Now I'm cooking with gas

I recently related a story about my own earlier adventures with gas (as in heating/cooking) to a friend.  I'll try to put in a short recap of that story down below too, but in the meantime the information directly below is in regards to a new oven that was recently purchased and installed in my home.  In order to save money on the installation I got help doing that part from my father (bless him!) who remains a bit of a jack of all trades, including handiman.

Thanks to problems with the LP gas we get at our home (which I still suspect has caused problems with the furnace in my home as well as coincidently causing grief for our oven which failed after approximately 3 years of service) and/or just because the scratch and dent oven we had been using decided to fail completely (it got to a point where it refused to ignite), my family needed a new oven.  We had been using a toaster oven that my wife purchased and it worked well though was too small to cook larger items in.  (The bigger hassle with it was trying to find cookie sheets or similar things small enough to fit into the limited space inside.)

My in-laws were incredibly generous and sprung for the new oven for us as an early Christmas present for this year.  The last oven (the scratch and dent one) had been purchased by my parents as a Christmas a few years (3 or 4 at most) to replace the one that came in the home when we bought it.  The original one had lasted several years actually, a decent feat considering that it was the most basic gas oven you could ever find.  (I know, I saw one just like it at Sears when shopping for a new oven.)  The scratch and dent one was nice enough, but was also a fairly basic model.  It was one of the first models to include "sealed burners," and had the first generation of that type of feature.  Later models (including the ones we just shopped for) using sealed burners allow the user to remove the ring around the burner and get down to a much smaller orifice that is sealed.  That was something that was very frustrating before because the older "sealed" burners still allowed liquids to get down into crevices around the burners that eventually fowled them up and were impossible to clean.

Anyway, my wife and I shopped around a little (Best Buy and Sears, as well as some online shopping at Lowes and Home Depot) for new ovens, found one with a reasonable feature set at a reasonable price and then (with help from my in-laws) proceeded to purchase same.  We inquired at the time how much the fee would be for installation, and I knew that we'd need to convert the oven from natural gas (the default) to LP (what we use here in my home).  The fee just for the install would have been approximately $165, plus approximately $65 just to do the conversion.  A bit more than I was looking for, and certainly enough to politely ask my dad for a hand to get the install done and save the $$$ that would have been spent on that service.

The new oven was delivered on the promised date, and my dad came up the next day to help get the installation done (actually to do most of the installation).  I've had earlier misadventures with gas in hooking up a heater that I didn't quite hook up correctly.  Enough of a misadventure to know not to go messing with gas. :-p  My dad, on the other hand, is a decent handiman and knows when things have been hooked up right.

So, we started with the conversion work to get the burners converted (easy enough, just replace the nozzle heads), and worked on the regulator conversion and broiler element conversion.  In doing the oven conversion we went over the instructions and found ourselves a bit confused at instructions that seemed to talk about a different oven than the one we were working on (instructions were for multiple models of the same series of oven).  My dad tried to make adjustments to the oven element but didn't find any adjustment to be made there.  The instructions clearly mentioned the broiler element, but seemed to not include any oven element for the model we were working on.

Got all of that stuff done, got the oven installed, tested the burners, tested the broiler element and such, and declared victory that night. The next day came and went and no time to use the oven. The following day came and went and when I got home from work I napped a little and then decided that it was time to break in the new oven to make some brownies.

Yummm, brownies. Especially triple chocolate chunk brownies. Good stuff.

Well, I turn on the oven and hear it ignite, and then see the flames literally firing up the sides of the oven (inside). Not just a pretty little yellow blueish glow, but flames. Flames like a char broiler. Flames like after you light up a grill using starter/lighter fluid. Big shooting flames.

Ooops, looks like we missed a step somewhere in that conversion from Natural Gas to LP gas.

In case you've never had to deal with things like this, when you get a "gas" oven it has to be setup as either a Natural Gas (the default in most cases) or LP (liquified/pressurized propane) gas. Natural gas is under less pressure and that being the case the openings/orifices that the gas flows through are typically bigger to let more gas flow through. If you don't convert the oven/stove properly than you wind up with bunsen burners and lots of flame baking/broiling.

It took me a little while to figure out what got missed along the way, but I did find the proper adjustment to reign in the amount of gas flowing through the oven burner. With that done I was able to finally make use of the new oven properly.

The brownies got made (and consumed), some cookies have been made and pies have been made for the early family thanksgiving dinner at my in-laws (early thanks to my brother-in-law's family being in town).

In anycase, it seems my adventures with "gas" heating/cooking just never quite end.