Pictures accompany this entry: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkida/195008918/
"What's this weird stuff under my foot?" I wondered as I stepped into the kitchen. Granted, we haven't swept the floor in a couple of weeks but they felt like incredibly big crumbs and they were right in the middle of the floor. I stepped closer to the counter to find that there were even more of them there, so I stepped back and switched on the light. My original plan had been to wander to the fridge, grab a cold drink and go back to the living room without touching the light, but now I was curious.
All over the floor were tiny little chunks of clear and black glass, almost cuboid in shape, like safety glass is. At first I thought that somehow one of our glass placemats had been swept off the table and shattered but it would have to be a very large one. So what else could shower glass all over the kitchen? I looked up.
"Um. How come our oven door has exploded?" I asked Tobes, carefully stepping back off the chunks of glass, reasoning that bare feet weren't a good plan for the kitchen.
We heard nothing, saw nothing. An hour ago the cooker was intact. It hasn't been used in two days. For some reason, though, it's simply exploded everywhere this evening. I guess it must be the hot weather but it's a mystery. If it had happened in the day I could understand it better - light could have been concentrated through the patio door onto the oven door causing a magnifying glass effect during the day. That, I suppose, would have the potential to make glass explode. Maybe. But it was dark and in a room with nobody in it to disturb anything and it just spontaneously threw glass everywhere. That's a bit dangerous, really, innit?
So now we have to figure out how to get that fixed, what it will cost, and whether the contents insurance is worth invoking. Hey... maybe it's under warranty. Time to dig through paperwork tomorrow. *sigh*
Aliens?
Maybe a clumsy ghost needed a late night snack.
*goes to check whether his cooker has experienced the same phenomenon*
Unfortunately, if there's a flaw or scratch in the outer skin, a crack can form and swiftly propagate due to this disparity in stress. Another possible reason for sudden breakage is the growth of nickel sulphide crystals in the glass (normally due to contamination with stainless steel during production). This is rare, but not unheard of; I can remember reading about a shopping centre in the UK which had a persistent problem with glass roof panels shattering for this reason.
Either way, it's probably a manufacturing problem that's taken some time to show itself, and so you should be able to claim on your insurance.
(on the plus side, at least it wasn't your ceramic hob that went bang - it was you that had a plate/pancake/halogen hob accident, wasn't it?)
And yeah, it was me with the pancake. Explosions are following me around!
We can't do it ourselves, we can't work out how the pieces held together. The bit at the top of the door with the handle on it came off when I tried opening the remains of the door, and the bottom part will need taking off to retrieve bits of glass from inside it.
Unfortunately, if there's a flaw or scratch in the outer skin, a crack can form and swiftly propagate due to this disparity in stress.
No, you've got that backwards, that's what can happen to glass that isn't tempered.