Christmas breakdowns......stuf f

My Magimix problem is nothing compared to some stories here!

I hope that everyone is warm with working central heating, full with co-operating ovens and can see what they're doing with lovely electricity.

As has been said, we have wonderful lives compared to many, despite modern-day problems.

The only failure in our household over Christmas was the software, very software!

I meant to turn the turkey on before we went to church on Christmas morning and I completely forgot. I remembered halfway through he service, but as we were 3 miles from home there was nothing I could do. In the end we just had to miss coffee and mince pies after the service and rush home and turn it on an hour and a half late. By judicious temperature raising I recovered 30 minutes of the lost time and we had a bigger breakfast to see us through.

I've now discovered why my oven temp dropped at mid day. It was because one of the pieces of foil I'd used to line the bottom of the oven had floated upwards and was clinging to the fan at the back of the oven. You gotta larf really, me, Mr me, other family members, all equally puzzled at the length of time it was taking to crisp up the roasties.

My oven door dropped off midway through cooking Christmas lunch. The handle on my small chest freezer snapped in half and I had to lever the lid open with a palette knife. The fluorescent light in my kitchen blew its starter - got a new one 10 mins before Wilkos closed on Christmas Eve! One more, my television aerial attached to my the tallest chimney slide down to roof level in the high winds, so that was the only snow storm seen at Christmas was on the TV screen.

Did anyone else find their oven temp dropped just after mid day on Christmas Day?

Yep, power shower gave up Christmas Eve.

Central heating and boiler packed in on 23rd,engineer ordered parts and back on 24th,parts replaced,all fine,till 2pm,packed in again !!!,Engineer back in 9am Christmas Day,(kudos for coming out then),new control board needed so no heating or hot water for Christmas Day and I am hosting dinner for Daughter and 3 kids and a friend,portable heater on and plenty kettle boiling to get hot water,first thing on Boxing Day the engineer arrived with new control board and hooray heating and hot water ??,Well done to the engineer ,great service from Scottish Gas ?

On Christmas Eve and busy preparing for guests (18!) for the next two days, my Maximix jammed and became unusable.

Our previous model worked perfectly for 15 or so years and this one (five years old) was really an affectation - just to match out new shiny granite worktops. Perhaps the longevity of appliances has reduced in those years?

I knew I should have kept the old one 'just in case'. That'll teach me!

Last week, the week before Christmas, we had to have a repairer out for both the dishwasher and to fix a leak under the kitchen sink. Brilliant timing! Also, the dishwasherman insisted on doing four electrical checks where he over loaded the system and destroyed the tiny brain in the BT phone and knocked the BT box out so we had to replace them. Doh!

However, compared with the awful scenes in Aleppo we consider it small fry and that, actually, we are blessed.

Well at least you can replace stuff in the sales, which start now almost before the Christmas calamity happens. Not much comfort though.

Boiler packed up the day before Christmas Eve. Managed to get an engineer to fix it thank goodness.

We lost ours (fan asst + regular double-oven) a couple of Christmases ago. Luckily my stepson who lives opposite our back garden has the same kind/size, so all was saved!

If you have an electric one (mid-priced model), be careful how you clean it.

DO NOT SPRAY THE OVEN LIGHT COVER WITH ANY KIND OF CLEANER... it gets in around the edges and shorts out the electrics in the oven. So no heat, no fan, nothing, dead as a doornail! The call-out to fix was almost as expensive as replacing the oven (which we did a couple of years later).

Cooker element packed up this year and the water went off Christmas Day morning!
Thank you Thames Water for working flat out to save Christmas for South West London before lunch time

What a timely discussion. Yesterday morning, hoovering before guests arrived, the vacuum cleaner gave a sudden cough, then a strangled cry, then smoked and died. We couldn't get it started again. Nothing was caught, so I'm hoping it only needs a good clean. (Knock on wood!)

I remember one Christmas Eve when we lived in the back of beyond and the electricity went off in the village (geese flying into overhead cables we were told!) and it was off for 23 hours.

No lights, no heating, no hot water, no oven.

A nightmare.

Washing machine is on the blink due to switch gone. Glass fitting in ceiling in utility room decided to come crashing down last night. Gas man just got here in time to see to boiler, which was coming on at all the wrong times. Other then that, ok so far, but anything could happen today with family coming over for lunch and tea.

We've had the heating go at Christmas, too. My worst was when I was expecting 16 for a sit-down lunch in the summer and the oven conked out. Fortunately, I still had a portable countertop oven which I could plug in outdoors and cook in front of my guests! There was only room for one roast at a time, though, so I did a pork roast earlier and served it cold, the beef was cooked just before they came and a large salmon trout in foil was cooked when they arrived.

Our boiler decided to pack in a couple of weeks ago and was practically rebuilt by the engineer who came out twice and spent hours changing every conceivable part - yesterday its gone on the blink again and goes off like a bomb (or the old fashioned geezers we used to have) so it will be yet another call tomorrow - can't be much more they can mend on it!!

Well, Turkey went in at 9am for a quick blast of heat, then I turned the heat down about 9.30. Off I toddled to open presents and returned to check on the bird about an hour later. Oven was strangely cool and the turkey still pale and raw. The thermostat was on the blink. We spent the next 30 minutes faffing about to no avail. Then I remembered that we had a large but portable oven lurking in a store room. We had inherited it years ago but had decided to keep it, "just in case!"
The sight of its replacement clearly frightened the faulty cooker because we gave it one last chance and it worked perfectly. Lunch was a tad late but it went down well. ??

& I thought I'd had bad luck when TV packed up less than 2 weeks before Christmas, DD had a TV of mine which I no longer needed, so quick dash over to DD's & back in time to change for Lunch Club. 2 days later DD rang to say a friend had a 32" TV approx 4 years old, working but no longer needed - not a total disaster in the grand scheme of things!!

There's always someone worse off than you.........

Yesterday morning our gas boiler decided to leak water everywhere. Had to clear out te contents of the cupboard where it lives as everything saturated. We called out the emergency plumber who could come until 5.30 but at least he was able to come. He drained everything down to stop the leak and said the boiler had died! No heating or hot water and we both have stinking colds. Just as well we are at our daughters for Xmas. Ps the coffee machine has packed up too

How odd that this thread should pop up now! Everything going well today until suddenly the oven (Neff only bought two months ago) blew, blowing all the fuses, tv off, phones off, wifi off etc. It wouldn't recover, whatever we did it just blew everything. I rang our neighbours who, luckily, had finished their lunch early so let us put the turkey, roast potatoes, stuffing, parsnips, etc in their oven! Thank goodness for neighbours.

We eventually had a bad tempered lunch, not up to my husband, the chef's, usual standard but we got there. We have my renowned super duper buffet (even if I do say so myself!) for 7 tomorrow but the gammon will have to go in the Reloska and everything else will have to be prepared any other way. Neff will hear from us on Tuesday!

A few years ago my oven went bang and died just as i was goingvto cook a roast meal for 12 (family) on New Years Day.! Luckily the top (small) oven still worked nd i just managed to get the meat in there. I did all the veg on the hob (mashed instead of roast potatoes!) and Id made the pudding earlier to eat cold so I managed somehow but it was very difficult!

As got out of car in supermarket carpark loud hissing noise that discovered was tyre going down great timing. So I had to battle alone doing the Cristmas shop while DH changed it with help of another broken down chap that then gave jump start to.