Hey everyone, it’s been a while since I was last here.
Anyways - I went full retard and bought a used oven, and basically it’s a commercial oven, marked 220V 12A. It was supplied with bare leads, and I figured I could use one of my spare AC outlets to power it. Said and done, I hooked it up, by buying a plug and hooking up the wires to that, but the performance of the oven is pathetic at best. In 1.5h it’s heated up a little bit, but still way below 100 degrees C. Other reasons for disappointment is that the light is buzzing and sparkling when activated (button-activated light), making me think it’s running on too low voltage and/or the wrong frequency.
Furthermore, it’s not grounded, which to me feels a bit wrong (but then again, I am close to clueless when it comes to AC electricity). There’s no obvious grounding point, and here’s how the whole thing is wired up: http://i.imgur.com/QmS7tqR.jpg (also, yes, that’s a sink in the bottom right corner, I like to live like a local)
Could it be that 2-phase 220V isn’t exactly right for this oven? How should it really be wired up? If someone knows an electrician who actually knows his stuff, I might have some wiring work for him, if it isn’t as simple as hooking it up to an AC socket.
Firstly, did you witness it working correctly before purchasing? Secondly, how did you wire it to the AC socket, are you sure you’re not wired to 110 and ground rather than 110 and 110?
Truth be told, I did not see it work properly in the store, stupidly enough. They offered a three month warranty though, that I have on paper, at least.
Also, since it’s the NEMA 5-20P socket, I did not wire anything to the ground pin, that I’m sure of. Naturally, it might not be wired up properly in the socket itself, I don’t have a multimeter to verify.
It does have to separate thermostats and dual resistors, but I would assume that the oven would heat up fully to desired temperature on either. Right now it seems like it’s just running on 110V, so it never builds up any heat (and the lamp sort of almost fires up, but not quite.) Gotta get a multimeter and double check.
Right… Making progress now that I have a multimeter. Turns out the oven was running on 110V, as the socket isn’t wired up properly - one wire is live, the other one is dead (and no ground).
I do have another 5-20P socket, which IS wired up and live on both wires, giving 220V, so I guess I’ll have to move the oven and get myself a big fat lead.
Rather odd, it’s not a broken wire if the “dead” one was acting as a neutral for the 110V so presumably someone purposely wired it as a 110V?? I’d check back to the breaker box and see what exactly is going to that socket especially now that you have a multimeter. It may be easier to wire it correctly rather than move the oven and run an extension lead.
Yeah, you’re right about the “dead” one being wired up as neutral. The breaker box looks like it’ll be a lot of work to even open up, and nothing is documented, so I think I’ll leave it.
I was thinking I’d move the oven to the other corner anyway (right beneath the ceiling socket), so I’ll go buy some wire tomorrow and set it up there instead, gonna build a small kitchenette around it.
