Willie Mae Truesdale was in her kitchen when she heard a loud explosion. She went to look and found pieces of her oven door all over the floor. “It was shocking and really had to be seen to be believed,” she explained.
“It was like what the hell. Broken glass, there was glass here on the ground.” His oven wasn’t even on at the time, which made things even messier. More terrifying is the fact that Truesdale is not the only homeowner whose furnace has exploded.
The strange case of exploding glass oven doors
During the COVID-19 lockdown, Cheryl, a suburban mom, had a similar shock. There was a hole in the middle of the brownies she tried to bake. She discovered that her oven was at about 25 degrees even though she was only three months old. Once she was out of quarantine, she called a professional to fix her device. However, she first set it to self-cleaning mode. Near the end, there was a loud explosion and the oven was hit by broken glass from inside the door.
But Michelle Wheat’s oven door exploded, breaking glass all over the kitchen. The same thing happened with wheat; Her oven, which was three years old, was not turned on at the time. Fortunately, the glass did not hurt any of her four young children. And like Truesdale, her oven was a Frigidaire. Cheryl’s was a Bosch, but there have also been complaints about other types of glass doors. In fact, since 2019, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has learned that this has happened 450 times.
All three women had issues with the creators after the event, which was a shame. Although Truesdale’s oven was still under warranty, the Frigidaire person thought the family was to blame for the explosion, even though the oven was turned off. She had to pay her own money for a new door. NBC asked Bosch for their reaction and they kindly replaced Cheryl’s oven.
Wheat’s oven was no longer under warranty, so he had to pay the technician $100. The technician then told him the glass was broken and they needed to fix it, costing the family an additional $314. Frigidaire told Wheat to get longer protection in case this happened again. “This shouldn’t have happened,” the mother of six said angrily. “That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
Why do oven doors break?
“There are two scenarios for why oven glass may break spontaneously,” says Mark Meshulam of Chicago Window Expert. “There is a family of furnace glass that is soda-lime glass, which is window glass, and it is heated and cooled quickly to temper it. That is a type of glass used in oven doors. Another type is borosilicate glass. It is most commonly used in laboratory glassware or old Pyrex glass, and tolerates heat and cold very well. So, the change to soda-lime glass has caused an increase in this type of breakage because it is not as tolerant to the thermal cycles that the glass will go through.”
But it’s also possible that the explosions are caused by a small defect in the glass called nickel sulfide inclusion. “It is only a tenth of a millimeter in diameter. “That little ball has some strange properties.” Meshulam said, adding that “Over time, he struggles to get out. And sometimes a high-temperature event, like cleaning the oven, can finally cause that spontaneous failure that was there.”
Still, Meshulam tells people that the ovens’ self-cleaning feature is safe. He said: “Most people will survive their entire lives using the self-cleaning function and won’t really encounter this problem.” Additionally, he believes ovens explode when not turned on due to small chips and defects. But the scariest thing about this possibility is that the door could break long after the first damage.
Prevention Tips
These small damaging spots can occur during production, shipping or installation. Homeowners can’t always prevent these things from happening, but there are things they can do to keep their homes safe. For example, some everyday actions can leave small chips or scratches on the glass. Some of these are aggressive cleansing methods and put too much physical stress on the body.
