Kitchen Aid oven "remove probe" problem revisited

Almost two years ago, I wrote a post entitled Remove probe? It's hard to find a kitchen aid at KitchenAid.com. The main point of the post was that when I encountered a problem with our Kitchen Aid oven, I found the answer to the question at a third-party site, rather than at Kitchen Aid's own site.

The specific problem? A message that suddenly pops up on the oven telling you to remove the temperature probe, even when you aren't using a temperature probe.

The solution, as documented at howtomendit.com, is to dry out moisture from the oven. This takes care of the false reading.

Incidentally, I have subsequently found this same advice at two posts at fixya.com.

So why am I talking about a 2009 post? Because that post recently received a comment:

I found this by googling, and am grateful. We have had other issues with this oven--we didn't have an oven for 6 weeks while KitchenAid misdiagnosed a major problem, sent out the wrong part, took forever to send the right part, etc. We are tenants, but we do own a home elsewhere, and you can be sure I won't ever buy KitchenAid.


In my reply, I wondered if other brands were any better.

As it turns out, this very question was addressed in the second of the two fixya links that I found. After providing his advice, Norm Dickerson went on to say:

Also as an aside, I work on all brands of ovens and we find that the Kitchen Aid models have the fewest repairs and the greatest reliability, everybody has design defects and most of the other brands have deliberately built in these defects for faster replacement. The only advice on the Kitchen Aid units that I recommend is that when you do replace it that you buy a separate oven and seperate microwave oven. Most microwave ovens are only lasting 8 to 15 years before major repairs, yet the ovens last 30 to 40 years.

Granted that this is just one opinion, but it's interesting to note that despite the problems encountered by various people, at least Dickerson thinks that KitchenAid is still the most reliable oven around.

But we still have the issue of having to go to a third party, rather than KitchenAid's own website, for advice. Since a couple of years had passed, I returned to KitchenAid's website. There's still no discussion area on the site, so I ended up at the FAQs page. A search for the word "probe" yielded three results, one of which described the tempreature probe but did not address errors.

But I did learn the following:

The health of some birds is extremely sensitive to the fumes given off during the Self-Cleaning cycle. Exposure to the fumes may result in death to certain birds. Always move birds to another closed and well-ventilated room.

Remember this when you cook your Thanksgiving turkey. Cleaning the oven beforehand could kill the bird.