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Electric cooker?

Hotpoint EW91 Halogen Double Oven on the display a symbol of a key appeared left of the clock. This has never happend before I had to disconnect from the electric to clear it can you tell me what it meand.
Barbara, February 2009
If it's anything like my cooker and I think most cooker clocks are very similar to one another - when you do cleaning it's quite easy to set the delay timer by accident.

You may have set the oven to wait for 8 hours and cook for five minutes - or even the other way round - without realising it.

The Key says it's locked out on a timed programme. Cycling the electricity and resetting the clock always fixes it on our cooker - every couple of months or so.

Quite why they put this feature on cookers i don't know - timed cooking is perhaps as few as one in ten thousand and these timers cause no end of problems and cost silly-money to replace when they go wrong - it's marketing managers gone mad in my view - insisting on having sexy and unnecessary features on their products. They should, at a very minimum, be castigated.

Peccavi, February 2009
link Click here to see other fixes for Hotpoint EW91.