My Superpower

I’m pretty sure after the last several months that my super power is being able to get into unique, problematic, complicated, and convoluted situations when things really should be simple and straight forward. I’d much rather have my husband’s superpower of being able to fall asleep at the drop of a hat.

My lovely stove situation? You knew I couldn’t possibly be done, right?

Our electrician comes out today to unhook our old stove and connect that wire into an outlet so we can plug in our new stove. He asked about the specs of the new stove, just to make sure he installs the correct outlet set up. I pull up the specs from the vendor’s website and lo and behold! The stove I picked out? It’s not standard!!

Even weirder? It has an amp rating that our guy had never seen in a stove and would require a whole new wire and breaker. Even then, he wasn’t certain that there was an outlet that would work with that amp level. The norm for most stoves is 40. 50 isn’t unheard of, but not exactly common. This one? Over 60.

In talking with the guy, he said that if it actually ran at that, when you ran all the different parts of your stove at the same time, you’d probably start tripping your breaker.

No where in any of the reviews I read did I run across tripping breakers or issues with electrical or hook up as a problem. When we bought our unit, the salesperson only talked about the different types of hook up we might have and the type of cord needed to make it work with those hook ups, none of which were outside of any kind of a normal range.

We spent a lot of time discussing options and different scenarios. This guy was absolutely floored by the situation as he’d never seen anything like it (shockingly, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard those words from someone’s mouth that was here to do work on some thing or another) even though he’s been doing this kind of thing for years.

I even got on the phone with the vendor and they pulled up the owner’s manual to see if there was anything in there that indicated we needed to do something as extensive as it was looking like we needed to do to get this to work. Everything pointed to standard cords and outlets. She even said that they’d never heard of any issues and didn’t know about this needing something specific for hook up even though the amps were clearly stated on the specs page on their website.

We finally settled on just installing an outlet on our current line, getting the new stove delivered and keeping our fingers crossed. With as many reviews as I’ve combed through and the experience of the salesperson (this is not a brand new model and has been out for several years) with all the sales of this unit, it is apparently not a major problem or it would have come up somewhere.

Our electrician had to run out and get the box he needed to convert this to an outlet. He came back and got it all fixed for us in no time after more than an hour of just trying to figure out what we needed to do. He, completely on his own without any prompting at all, also grabbed the necessary cord to turn our existing stove to a plug instead of a hardwire so we could at least use the oven until the new stove gets here on Sunday. And he didn’t charge us to do it.

I was absolutely blown away. We’d never worked with this company before and didn’t know what to expect on service, but they could get to us in a reasonable amount of time, so we crossed our fingers and hoped they’d at least be decent. They are SO much better that just decent.

While this was yet another totally messed up day in a long string of totally messed up days. This guy brightened it considerably. And earned all future business and a totally loyal customer because he was awesome. We have a few things we still need done in the basement, so that isn’t just a sparkly comment without substance.

I’m also extremely impressed with how well our salesperson has handled all of this and helped out. So, even in this chaos there are some silver linings.

As of right now, I have a working oven to get me through until Sunday when the new stove is supposed to be delivered.

But… I’m so disappointed in my superpower. I could have really used the sleep one. Or one that allowed me to snap my fingers and have my house be clean instantly. No. I had to get the power to find unique chaos in the most basic situations.