theReviewGuys

This Amana Gas Range, Model AGDS902SS seemed to fit the bill for us some six years ago. It was a gas stove top and oven, and had a down draft vent system, which was good because the previous Electric Range was down draft also. Our kitchen does not have a hood.

And so we spent a few bucks on this stainless and computerized appliance. We had it delivered, and I ran a new electrical service so we wouldn’t have a cord running to the wall outlet which was at chest height. I cut a new hole in the floor and ran the venting into the crawl space.

The house was already plumbed for Gas and all we needed was a three or so foot piece of flexible gas hose.

We love to cook, and gas is so much more pleasant to cook with, and we were in hog heaven, until a couple years later when the first burner igniter failed. Ordered the parts, and installed, and a couple weeks later a second burner failed. Hmmmm.

Fast forward another year, and we had an oven igniter fail. And by then the brushed stainess control panel was looking beat. Some stoves get a nice patina, but this is just tired looking.

Wife used oven cleaner on stainless pans for the burners, and over spray got on the aluminum trim pieces which destroyed the black coating.

Soon two more burners failed. And a second oven igniter failed. Knobs on the control panel had been falling off one, by one. Ordered replacement knobs, but turns out the problem was a plastic piece on the computer that was failing. They don’t sell the five or ten dollar plastic piece which screws on to the computer circuit board. Rather you have to spend over $200 to have buttons that work. I bought computer against my better judgement, and today went to install it.

To get to the computer module you have to take apart most of the stove top. And then it becomes very apparent that this stove is not sealed very well against cooking grease. I spent hours cleaning the gunk off, and still there’s a ton left baked on. I suppose one day this thing will end up in a metal recycling and then, finally the baked on gunk will forever get burned off.

Will all appliances I’ve ever worked on there are a lot of stamped sheet metal parts with very sharp edges. The first thing you should make sure you have on hand when working on an appliance such as this Amana is an economy sized box of bandaids.

After hours of removing and cleaning parts and installing larger sheet metal screws to replace all the stripped out from the factory screws, I got the computer reinstalled.

Now I needed to fix the wires going to the oven igniter. Both wires were frayed and had exposed wire in multiple places. The factory didn’t leave enough wire to cut off of 6inches, and so I had to order some replacement wiring. Factory wire is rated to 150 degrees Centigrade. I got replacement wired rated for 200 degrees Centigrade. Had to make a trip to Lowes for some ceramic wire nuts.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 5th, 2011 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.