RANT: always take everything apart

This is a silly story, but I've got to get it off my chest and just rant a little bit and nobody else I care to talk to is available to take a long phone call at the moment, so you guys get to hear it

This house came with a very fancy Jennair electric stove. With these ceramic topped burner cartridges that you can take out and replace with a griddle or a grill thing. (the grill is useless, doesn't get hot enough, but thats another story) about a year ago the big burner on one of the 2 cartridges burned out. So I was down to one big burner and 2 little ones. Most days thats not a problem, but last thanksgiving I was doing a lot of juggling and I knew I was going to have to replace it eventually.

When walking through Home Depot a couple of weeks ago I noticed the exact cartridge that I needed sitting on a shelf of returned stuff, even though I was pretty sure they didn't actually carry that brand, evidently they could order it for you. So I went over to the appliance section and tried to order it. Took an hour of chatting with the guy to find the right thing and figure out how to order it as the computers were acting up.

Forgiving me my first mistake of ordering through HD to start with Here is where I made my biggest mistake. He asked me where I wanted it delivered, evidently appliances are delivered and the computer wanted to know. I told him that I didn't want it delivered that I'd come and pick it up. However, the otherwise very nice and helpful fellow working for me entered it, I paid for it ($$$!!!) and walked out with a will call receipt.

When I came in to get it the first time I waited for an hour while they looked around and tried to figure out the paperwork and nothing yet, printed me a new receipt and said they would fix it. Came back that day and got a third person who after another hour or so of my reading in their book section they figured it out. By not letting them deliver it they had basically sold me the first one that came in to the store, but since it wasn't an item they stocked it was never going to come in! But they figured it out and ordered me one.

Called today to tell me it was in and I went to go get it. Still took them half an hour to get it out of the back room, so I rummaged through the bulb display to see if I could maybe grow something this summer. The box was open and I looked in and it looked right so I took it home (and some tulip bulbs)

But in re-ordering it they had changed the color of the top! Arrg, didn't notice till I got home and I was so fed up with waiting for the thing and sitting around the store that I was just going to keep it anyway and have a mismatched stove.

But in looking at it and the old one I decided that I could swap the tops between the 2 and get the new burners under the old top. And so I took the old one apart, came off fairly easily with some screws along the edge. So then I opened up the new one.

First thing that caught my eye was the nice paper "inspected by number 5" sticker that was just to the left of the big burner. Hmm, whats that smell of something burning in there? lol! paper stickers inside a 3k watt burner?

The burners are little ceramic lined metal dishes that are on springs to hold them tight against the ceramic top. They have little tabs around them that let them float but keeps them in position. There are temp sensors in the middle that would keep them from over heating and where the electrical connections are.

As I was about to put the old top on the new burner I took a closer look at the electrical connections, the sensors taps were awfully close on the 2 burners, and since the things are floating they were about touching and they could move. I played with it a bit and really, the first time I lifted it off to the side the would have shorted together and then to the case causing a rather nasty ground fault. The smaller of the 2 burners in this brand new burner was off it's tab and about to slide it's wire into the case!! I spun it back onto it's tabs properly to make it look more like the old one and routed the wires as best I could and put it all back together...

Where is all this leading? nowhere but YOU are smarter than "inspector number 5" and if you want to make sure you're safe you have to take it into your own hands. Or really, you dont want to take everything apart, but be ready for things to fail and fail spectacularly.

But it all ends happily, my stove has 2 big burners again and my blood pressure at sitting around HD for hours and hours is going back to normal now that I know I dont have to return this one and start all over again

Thanks for listening...

Poor guy. I try to avoid HD when I can. It's just too frustrating to find the item you want on display only to find that they don't know where the heck the things got stored.

As for taking things apart.... We have a saying in the house about new toys. "I'll read the manual as soon as I finish re-assembling it."

Daniel

I hear you about safety concerns.

I once purchased a house that came with appliances. The oven on the electric stove was taking forever to heat up. I pulled it the stove out and took off the back panel. What I found was a little shocking (no pun intended - keep reading). Two of the heating element electrode wires were not connected or terminated. They were just dangling bare in the back compartment. These could have very easily grounded against the frame of the stove. I guess we (and the previous owners were lucky).

I'm not surprised. I would say that most things you buy these days requires you to take them apart and improve/fix them as the first thing you do. Cables might be loose, nuts not tightened and so on.
Not to mention if you hire an electrician. They work so fast that everything is on the edge of a short-circuit or ground-fault. The only right thing to do is to do it yourself.

It's Chinas fault!

Been there done that! My wife wonders why I take everything apart.

Turns out, about a year ago I was attempting to install a dimmer switch. I got to looking at my internal house wiring and whatever electrician the contractor hired when they built the house, had his own wiring color scheme (read very random colors, multimeter is essential!) I don't know how it ever passed code! But I looked further and found that half the wires weren't even screwed down tight to the poles on the outlets and switches. Ground wires were just sorted looped around but completely loose! I have checked every outlet and switch in the house and best I can tell, I have all of them tightened correctly now. I'm not about to try to change the wires out to the proper colors, but dangerous stuff like that that electricians and other contractors do, just bugs me! They don't care, it's not their lives they are endangering most of the time.

And yeah at HD or Lowes, I don't buy anything from them unless it's in a sealed box right there on the shelf. I fully inspect all display models for engineering design flaws and then I search for a properly sealed and un-dented box with the item and all parts securely in it. Been bitten too many times by boxes of stuff not containing all the required parts. Granted I know some of that happens at the factory, but I'm going to do my best quality control to make sure I don't let HD or Lowes have a chance to screw it up. And I definitely keep receipts, they are very useful for returns!

now you guys are making me want to tell you the story of my first washer and dryer purchase. This was from a best buy.

Picked out the washer and dryer and it was then I learned that electric dryer cords aren't installed at the factory because your house may have the older 3 prong outlet or the newer 4 prong one. So you purchase the cord separately and they install it at the store for you.

So my dryer was delivered, I hadn't finished with the dryer vent yet so I couldn't have the delivery guys hook it up. They pushed it over to the correct position and left and I went to work on the vent. Since it was in a basement the vent came down from above. I climbed up on top of they dryer and plugged it in and then took the vent and reached up to connect the flex vent pipe with the new rigid one sticking out of the wall and when I got them close toghether there was a rather good set of sparks and smoke started drifting up from the case of the dryer that I was kneeling on and I heard the circuit breaker (which was only 10 feet away in the basement) buzz and click off.

I got carefully down off the dryer and pulled it's plug and pulled it out from the wall and looked at where you attach the cord. Someone had put the cord through the hole and tightened up the plate over it, but never bothered to actually attach the wires to the screw terminals in there and so they were basically laying against the metal case of the dryer that I was kneeling on. What would have happened if I had been leaning against the basement wall, or the conduit to the plug when I reached around to plug it in? I'd be dead, thats what.

It melted the end of the cord and completely vaporized one of the screw terminals.

I called them up and demanded very not nicely at all that they send a guy round with a new cable for me and expressed my displeasure with them and my pleasure with the fact that I could still draw breath. They didn't even want to come over and bring me a new cord, their first answer was that I should come out and BUY a new cord from them! After some discussion they agreed it was their fault and they would send someone round with it.

The delivery guys were nice enough when they came back with the new cord and were very surprised at the condition of the original plug. They intimated that this sort of things had happened before and that someone would probably loose their job. And a darned good thing I thought since whoever did that very nearly killed me, or at least ran 220v through my body from which I might have survived.

So yes, you can't trust anybody!

And as far as electricians, i've known some excellent ones over the years, unfortunately the last guy to work on this house wasn't one of them. I'm also going around little by little and replacing all the old loose overheated, backstabbed electrical outlets with properly grounded pigtailed outlets of a better quality. i've done all the bedrooms (and put in arc fault breakers) and all the other places that have any load on them and just a few more mostyl unused outlets to go. I've found all kinds of interesting things, like stranded wire stuck into a backstabbed connection and I just discovered recently a flying splice in the attic. I haven't even had a chance to fix that yet, just noticed it.

Yeah, the appliance guys are rather clueless. We bought a new dish washer from a national appliance chain. Installation was included in the price. The guy who delivered it also hooked it up. He did OK on the water connection, but when he attached the wires I noticed he went white to green. I stopped him and asked how he differentiated between neutral and ground. His reply? "It doesn't matter." I had him re-wire it correctly while explaining the difference. He still did not get it, but I think in the future he'll at least follow the color code.

Daniel

I love to take stuff apart, great thing about being a mechanic in my younger years.

Yeah, I know a guy whos job at HD is give an apology for orders being late or incorrect. Seems to be an ongoing issue and its easier to hire someone to deal with angry customers than fixing the problems.

I know a guy whos job at HD is give an apology for orders being late or incorrect.

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heh, they were all very nice and polite about it, they just didn't fix it and I waited a LONG time for it not to be fixed, but I'm not one to get mad and yell at people in public so I just took the time to read through the DIY books section.

In fairness to the guy who placed my original order, I watched him try to figure out the computer system and it was ludicrously and needlessly complex. Lots of UI screens and passwords that ended in him just at a 3270 terminal screen where he had to re-enter a different password and type a lot of long numbers

Somehow I don't think inspector No.5 or No.14 etc are real people. They are just stickers to get arround some legal requirement. Similar to the UL stickers you see popping up on all kinds of junk.