EASY FIX: Oven Not Heating or Heating Slowly - *TURN OFF The Power Before Repairing!

Welcome back guys it's the Tightwad and today we are working on my oven. It is not preheating or cooking like it normally should. It typically takes two to five minutes to preheat the oven and then whenever we're cooking of course we follow the directions in the recipe and lately it's been taking longer to cook and it's been taking 20 or 30 minutes just to get up to temperature. So I'm going to show you a simple thing you can check today to see if your element is bad and talk to you about all the things you need to do to test it and replace it to get your oven back up and running. The first thing we're going to do today is put our oven on 350 and the preheat mode comes on and now we know that the lower element in our oven should now start to glow bright red and as you can see nothing is changing with our element. I'll give it about 30 seconds and check back in and make sure that it's still not working. The oven's been on for about a minute and a half now and you see we still have nothing glowing so now I'm going to show you how to start taking things apart and I'll tell you what the different parts inside the oven are. Inside the oven there are two things called elements. There's an upper element and a lower element. Sometimes this lower element is below another piece that covers the bottom of your oven but ours is exposed so it's really easy to get to. The first thing to do to make it easier to work on your oven is to remove the racks from the oven. With the two racks out I have really easy access to my element on the bottom and my element on the top. The top element is mostly used for broiling functions which is right here and that's when you want to brown the top but it does kick on and off throughout most cooks. It just doesn't come on full strength during that and since our issue today is with it taking a long time to preheat and also taking a long time to cook I'm thinking it's this main element down here on the bottom. To remove this element there are just two screws back here in the back that need to be removed and then the element just slides right out. Typically elements are held in by two screws and they're almost always Phillips head so I'm just going to use my Phillips head screwdriver here and remove these two. I'm just going to set them on the glass of the door and now with those screws removed I can simply pull straight out here and it reveals the connections on the backside of this element. These connections are just two spade connectors so I should be able to pull them off with my hands but if not I'll go grab a pair of pliers and you do want to make sure you pay attention to which side each of those connectors is on so the white is on the right and the yellow is on the left on mine and this is actually the part of your oven that controls the heat so it comes on what needs to come on turns off when it needs to go off and it regulates the heat. With the element removed you'll see that there are two leads on the end and I should have continuity because this is a complete circuit. If you follow your finger down and around it comes all the way back to the other spot without any breakage. If there's a break in it that is what could be causing your oven to not work properly. So today I've got my multimeter and I've turned it to the continuity setting and on mine it has a little chime on it so I'm not looking at the numbers on it I'm simply trying to see if I get a chime indicating there's continuity. So now I'm going to touch the leads to my element here and I should get the same chime and you'll hear that I get nothing chime if they're touching nothing if they're on my element so that lets me know that my element is bad. To order a new element for my oven I need to know the model number and that's typically inside the oven just behind the door panel and here's the model number for the oven I'll be working on today. Once I have my model number I go into my Google search bar and type it in to find the actual part number for the element and sometimes I use a site called Repair Clinic to get that part number. Repair Clinic is nice because it not only has OEM parts a lot of times but it also has instructions on how to test different components and how to tell exactly which parts you may need for your repair and you can see on the screen that my part was $69.76 and sometimes there's a shipping cost incurred so I like to switch over to Amazon and put in that same part number and see what comes up there and see if I can get the part cheaper and faster through amazon.com I'm gonna leave some links in the description and in the pinned comment on this post if you want to use those links to help you get started finding the element for your oven. Now that I have my new element I will test it with my multimeter. I know it should be good but I'm gonna touch one lead to each one and you'll see I get tone on there no matter which way I do it and that lets me know that my new element is good and I can reinstall it into my oven. Now to reinstall it I'm gonna attach the spades white on the right yellow on the left on my particular model back together here and then I'll shove it back inside the installation. Be very careful when handling your element because any small break will cause your oven to stop working again. So my spade connectors are back on really good and I'm gonna carefully push them inside the insulation and then slide them all the way back and your element has feet on it like this so it should sit off the edge and now I have my two screws which I need to reinsert just lining up the holes. My oven should now be good to go I'm going to go ahead and close it and press bake and start it and we will see if the element glows orange. As you can see my element is now glowing bright orange or red so we know that we have fixed our issue. We will test to make sure that our oven continues to preheat properly and that it cooks back in normal cooking times. I hope you guys found this video helpful if you did give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel. After you subscribe bring that notifications bell so that you'll be notified every time I post a new DIY repair video. Click any of the links shown on the screen now and you'll see some of the other things I've repaired around my home. I hope you guys have a great day!