A Kenmore Oven That Broils but Will Not Bake, and Other Splits

Kenmore oven not heating but broiler works: read the split

Almost nobody volunteers this, and it is the single most useful thing an owner can say about an oven that is not heating: does the broiler still work?

An oven cavity carries two heat sources — one at the roof for broiling, one under the floor for baking — and each has its own switched circuit from the control. They share a box and almost nothing else.

So an oven that broils happily and will not bake has already proved a great deal. Power is arriving. The control is switching. The door switch is behaving. Temperature sensing is working well enough to run a cycle. The problem is in the bake half alone, and that is usually a single component.

The reverse split proves the same things about the broil half.

What fails, per half

On an electric oven, the element itself. It fails open, and often visibly: a blister, a bright spot, a break, or a patchy glow along its length. Elements are consumables, they are inexpensive on every one of these ranges, and the labor is straightforward because they mount at the back of the cavity.

On a gas oven, the ignitor, and the mechanism is worth understanding because it explains a confusing symptom. The ignitor has to get hot *and* draw enough current to open the gas safety valve. As it ages it still glows — sometimes brightly — but stops pulling enough current to open the valve. So you see it working, you smell nothing, and the oven never lights. A glowing ignitor is not proof of a healthy one.

When neither half heats

Now the shared parts are in question: the supply to the appliance, the control board, the door lock circuit on a range that has one, and the temperature sensor.

The sensor is worth its own line. On a Frigidaire-built 790 there is a published code for an open probe, and another for the oven reading higher temperatures than it should — the manufacturer's own name for that second one is thermal runaway. Both are the appliance saying that its temperature information has stopped being trustworthy, which is a reason to stop using it rather than to work around it.

Heats, but wrongly

A different complaint that arrives under the same words. Everything works, and cakes take an hour and a half, or the top burns while the middle stays raw.

Three usual causes. Calibration drift, which most of these ovens allow you to correct from the control panel. A sensor reading a few degrees off, which is a part rather than a setting. And a door seal that has hardened, which lets heat out continuously and is the cheapest of the three by a distance.

Test it before assuming: an oven thermometer on the middle shelf, preheated for a full twenty minutes rather than until the beep. The beep on most of these ranges means the air has reached temperature, not the cavity walls, and a cake put in at the beep goes into an oven that is not ready.

What the three digits change here

Less about the mechanism, more about what the machine can tell you and where the parts come from.

A 790 is Frigidaire-built and has a published code set, including the door-lock family that appears after a self-clean cycle. A 362 is GE-built. A 911 is Roper-built and publishes nothing at all — its own documentation is symptom-based, so an owner searching for a code list is searching for something that was never written.

Knowing which you have decides whether a silent display is a missing feature or a missing message.