On Jun 19, 12:42*pm, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote:
"Arfa Daily" wrote in message

...

(The economic "justification" is obvious.)
So what other justification do you think you are looking for?

I guess I'm looking for a groveling "Gee-ee, we're stupid" apology from GE.



It works. *It's perfectly safe until some fool works on it 'live' in the
expectation
that he's going to be safe, and it saves money on the build cost of the
appliance.

As another poster pointed out, there are ovens with both sides switched at
the "bake" selector.

Sorry, but I can only echo Mr Angus's sentiments that working on such
equipment without fully isolating it first, is highly irresponsible,
especially for someone of your usually pedantic persuasion, who I'm sure
would normally be shouting "never assume anything !!" at anyone else who
posted a similar story here ...

Criticism accepted... But in this case I might very well have taken "anyone
else's" side.

Interestingly I also own a GE stove and coincidentally my bake element
developed a hot spot one day and "exploded" open and also needed to be
replaced. I never even thought of the possibility that only one side
of the 240 was being switched off from the control unit when I
replaced it, Like you William I just would have expected such a design
to be both impractical as well as unsafe. However I did unplug the
stove first, but just purely from habit, ( and because I really don't
like working on live circuits, unless there is no other alternative).
So in all honesty I made the same assumption that you did with the
exception that my stove was unplugged.
The model number of my stove is JBP64 and it is almost ten years old.
GE was nice enough to provide a service page with their appliances,
(at least they were still doing it at the time we purchased this
model), and it included a schematic. I just looked at it and
incredible as it may seem, sure enough L2 is directly connected to one
side of both the bake and broil elements!
I've never forgotten the words of one of my teachers many years ago
when I was in electronics school. He never seemed to tire of reminding
us to "never assume that the power is off". And I try very hard not
to. Good advice when you run into something unexpected like this. Lenny