The oven light would come on, but when we first tried to bake something in here, we discovered it never warmed at all.
Rockleaf has a double oven setup, as you may have noticed in the previous post’s mention of cleaning years of grime off the sides of the appliance.
Perhaps the fact that the upper oven worked just fine is why the previous owners didn’t fix the lower oven whenever it broke. That’s certainly why it’s taken us over 2 years to get around to looking into it! (Although to be fair, it took us half a year to even notice the lower oven was broken…)
We knew that when we set the bottom oven to “Bake” it didn’t do anything. The first step to fixing that was figuring out exactly what was wrong. To do so, we busted out out our handy Fix It Yourself book, which we previously used to diagnose and repair the water heater. Thankfully, the era of this book matches the era of our oven pretty closely, so it showed us exactly what we needed to know.
This book is exactly the right era for our needs. (p.s. Note the green floor layer in the background!)
We had — wrongly, as it turns out — assumed the that whole of the lower oven was non-functional. The book smartly recommended checking not just the Bake setting but also the Broil one, since those are 2 separate heating elements. The Broil function worked just fine!
Next up, we turned off the power to the range, removed the lower oven’s baking heating element, and brought out the trusty volt-ohm meter. We would need to to check to see if the correct ohm range registered on the heating element. It was supposed to be between 15 and 30, but it came out a bit over 30 ohms, telling us that the heating element would need to be replaced.
A few weeks passed in which we tried to track down a new part for a roughly 50-year-old appliance. GE’s model number search didn’t even turn up our oven, and a chat with their customer service team revealed that they no longer have parts for appliances that old.
But the internet can be an amazing thing, and a site called AppliancePartsPros had what we were looking for. We were delighted when the new heating element arrived that it appeared essentially identical to the part we had removed! Just, you know, without being blackened from the years of use.
New on the left, old on the right. (p.s. Note the new tile floor in the background!)
Next trip out to Rockleaf, we hooked it up, turned the power back onto the range, and it warmed up promptly. The only downside was that the “preheating” light didn’t come on, but that’s a task for another day. Having 2 functional ovens and a working stove top is plenty to be excited about for now!
Connection made 
Good as new
Rockleaf Haven 