I must admit, my hopes were that I would receive the Electrolux Icon oven panel with glass and have our oven fixed before Mother’s day…till Parts Warehouse called me back yesterday to let me know I had the choice to wait another month (without certainty) or get a refund…I chose the latter one, and now I will begin searching for a new oven. I feel we have been ripped-off badly…using what we thought was a top of the line oven lasted less than 4 years. My guess is that the same can happen with any electronic cookware, unless you buy additional coverage.

kudzu9, I thought that your comment about "cracking" was meant to be funny - again, "a euphemistic way of saying that you ended up with a pile of tiny glass pieces all over the floor". My comment was intended to convey that I truly appreciated the humor (been there!)... However, on seeing your follow up reply (and if I read it correctly), I realized that the glass sheet didn't break into tiny pieces, it broke into several larger pieces; because of that, it could not have been tempered glass. By nature-of-the-beast, tempered glass must break into those little pieces when broken. It is unavoidable, the physics involved in making the stuff. Without going overly in depth, tempered glass is heated until the center of the piece reaches about 940F. This is the annealing point of glass. The glass is then rapidly cooled (called quenching) until the outer surface is cooler than the inner portion of the lite. When glass is heated it expands. When quenched, the outer surface contracts and the warmer inner portion remains expanded. Quenching induces stress into the glass. It locks the outer 21% (top and bottom - 42% of total) of the glass into compression and the inner 58% into tension. This is what gives tempered glass its resistance to blunt force breakage and also explains the little glass bits when it does break. In order to break tempered glass, it is necessary to breach the outer 21% "exposing" the inner tension layer. You do that and POW!!!! lots of little pellets everywhere. There is no way for properly tempered glass to break any other way. That said, it is absolutely possible to induce damage to a tempered lite and to have it break later. Often this is the reason for spontaneous breakage of the glass. Typically, it is edge damage (crack or chip) that propagates (often VERY slowly) until it passes that magic boundary between the compression and tension layers - and then you have the middle-of-the-might - BANG!!! In the case of this shower door, the break (based on the picture) does appear to have started in the face of the lite rather than at an edge. It is also quite possible to bump a tempered lite and to leave a small chip in the surface that could slowly grow until it penetrates the tension layer. So that is certainly an option to consider.

I agree as well that it's pretty clear that the break occured right in the middle of the bow tie, and it does look like an impact break to me as well. But an inclusion will produce a very similar pattern as well. What I was hoping for, if you had the glass that is missing from the door, was to see if there were two pieces that were shaped like hexagons and that were larger than the rest of the remains. When the glass "splits" at the point of the nickel-sulfide inclusion it produces two hexagon shaped pieces that are very distinctive and are a positive ID of the cause of the break.

Brenda! I had a huge panel in a 20' slider spontaneously shatter as well. It happened for us in March and Western claimed no responsibility and literally said, "get on the website and find a vendor in your area to buy a replacement panel". I found one ... spent SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS and western didn't ship evereything required for the install. Now I have been waiting for the second part for 90 days and the install still isn't complete. This happened in MARCH. I am screaming from the rooftop for people to never buy Western Windows. It's the worst investment we made in the remodel.