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
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... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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'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.
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).
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