GE Profile Stove turning on by itself

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Prior to moving in our house, we replaced the old coil burner stove with a nice fancy GE Profile Induction range - their PHS930SL2SS model. I grew up with a coil burner and don’t really want to relive the experience! Overall, we’ve been happy with the stove, but we’ve had several issues addressed under warranty - mostly minor.

Minor issues:

However, we have had one major issue with the stove – while using the oven, the induction burners on the left side will turn themselves on. When this happens, the burner controls for the misbehaving burners won’t work reliably. In order to turn the burners off you have to engage the “lock mode” on the stove, which has the unfortunate but understandable side effect of turning off the oven. This has happened many times over the past year - and has persisted even after a new control panel.

A video of the issue occurring:

In the video, the burners pop on and off – but we’ve also had them turn on and set to a particular level. When this happens it’s difficult to turn them off unless you use the “panel lock”.

We have noticed that this state is most likely to occur when we’re cooking food which lets off moisture in the oven using convection mode - roasted potatoes are a frequent culprit. Often times there will be a lot of steam which comes out of the oven when you open it. There are ventilation holes on the left side of the stove directly above the oven opening. Our theory is that this hot moist air comes up through the ventilation holes and condenses on the backside of the control panel. The condensed water droplets can cause phantom touches on the capacitive touch screen.

We contacted GE about this and have filed a report with the Consumer Product Safety Commission since this is dangerous - if there is a pan on the stove, it could heat uncontrollably. Just before the holidays, GE Appliance (a division of Haier) Corporate reached out. I provided them with all of our findings. It will be interesting to see what they come back with in the New Year.

I’ll update this post as new information comes.

Update <2021-01-23 Sat>

GE Appliances got in touch with me a short while ago and they have replaced the stove with their latest production model free of charge. We haven’t had a chance to use it much yet - but it seems fine so far.

The most interesting part about it is that the new “Air Fryer” mode requires a WiFi connection. It’s not clear why this is, as there are no extra sensors or anything like that used. It worries me that they could shut off whatever service it’s using in the future and brick that feature.

I’ll try to put a more thorough review together sometime soon.