Pre-heat baking stone at 482F, Top/Bottom elements, 1h20min then start baking - APO shutdown (without warning) within first 2 min. APO came back to life in 10-15min, but I had to finish baking in a regular oven.
The external surfaces of the APO were very hot. The APO is on the counter with 4" min distance everywhere, however it’s apparent that long bakes at high temperatures could be problematic. I am tempted to take it apart and see if the insulation could be improved. The other potential improvement, hopefully Anova is listening, is to avoid sudden shutdown without warning users and/or giving them options (e.g. lower the temperature).
This happened to me several times when baking sourdough bread using the sourdough boule setting in the app. The bread got very brown and I suspected overheating. I bought an oven thermometer and put it into the oven and it showed about 30 degree difference between the internal temp and the temperature reading on the display (the oven was hotter than the display said it was). Now I manually set the oven by following the reading on the oven thermometer I bought to keep it where I want and it no longer shuts off. I set the oven to between 430 and 440 to get an oven temp of 475 or so. My experience is that this happens at the high oven temps needed for baking bread. This is a replacement oven because the first one developed display failures. This new oven makes a thumping noise when it heats, also a new thing. It does not shut off at the 350 - 400 degree range or lower. I reported this temperature issue to Anova and all that was said was that they would report this to the engineers. I think this manufacturer has some quality issues to address that lead to oven failures as I have had significant problems now with 2 different ovens.
Thank you! I have an oven thermometer and will check actual oven cavity temperature. It’s very surprising that it differs by 30F from the setting on the display. That’s not good at all for a precision oven. My 35-year old electric Jenn-Air is spot on, which was also also very surprising to me, in a good way.
APO is a tremendous value as it has some unique features unmatched by higher end built-in ovens at any price, but - as you said - there are some compromises.
Seems to me that pre-heating at max temp with a baking stone for an hour and 20 minutes is a bit over-kill. I would suspect that the oven shut down due to overheating. I believe they are designed to do so. I bake sourdough using a cast iron plate, not a stone, but never pre-heat that long and my bread comes out perfect every time. Never had a shutdown mid-bake.