Zanussi ZCE-7700X smoking heavily despite cleaning

[sparksp]

I hope someone can help.

Our Zanussi ZCE-7700X (ser no 0070073) fan oven smokes when the oven is put to serious use, e.g. roasts.
Before Christmas, we called out an engineer and were rather embarrassed when he said we should read the instructions and run it at high temp for a few hours (it is a self-cleaner).
This seemed to do the trick at the time.

However, after repeating this procedure several times since – and last week doing a big manual clean of the top/bottom/racks/door – we found it smoking & smelling unacceptably again last Sunday. This was the first roast since it had last been run at high temperature.
Yesterday, therefore, my wife ran the oven at full temp all morning. The smell was so bad it made her sick! An interesting point is that the clean racks are now dirty since yesterday’s run.
She’s also noticed uneven cooking left-to-right on cakes and the like, and it seems sometimes to cook too fast (temperature too high? Although the thermostat light does go out when it’s hot).

I now have a dilemma – I suspect there’s just so much gunge in there it never burns off, but my wife now believes there is something fundamentally wrong with the cooker and wants a new one (£500 I’d rather not spend). I don’t want to spend £50 on calling the engineer out to be told the oven is dirty again 🙁

So what’s the answer? Is there something wrong with it that could be fixed, is there something fundamentally wrong with so we’re better off with a new one or is it just not clean? If the latter, is there any way of ever getting it clean?

Thanks!

[SJH]

Re: Zanussi ZCE-7700X smoking heavily despite cleaning

Hi, we have the same problem and I have concluded it’s a problem with electric ovens in general. A number of friends have reported the same problem with other makes of electric oven. I notice that Neff produce a smokeless roasting tin so presumably they aknowledge this problem too?
Best way to solve the problem seems to be to cook at a slightly lower temperature for longer. Stephen Hayward.

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