david j. scherba

When we bought our house, one of the most interesting (and commented upon) features is our late-1950s era electric range, GE model J 406P2WH 14.4. I can only assume the 14.4 refers to the V.32 modem for unit telemetry (*cough*). Meet The General:

• 

• 

This thing is a beast: 40 inches wide (difficult to replace!), two ovens, lots of chrome, a bunch of ganged push buttons (kindly placed away from little fingers), a cool looking timer/clock and none of this fancy self-cleaning garbage. If you want to clean The General, you’re going to need a few hours, oven cleaner, and elbow grease. Good ventilation is a plus.

The General has been pretty good to us over the 5 years we’ve used it, but there have been two incidents of note. Around 2016, and near to when we were preparing a major holiday meal, the oven stopped heating up. An appliance repair person was called, some poking was done, and an ancient terminal than had broken loose was replaced. A couple years later, also in proximity to a major holiday meal (I know, right?), some blue smoke was released when I was cooking and the cause was the same. Given the frequency of failure, I took the opportunity to purchase some high temperature wire and terminals and replaced the [likely original] wiring at the back of the unit.

A couple weeks ago, our oven failed again (no holiday this time, just COVID-19). Upon looking inside, the lower oven element (bake unit) was clearly in bad shape:

The good news is that this is a very easy DIY repair if you can find a compatible part. Given the age of the stove, this wasn’t very easy as the range does not show up in online databases and documentation is hard to come by. The manual we do have, while very 1950s and hilarious, is basically useless:

• 

• 

To find a compatible part, I looked at the following criteria:

• Element [and oven] width
• Element [and oven] length
• Distance between element connectors
• Distance between element attachment screws (3.5″)
• Style of bake unit attachment (hinged)
• Terminal types (1/4″ push-on/spade)
• Wattage rating (the installed unit listed 3000W)

I then did a bunch of image searching, restricting myself to GE parts, to find the best match, a GE WB44X10009, and ordered one on Amazon (the local appliance part store was out of stock).

This is actually a slightly smaller part with a lower wattage rating, but that basically means that things may take a bit longer to warm up. I’m not sure what the wattage rating of the original part was, so it’s possible this is actually closer to the specified part. I purchased a GE OEM (original) part as the quality control on third-party manufacturers is variable and the cost difference (< $20) wasn’t worth it; the entire repair cost of approximately $40 won’t even cover an appliance repair service call, let alone parts and labor.

To perform the replacement:

1. Turned off the circuit breaker for the range. If a professional electrician has worked on your house, the appropriate breaker will be labeled on the door of the breaker box. We live in an approximately 100 year old house that has been rewired at least twice… so the labels we do have are suspect, and many are missing. The good news is that an electric range will be a large (40 amp, often double-width) breaker making it easy to find. Verify that you’ve found the correct breaker by turning on burners, lights, etc… and verifying that the range is indeed off before performing maintenance. Remember to turn everything off so you don’t inadvertently leave a burner on after you complete the job.
2. Remove the old oven element. This is as simple as removing the bottom oven rack, lifting the element up a little bit, and using a 1/4″ nut driver to remove the two sheet metal screws holding it in. As mentioned previously, our oven element uses push on terminals, so the wires disconnect with a simple tug (a standard screwdriver might help if you need some leverage on the terminal). Make sure the wires don’t fall back into the oven… ours are of generous length, see my note above rewiring above.
3. Clean the oven a bit, you might as well.
4. Insert the new element reversing the steps in (2)
5. Turn on the circuit breaker and test things out.

Success!