. Also, the previous owners DID have 3 small children (all under 3), but apparently were unaware of the flaw. The house had been a "spec"/model home, and the appliances were installed before they purchased it. Caveat emptor....
As an EE who also happens to a Paramedic, I can tell you that the anti-tip bracket for an Oven is a MUST MUST have, even if you don't have children (and even if you don't plan to climb into the oven)! I once responded to an emergency call for a woman who had a pot of boiling water on the stove top and then opened the oven door to put something into the oven. As she was reaching into the oven, she slipped and put her weight down on the open door. The oven tipped over and the pot of boiling water fell onto her. She suffered some first and second degree burns to her back and arms, pretty nasty stuff, and got a ride to our area's burn center. So this anti-tip bracket is REALLY important to have on all ovens, kids in the house or not! If you don't have it now, get it installed ASAP! I believe you can order them as a "part" from most of the parts websites out there, or for us handy Engineer Types, we can design our own!
My girlfriend's mother told a wonderful story about ovens and their entertainment utility. Allegedly she caught her daughter helping her younger sister into the oven. They were both too young to remember the incident themselves.
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