Do-It-Yourself Story

A local power failure with several on/off cycles apparently fried the control board on my 8 year-old double oven. After the power failure, the oven display was dark, but pressing keys still resulted in beeps and the oven light came on when the door was opened. An Internet search identified the possibilities as the transformer, the thermal fuse or the control board, with the control board being the most likely. The fuse was easy to test, and I guessed that I would have smelled something if the transformer had gone, so I went with the control board as the problem. I had installed the oven myself, so I knew how to take it out. I built a simple 2x4 frame stand to set the front edge on to make the work easier and pulled it almost all the way out of the cabinet. The board was ordered from AppliancePartsPros on a Thursday and delivered to my office the following Monday. Because I had the oven almost all of the way out, I had room for both boards on top, so I unplugged/replugged the wires one at a time. To eliminate any static electricity concern, I had borrowed a wrist strap static guard from my companies IT group and grounded myself to the oven frame. I got the board plugged in and powered it back up to test. The first try resulted in an error message E1 F2. I couldn't find that on-line, so I called the AppliancePartsPro 800 number. It took about 20 minutes of wait, but the individual I spoke with was able to tell me it was a keypad error code, and likely a ribbon cable problem. The ribbon cable was difficult to seat properly and seemed delicate so I had been cautious. I tried again - it took about 5 minutes of messing with it before it finally slipped in all the way. I turned the power on again and everything worked. The board was $311 from AppliancePartsPro. The Whirlpool site listed it at about $370; I'm guessing my bill to have a Service Tech out would have been in the $600-$700 range.