Indianapolis

$100

lawrence

Oh, I'd love to get one like that! 

It's a 1969-70 model. 

Yes Hans this is the type of range you should be cooking on in your kitchen, in fact you should have two of these next to each other in your kitchen, then think of all the great food you could turn out.

I always loved seeing the really big old houses that had two stoves and maybe two refrigerators next to each other in the days before these silly monster appliances. It really made much more sense, you can still buy two really good ranges for less than a 1/3 the price of some silly Viking piece of junk and then you would have two Self-Cleaning Ovens that actually work and eight burners that are actually appropriately sized for cooking in a home.

What does one of those look like?  I've only seen the ones with glass oven doors, so did they make Electri-Clean Flairs with solid doors?

FD introduced this first on a 30" free standing around two years after GE introduced this great feature about 1965. Self-Cleaning was about the best thing that ever happened to electric ovens, not only did this work saving feature really work, but the ovens baked much better [ much more even heat ] as a result of better insulation and used less power and kept the kitchen much cooler.

FD also used the Flair name on some 30" wide [ they also called these Twin 30s ] ranges with a top oven, the Flair versions had a top oven door that lifted up to open. The regular Flairs never got the SC oven feature, in fact this is a major reason that they faded from production, it was just not possible to insulate this type of oven well enough to make a SC oven out of it and people buying expensive ranges at this time usually wanted a SCO.

FDs first 30" and 40" SCOs and wall oven with EC were unbelievably complicated and as a result problem prone [ the same can be said about GE, WH and a few others first SCOs ]. Around 1969 FD and a few other companies like Thermador went to a new line voltage King-Seeley helium filled thromostat, that also used a hot-wire power relay. It was very interesting to note while every manufactures SCO worked the same way to burn food residue away by gradually heating the oven interior to around 800F they all did it with a different combination of the use of the bake and broil elements [ including some additional heating elements on some brands and designs ] they had to do this to get around patents that GE and others quickly placed on their designs.

The FD EC SCOs worked by applying 240 voltage to the broil element through a percentage switch that operated the broil element at about 80% power [ this allowed the oven to still clean well if it was connected to 208 power as the broil element would now run almost 100% of the time ]. The broil element had a catalytic converter above it near the oven vent to help burn away any smoke, meanwhile the bake element was connected to straight 120 volts which is constant on either 208 3 phase or 240 single phase power supply systems. This has the bake element putting out 1/4 the heat it would while baking [ about 650 watts ]. 

FDs clever trick in their SCO was a 1/4" thick plate of aluminum behind the inside of the oven door so the heat would evenly spread and assure complete cleaning of the entire heated area of the door. This was the reason that FD tried to get away from having a window in the door for so long [ and in my opinion almost no oven should have a window, they are usually just a dirty waste of power ]

I would say by a slight margin that FD SCOs did the best job of any SCO followed closely by GE-HP and Thermador, most other brands left more areas that were not completely cleaned.

John L.

The theory of burning off organic residue was long know to many scientists and other folks. What had to happen to have this happen in a home oven is what GE had to figure out. It is probable that several different manufactures were all trying to develop a SCO around the same time, it is hard to keep this type of development secret.

Basically to do this safely in a home oven they had to find a way to lock the oven door so it could not be opened and allow unburned soil to burst into flame. They also had to figure out a way to minimize any smoke from the burn-off process and of coerce control the temperature of the oven accurately to prevent porcelain damage.

There was no difference in the porcelain finish used in SCOs, this part was easy, and it certainly did not matter how many dials the oven control system used [ GE always used two dials so you could adjust the broiling heat anyway ] as did companies like Thermador. The single dial oven controls that companies like WH and Frigidaire used were always inferior in my opinion anyway but did not make it any more difficult to have a SCO.

Any good electric range already had a clock that allowed you to time the ovens operation if you were not present, so for most makers the timing part was easy. Interestingly WH, the first Frigidaires and Coloric's Gas SCOs all used a different timing system just for the SC oven cycle and not the usual clock that the range already had. Also a little know fact was that FD and GE made basic electric SC ranges that did not have ANY timer at all for the SC cycle, the user was just required to turn on the SC cycle and instructed to turn it off a few hours later.

A SCO will not cause a fire if you left it on for a month,  your kitchen will stay nice and warm though, LOL.

John L.

Tom, some US models did have a bake/broil selector too. As I said in my previous post, they were rare and BOL non-self-cleaning models!

Here's a RS-30P from the very same years as the model advertised at the top of this thread. You can see a close-up shot of the bake/broil selector on the second picture. 

I got the pictures from the thread in the link below: 

Hans once you discover the wounder of Electri-Clean you can start Broiling, I probably use the broiler in one of our 7 SCOs at least once a week.