Since several of you have asked, this is what an oven vent filter looks like! The filter itself is the honeycomb-looking thing; it’s made of rough ceramic and so far as I can tell functions a bit like a smokescrubber, catching particles. An oven needs a vent for proper heat circulation, and that vent needs a filter so cooking smoke doesn’t taint the food–even a small amount can ruin a whole meal. You can use your oven without the filter in the vent…but I wouldn’t recommend it for stuff that could produce even a little smoke. (Like bacon. Mmmm, bacon.)
We found out we needed a new filter as the Princess was baking a cake, when the old one literally fell out. The vent tube itself is held by a couple screws and that flared lip–in this picture the tube itself is upside down, it’s supposed to be fixed to the roof of the oven interior. There are ways to get the filter back in if it’s just cracked, but unfortunately ours was too broken by its trip through the wire racks. So a whole new vent tube/filter was necessary; there are tabs on the inside that hold the ceramic disc and, wouldn’t you know, a new disc wouldn’t fit.
Cue about two hours’ worth of weeding through useless AI-tainted swamps before finally finding out what precisely we needed, then a trip to the manufacturer’s website for the precise part number and ordering info, another half-hour of drilling through that mess, and finally I found the part number…only to discover it was out of stock. A month and a half later it was finally back in stock, and it took another long while to be shipped.
Guess how long it took to take the old vent tube out and put the shiny new one in? Less than seven minutes. It would’ve been less than five if I’d been able to take the oven door off like I once saw the appliance repairman do, but I felt like that was just a way to create more problems. And now the oven is back to full use.
I absolutely needed the dopamine hit from this victory; it’s been a heckuva week. And I still have a character to kill in the Sekrit Projekt today–it would’ve been yesterday, but so much intervened. And to be honest I wasn’t ready to let go. This particular fictional person deserves better than what they’re getting; sadly, that’s life. Even in fiction.
See you next week, my dears.