Better luck NEFF TIME
Door blimey! Kevin encounters some appliance defiance and realises way too late it’s best to keep your mitts off the oven
We have quite a clever double oven. It’s a Neff, founded in Germany in 1877 by Mr Neff. But while it’s “quite clever”, it’s not a genius.
Why? There are three independent glass panels in each of the oven doors. But oil, juices or hot fat can spill down openings at the top of the door and leave ugly stains on the inside of the glass. To clean these, you have to take off the oven door, take apart the door itself, remove the glass, clean, then put it all back together again.
A damned nuisance, but there are online videos and clear instructions on how to do this. We had stains inside both doors of our double oven. So it’s a challenging job, but I thought I’d give it a shot while Linda was out for the afternoon.
I spent an hour taking off the top oven door, taking it apart, cleaning it and putting it back together. The lower oven’s different. It has a clever slide-in door; the mechanism’s tricky, but my confidence was up. And after another hour I was 95 percent there. Just had to put the door back onto the bottom oven and voilà... Linda’s man turns out to be a domestic hero.
I opened the locks. The door slid onto the rolls but wouldn’t close smoothly. So I lifted the door back up off the rollers, and WHAM! Hell of a noise. The hinges snapped shut without the door in them. No way of getting the door on now! There’s a warning about this but no instruction on how to fix it. The manual just says you risk injury mucking around with the hinges. Call after-sales service.
When Linda arrived home, all she saw was an oven with no door on it. It’s still not on it. I’ve just rung a real man, an appliance technician. He’ll be here in a week. Linda appreciates I did my best. But that’s hardly Superman status.
It was Neff who made the first microwave oven in 1957 and more recently the first induction cooker – both technological miracles in my mind. If only the miracleworker had gone on to think, “Let’s make it impossible for grease to get down the inside of oven windows.” Or, “Let’s make an easy way to clean inside the glass.” But no.
Perhaps the miracle-worker never had to clean the oven.
When Linda arrived home, all she saw was an oven with no door on it. I’ve just rung a real man, an appliance technician