Should Rebekah buy a new oven? Or repair the one she has?

My husband and I are facing a frugal dilemma that I would love reader’s input on. For the last couple of years our gas oven (also a gas range) has struggled to hold a steady temperature.

 

It does not seem old but I’ve only lived in this house for three years. It’s a GE “TrueTemp” oven (oh the irony).

 

I know gas ovens should expect to have temperature fluctuations but this goes much beyond that. I thought it might be a thermostat issue because it “thinks” it is still at the temperature I set but the reality is that the temperature has dropped 100-150 degrees.

 

However, the last time I tried to use the oven, it would not heat up a first. (After about an hour of switching in on and off it finally got up to temperature.)

 

My husband and I have been advised to just buy new and not bother with repairs. We have been told that between to price of the service call, parts and install we will pay a LOT of money and in the end it might not be fixable. We really hate to just throw out the oven for environmental concerns but we do want to be frugal and wise.

My goodness, that sounds SO frustrating! It would not be the end of the world for something like a pot roast, but if you were trying to bake a cake or a crusty loaf of bread, that amount of temperature fluctuation would be a bit of a disaster.

So, I completely understand why you want to get this fixed or replaced.

When I make a decision like this, I try to consider things like:

• the age of the appliance (if it’s very old, other things might go wrong soon too, and replacement parts might be hard to get)
• the cost of replacement (if the service call is going to add up to half the cost of a replacement, then that’s an argument for not fixing the old one)

Remember when I cracked the glass top of the stove at my old house?

In that case, the new stovetop didn’t make a lot of sense, especially given how old my oven was.  You can read through my thinking on that in this post.

Luckily, I knew precisely what was wrong with my stove (ha!), so it was easy to figure out how much a replacement would cost.

In your case, there are more unknowns, so that makes it harder.

If we were chatting I’d ask you:

• Who advised you? If they’re experienced and knowledgeable about repairing gas ovens, I’d take their advice seriously. When I cracked my stovetop, I called my trusty appliance repair guy to ask his opinion!
• How much is a service call in your area?
• Are parts readily available for your oven?
• How much would a new gas stove/oven be?
• Would the new gas stove have some better features that would be valuable to you?

Also, you’ve probably already done this, but I’d definitely google my oven’s symptoms to see if I could get a vague idea of what the problem might be, because that might help me get a ballpark idea of what a repair would involve.

I am not at ALL a gas oven expert, though, so I’m gonna stop typing here and open the floor up for reader input.

Readers, what would you do if you had Rebekah’s oven? And how would you think through the decision?