I recently moved and discovered that my owen seemed to be actijg funny. I had owned the same brand before but this one wouldn’t esrm itself up enough tonorr-heat until 40-60 minutes. Normal ovens pre-heat in 10-12z
I was about to call the repair number in manual when i noticed a passing mention to ‘quick heat mode’. I dug further and found then by navigating a bizarre maze of menus, it is possible to enable this (non-default) setting that decreases the preheat time 4x. In my testing thr time to preheat to 400 degreeseent from 40 monutes (unhesrd of with even okd stoves!) to 10 minutes (normal).
My question is what is the most likly purpose from from fhid design of hiding the ‘quick heat’ mode that would evn have been standard on any oven from the past few decades. Is it possible raising heat to 400 slowly is more energt efficient than quickly doing it so?
My guess… baking pastries… requires low temp starting… just a guess.
What brand and model of oven is this?
Ovens can pre-heat quite quickly but tthat’s really just heating up the air inside. As soon as you open the door, all that hot air is gone. to really pre-heat, you need to get the entire cooking box - walls, insulation, glass in the oven door, everything - up to temp. This takes time. This strong heat right at the start helps for the baking of certain breads and pastries than need to convert water to steam to promote rise.
Are you in a house or apartment? In North America, we typically use split-phase 240V which gives us 240V between the phases for stoves, water heaters etc. and 120V for everything else. Commercial including high rises usually has 3 phase which still gives us 120V from each phase to ground but 208V between any two phases.
Many applicances are rated to work on both 240V and 208V but will heat much slower on the lower volatage. My parents moved into a condo from a house and my mother constantly complains about how much longer it takes to heat the oven to temp.
Slow heating certainly isn’t more energy efficient. The total energy cost to preheat an oven is the amount of energy to increase the temperature of the oven, plus the amount of energy that leaks out of the oven. The former term is a constant, and the latter will be greater the longer time the oven is at temperature.
Fast heating might wear out the heating elements more quickly, but heating elements last a long time, and even if they do wear out (more often, they get broken by dropping something on them, or the like), they’re fairly cheap to replace, so I wouldn’t think that’d be significant.