... 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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