Life of Brian

The other weekend we had dinner at the local Fatz Cafe. We have been eating there probably every couple of weeks for a while now. Donna likes their Chicken & Rice Soup and the menu is varied in the usual casual dining manner to keep the entree choice fresh at each visit.

The food quality has been mostly pretty good, but this time the C&R Soup looked and tasted like it came from the bottom of the pot and to make matters worse the crab cakes she ordered as her entree was mostly tasteless bread crumbs. When we got home Donna went to the restaurant’s website and filled out the survey that has become standard on any receipt for anything you buy.

A couple of days ago when we got home from work, a regional representative from Fatz Cafe had left a phone message that he had read her complaints and wanted to talk to her, so he left his phone number. She called the number and of course got his answering machine where she left a message back. We then went out to dinner (because of the ongoing dead oven issue.) Well, you know what happened next, Mr. Fatz Representative called while we were away and left a long apologetic message and saying that to try and win our business back he was going to mail us a gift certificate to the restaurant.

In today’s mail there was an envelope from Fatz and sure enough there was a gift certificate inside. It was for the amazing sum of five dollars. $5!!! What a slap in the face. Five bucks is like a large soft drink and the tip…Donna shredded the gift certificate.

We won’t be going back there anytime soon.

Forty-three bucks. That is how much they want for an oven tem?per?a?ture sen?sor or more than twice what I thought they should be. So I went back to the net for some more information and I found out how to check and see if the sensor is actually shorted or not. Take an ohm meter and measure across the two terminals. Zero is a short, with infinity being open and normal being 1,000 to 1,100. Well wouldn’t you know it, my “bad” one read 1,000 ohms. Maybe it is not bad?

The next option is to see if the wires from the sensor to the control board have been shorted. I tried to trace the wires, but they disappeared into the top of the oven and it was unclear how to get at that area, so I gave up and put everything back together. At least the top burners still work. And more importantly, the clock.

From what I read on a couple of forums is that sometimes the sensors are bad even if they ohm out good, so tomorrow I’ll call the appliance parts place and see what their return policy is on the sensor. If it is in any way returnable I’ll buy one and try it out.

If that doesn’t fix it, it may be time to replace the 15-year old electric stove with a spiffy new gas unit.

When Donna went to set the oven temp to make Oven Fries for dinner it just annoying beeped at her and displayed -F4-. I dug around in the draw that holds all the owner’s manuals (including some for things we no longer own) and picked the one for the Maytag electric range. The only mention of error codes was that if the display read F whatever, unplug the unit and call an authorized repair person. Now that kind of stern warning might have worked on a housewife in the 50’s, but I have the internet.

F4 means a shorted oven temperature sensor. Now all I need is the oven model number so I can order a new sensor. The owner’s manual, of course, covers several models, so it is no help. We check out the stickers on the door and sure enough they have numbers, but it turns out they are the part numbers for the sticker. We pull the oven out from the wall but there is no sticker on the back either. Because the easy way to pull out the hopefully bad sensor failed, I had to remove the back panel to get at the connector and I was hopeful to find something there, but no luck. Back to the net we go and on a forum that was the third or fourth place we looked we found a hint that led us to the units nameplate. Pulling out the pot and pan storage door reveals the holy grail, including a serial number in case it happens to be required.

Feeling lucky we drove over to Home Depot to pick up a lawn mower spark plug and an oven temperature sensor. We found a spark plug, but struck out on the sensor. Because Lowes is just down the street a mile or so we decided to turn over that stone too while we were out. Under the Lowes stone was the same as under the Home Depot stone, new ovens….

Yesterday morning the lawnmower wouldn’t start. As we were staring at the mower looking for where the spark plug might be, Donna said, “Maybe it is under here?” She proceeded to back out a thumbscrew on the side which opened up a 2″ x 4″ panel. No spark plug, but there was a paper air filter. Wow, this thing has a paper filter. I removed it, fanned the folds to loosen the dirt and smacked on the driveway a couple times to clean it. It wasn’t too dirty which was not too bad considering we bought the mower a little over two years ago. As I went to put it back in I noticed a foam filter that resided under it. It was no wonder the paper filter was so clean, the foam filter was totally blocked and there was a 1/32″ thick layer of dirt covering it.

Figuring I found the problem, I washed the foam real good and placed it all back together, but it still wouldn’t start. Because the yard really didn’t look to bad I wheeled the mower back into the shed. Now almost absolutely sure it was the spark plug I went inside to check the owner’s manual for location and type of plug. Well, as is the custom now a days, the manual was a a generic one covering all 68,000 models of Yard Machine mower, so none of the pictures actually matched our mower and there were plenty of paragraphs talking about the spark plug and how to replace it, but there was no actual mention of the proper number to use. In the same bag as the mower manual was one for the Brigs and Stratton engine. It too was extremely vague, but I did find mention of a spark plug number near the back of the book, 5062. That number was for the resistor plug to reduce electric interference. Under that were two other numbers, 802592 & 492167. Now we are in business.

Or so I thought. This morning we checked an auto parts store and the Home Depot where we had bought the mower, where we found all kinds of plugs and all kinds of cross reference guides, but they all were sorted by manufacturer, plug manufacturer (NGK, Champion, etc.) not engine maker, and nowhere were the three numbers I had mentioned. My only resort now was to find the elusive plug, remove it and hope it was marked with something that I could cross-reference. So I came home and removed the plastic engine cover and the plug location was immediately identifiable. Not only that, I was easily seen and removed without having to remove the 4 screws and cover. I, in typical male fashion, didn’t see it, because it wasn’t where I first looked.

The plug removed was all back and icky and still smelled of all the gas it was drenched in yesterday in my failed fifteen or so pulls to start the mower. I wiped the dirt off the ceramic insulator and read, “TORCH F6RTC.” After a little Google searching yielded substitutes of RN9YC (Champion) and BPR6ES (NGK.) Tomorrow after work we try Home Depot again and hopefully come home with a spiffy new plug that will lead to a running lawn mower.