Willie Mae Truesdale heard a loud explosion coming from her kitchen. When she looked, she found the glass door of her oven shattered on the floor. « It was shocking and you really had to see it to believe it, » she explained.
« It was like, ‘What the hell?’ The glass shattered, glass was here on the floor. To add to the confusion, her oven wasn’t even turned on at that moment. » Even more troubling is that Truesdale is far from the only owner whose oven exploded.
The curious case of the exploding oven glass doors
Cheryl, a suburban mom, experienced a similar shock during the COVID-19 quarantine. She tried baking brownies, but they came out soggy in the middle. Her oven was only three months old, but she noticed that the temperature was about 25 degrees lower. After the quarantine, she called a professional to repair her device. But first, she decided to put it on a self-cleaning cycle. Toward the end, there was a loud explosion and the inner glass on the door shattered inside the oven.
But Michelle Wheat’s oven explosion left shards scattered all over her kitchen. Like Truesdale, Wheat’s three-year-old oven was not turned on at the time. Fortunately, none of her four young children were hurt by the glass. And like Truesdale, her oven was a Frigidaire; Cheryl’s was a Bosch, but other brands also have reports of glass doors exploding. In fact, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has received approximately 450 reports of this event since 2019.
Unfortunately, the three women had trouble with the manufacturers after the incident. Truesdale’s oven was still under warranty, but the Frigidaire technician blamed the family for the explosion, even though the oven was off. So they had to pay out of pocket for a new door. Fortunately, Bosch replaced Cheryl’s oven after NBC contacted her for comments.
Meanwhile, Wheat’s oven was already out of warranty, and she had to pay the technician $100 just for him to tell her that the glass was broken and they would need to replace it for $314, costing the family. Frigidaire suggested that Wheat purchase an extended warranty in case this happened again. « This shouldn’t have happened, » said the frustrated mother of six. « That was the point I wanted to make clear. »
What causes oven doors to shatter? « There are two scenarios for why the oven glass can break spontaneously, » says Mark Meshulam of Chicago Window Expert. “There’s a family of oven glass, which is soda-lime glass, which is glass used for windows and is quickly heated and cooled to be tempered. This type of glass is used for oven doors. Another type is borosilicate glass. It is more common in laboratory glassware or in the old Pyrex glass, and it handles heat and cold much better. So the transition to soda-lime glass has seen an increase in these types of fractures because it’s not as tolerant of the thermal cycles the glass will go through.”
But explosions are also likely caused by a nickel sulfide inclusion, a small defect in the glass. « It’s only a tenth of a millimeter in diameter. This little ball has some strange properties, » said Meshulam, adding: « Over time, it struggles to escape. And sometimes the high-temperature event, like an oven self-cleaning cycle, can end up causing that spontaneous failure that was already there. »
Exploding ovens: why glass doors shatter and what to do if it happens to you – Which? News