Neff Hide And Slide Problems
I have been thinking about Neff Hide and Slide hinge problems. As the NEFF Hide and Slide mechanisms are causing us some issues mainly because they have been around for a while and the older ones are tending to have some reliability issues. And now they are the oven that gives us the most issues when cleaning them. And its nearly all problems with the locking mechanism on the hinges.
Neff Hide and Slide ovens are popular as they are on Bake Off on the TV every week. So to people see the swish way the door retracts into the oven and think - I like that style. And its a Neff which means it will be a good oven.
Well although I have owned a couple of NEFF Hide and Slides (for training in my OvenGleamers office) and cleaned a lot of them. I haven't ever used one. But yes as we tend to see a lot of them customers are generally happy with the way the perform but they don' t like the way the glass inside the door can easily get dirty. If you run a wet cloth over the handle to clean it - water and grease can easily run through the handle mechanism - as it rotates there are gaps - into the middle of the door glass. To clean this you need to take the door off and then put it back on again. This isn't easy as even though its straight forward method - move a couple of bits of plastic and turn a couple of screws it's very easy to get confused. My video on YouTube has had 125,000 views.
And as they get older there issues with the way the door locks are locking or not. So to take the door off you turn two screws to lock the mechanism in place and this allows the door to be pulled off the hinge supports. But these two screws - they are plastic and connect to a pin in the hinge allowing it to fall into a groove to lock the door - can sometimes not work or only work on one side.
What this means is the locking pin connector has fallen off of the locking pin.
Most people don't know how to put it back on - and its a call to NEFF to get them out at a cost of at least £150.
We went to clean a Neff hide and slide last week. The customer had called out another local oven cleaner who had never cleaned a Hide and Slide before. He didn't know how to take the door off and had tried to just pull it off. He couldn't get it off and then told the customer to contact us as we knew what we were doing with Hide and Slides and left.
When my employee got there the door was stuck in the open position. I talked him through putting the lock arm back into position. He cleaned the oven and then at the end realised there was still a problem with the oven. I went a few days later and had a look and I checked the locking arms again and then discovered that the pin itself had broken. We told the customer to go back to the first oven cleaner and get him to pay for a replacement hinge as he obviously broke it when he pulled on the door.
