I’m not talking about slamming the oven door in anger with all one’s might. I mean losing grip on the oven door and letting it close uncontrolled. It shut hard, but not insanely hard. And it was a one-time thing … definitely not something of which we make a habit. Oven was working perfectly five minutes before the hard door closure.
For a visual, it’s a GE Built-In Gas Oven, this model. It’s roughly 15 years old … came with the house we bought in 2006. It had its igniter replaced in 2010.
So … what can a forceful door closure do to an oven? Mess up the igniter? Mess up the electronic controls somehow? The high-level symptoms are that the oven cannot pre-heat … but the broiler works fine. Cutting off the oven’s power for a few minutes, then switching it back on, had no effect.
Break a wire loose … are you handy enough to open the thing up and look? It’s 15 years old, these things happen. Think of how many times that door crashed back into place, all those heating and cooling cycles, grease and cat hair coating everything inside … maybe time to buy a new unit?
But first thing is a visual inspection, often enough you’ll be able to see what’s wrong and figure out if it’s worth fixing.
My first thought was that if the igniter is cheap, you could order a new one and then take go about taking the oven apart (or just replacing it to see what happens). It’s $65, so not cheap enough (IMO) to replace without diagnosing. But right on the page where you buy it, it specifically mentions that it’s very fragile.
A few things you could try are pulling the igniter out and taking a quick look at it (you might not even have to remove it for that). Does it look broken. If you have the tools, you can see if it’s getting voltage when it’s trying to lite the burner. I assume the gas is turning on, right?
If it’s easy to remove, a quick thing you can do is swap it with the broiler igniter, they’re identical. If the bottom burner turns on and the top one now doesn’t, you know it’s the igniter and since the oven works (just not the broiler), you don’t have to rush to buy a new one.