New Samsung range temperature fluctuation

Question

My Samsung range (still under warranty) fluctuates as much as 50 degrees Farenheit in my personal experience. The technician has been here 3 times. He claims it is normal for the oven temperature to drop as much as 60°F while baking. I called Samsung and they claim the actual range is 90°F. I am a baker and this is too wide a range for baking cakes! (The range has a gas cooktop and electric oven). I can't believe they can sell a range with such a wide range, and I can't bake with this. To get a successful bake on a cake, I have to reset the temperature every 3 to 5 minutes.

Answer 1

Temperature fluctuations like that are not normal. You have one of two things going on:

1. The oven is faulty. This is simple in principle, Samsung need to diagnose it and fix it. In practice this isn't so simple as my own experience with Samsung's support was absolutely terrible

2. You could have a problem with the electrical supply. The oven could be fine, it may not be getting enough power. There could be several reasons for this like bad wiring, a faulty outlet, or a setup problem at the electrical board. None of these are good, and some are dangerous: bad wiring + high draw appliance = fire risk

I highly recommend getting an electrician in to test your system as it will ensure safety and give you a definite answer as to whether it's a problem with the oven or not.

Answer 2

Not an answer, but too long for a comment:

Older ovens basically had controls so that the oven shut off after it got some point above the set temperature, then let itself cook off to below that temp, then heated back up to the higher temperature. This type of oven will almost always be off from the desired temperature, but +/- 90°F sounds… not good. You might be able to get the oven to cycle less with the addition of thermal mass (pizza stones or similar), but that also means that it’s going to spend longer times at each extreme.

It wasn’t until we got ‘fuzzy logic’ controls that instead of just off/on, they’d do things like ‘set the heating to 50% when you’re close to the desired temperature’ or similar to try to maintain a specific temperature rather than just bounce around near that temperature. But those require microchips which have been in short supply the last few years. (If the oven has an LCD screen to set the temperature or even as a clock, it has microchips, but may not always have fuzzy logic)

It’s also worth mentioning that there have been reports of some ovens that set a timer for preheating, rather than when the oven is actually up to temperature, so may need extra time when the kitchen is cold. Adding thermal mass makes this even worse, as the oven might not be close to the desired temperature by the set time.

There’s also the possibility of a bad sensor or calibration issue, and the oven is consistently off on its temperature. This might be able to be adjusted by a technician if it always skews 50°F colder than normal. Of this is the 90° of error that they consider acceptable, I would be very worried about their products.

It’s possible that the 90° is cumulative between those two types of error. If it’s 30° inaccurate (always cold, for instance), and has a 60° precision issue (swings as it stays near the set temperature), then together they add up to 90°. But that still seems like a huge error rate to me.

You might think that you could get a probe thermometer to monitor this from outside the oven… but from experience I can tell you that a kitchen thermometer often aren’t rated for these temperatures. They might list ‘high’ when they get significantly above the boiling point of water. (And they might melt parts if put into a very hot oven (without being in food) for long times)