Hello again. Below is the letter I'm ready to send to the company that handles warranty. Please feel free to comment !! --- X, I think there is something worth sharing here. It's a bit too much for a phoned-in description so I am not eager to make a phone call as the first point of contact. Perhaps __(the manufacturer)__ needs to see the "Interesting part" below. Yesterday I received a voicemail message call from someone in your firm asking me to call back to speak to you. I'm glad someone called. He said he had seen the email sent yesterday. He made a small mistake in his description of the situation. This is one good reason to write things down. Please read. I have the __XxxX_ cooktop. It's still under warranty. I found a small visual "schematic" on the underside of the cooktop. It mentions different color wires than the red, black and green wires which the cooktop has. I'll guess the wires were replaced by you or by the factory so as to correspond to North American standard colors. If so, it changes nothing electrically. It has two wires (two hots), and a ground wire. The black and red take the two hot wires of a 230V circuit, and the green is grounded. If this is correct, read on; otherwise please advise. In the manual, there is no information about the wiring or schematic diagram. In the manual, it says to "follow the connection schematic" but there was no schematic diagram provided, separately, and none in the manual. If the visual provided in the label on the underside is the schematic, this would be good to know. Good news: the cooktop works. I've been using it every day for a few weeks now. I'm not sure if it works perfectly as expected, because sometimes I get a dash result (-) on the display and that burner turns off. This is when I put high heat on a large cast-iron pan at a burner at the back; these are medium sized burners. Later, when I give away the cast iron and get stainless induction-ready pans I expect this problem to disappear. Other than that, it appears to work fine. Bad news: it gave a lot of medium-voltage shocks when ground got disconnected. Last week while preparing for the countertops to be installed (coming soon), I moved the cooktop to an adjacent cabinet. To do this, I lifted the cooktop a couple inches, moved it sideways and placed it onto a horizontal surface. I did not disconnect it electrically and I did not turn its circuit off. The cooktop was not turned on; its circuit still had voltage. Later that day I received an electric shock, more than once, intermittently, before I found the loose green wire. The cooktop's thick green cable and the building's romex single-strand ground wire (also green) had gotten disconnected. By sliding the cooktop over, this moved the sheathed cable and this caused the ground wire (green) to get disconnected when the wire nut loosened. I did not turn the cooktop on during that day. I did not turn the cooktop on during that interval of time when it had been moved and its ground wire was not connected. The cooktop was never turned on while I was looking at it to determine the problem and find the loose ground wire. I am the only person who operates the cooktop; no-one turned on the cooktop. Just f.y.i. since I placed the cooktop onto metal it was easy to receive shocks, without touching the cooktop's housing. The shocks were not 230V in intensity. I have enough experience to know that this level of voltage was not as big as 230V. My guess is that it was much less than 115V. My guess is that it was more than 20V, but how much more I don't know. Here is the interesting part: I'm wondering how an appliance which is not in operation can allow to leak or discharge or let loose that much current through its ground wire. The fact that there was more than one zap is the thing that is making me look into this a lot. Those who know more about these things can tell me if it is normal for a ground connection to be the route for excess charge to be released, -- AND more than once -- while the device is not ON and also has not been turned on between the intermittent shocks. At first I thought it was not normal but maybe understandable, but when i got another "intermittent" shock I really started thinking there may be something more to it. Now I'm wondering if it is constantly consuming electricity when not turned on, by sending pulses into the ground. I'm also wondering if this can cause premature failure. This can become important at some point. An appliance should not be sending pulses into the ground wire. I'm willing to do some diagnosis with multimeters and power meters. I like the __ and would gladly have another one of the same 24" size, if it comes to replacing this one. --- .

Yes, it is a 3-wire plug (all the 240v in this house - stove, hot water heater, clothes dryer, and wall A/C unit - is 3-wire). So you're telling me that in order to create a 120v circuit for the oven light, clock, etc., it uses one of the two 120v legs, plus the ground as its neutral? And that there is a break in that circuit along the ground/neutral line, so it's using the metal chassis of the stove as its ground/neutral in order to complete the circuit? The internal wiring of the stove with regard to the clock and oven light and what-not is way too involved for me. I'd rather just disable all those 120v features and do without them; I don't ever use them anyhow. How do I go about doing that? I just want the simplest, fastest, easiest way to get my stove to quit shocking me. Thanks.

What I can say is this: I am a professional firefighter with over 30 years of experience in a medium sized department. We are not particularly busy, but we generally arrive at an address within 5 minutes of an alarm notification. I have been to two separate fatal fires in daylight hours where an adult female occupant was the sole victim and the cause was clothing ignited by the top of a stove. I'm not sure about the source of power in one of the incidents but the other involved an electric range. Property damage in both cases was limited to smoke and water so it's not like they were trapped in something that turned into an inferno. There was no alcohol or drug involvement and no physical or mental deficiency or disability.

First I would make sure someone hasn't put a 3 to 2 prong adapter on the washer plug which would do away with the ground and perhaps turned the plug upside down which would reverse the polarity. Before they started using polarized plugs women would often get shocked when using wringer washers because they would get plugged in backwards. Polarized plugs are there for a reason and those adapters can be very dangerous.