I kept burning my food or wait forever for the pan to heat up and I finally understand why. Each knob has a different direction for the Hi and Lo (also why isn’t it Low).
Mine has similar settings but they're named in ways which actually tells you why you'd want them that way: "Ready to Iron", "Ready to Hang" and "Extra Dry", things like that.
Some fabrics wrinkle when you allow them to sit in the dryer totally dry. For those you want to take them out and hang them for the last bit so when they reach their driest state they’re hanging and not crumpled within the dryer.
I bought a portable electric space heater a few years ago that had an alarming tendency to rewire itself - like, "Off" would become "Low", "High" would become "Fan" etc. Finally took it apart and realized that the dial was just a contact that rolled across a bit of printed solder and occasionally the solder would melt (no way they could have expected that to happen in a fucking heater) and flow into a new pattern. I have absolutely no idea why thousands of people haven't burned themselves to death with these things.
It's like your stove top was the experimental test one where you could see how all the knob styles worked, like it wasn't supposed to be released to the public.
You have double burners. Some of your knobs have two HI and two LO positions, one for one burner and one for both burners.
On top of the stove this looks like two concentric heating elements. You can turn on one or both. Turning on both is sometimes called a “fast boil” burner.
The best solution the industry has come up with is to put two control surfaces into one knob, so instead of the control surface being a full circle it’s a half circle.
There’s no way to make all the knobs match in appearance unless all the burners have optional double burner operation.
What they should do is make the rule: “clockwise is hotter”, and make all the LO…HI arcs increase in the clockwise direction.
Then no matter which burner you’re adjusting, you know it’s a clockwise movement.
They should also have a little LED light bar that changes length to show how high that burner’s setting. As you turn clockwise, it lengthens toward “full on”.
The LED light bar should light up whenever a knob is touched.
My folks had a stove with two (electric) heat elements in the same way I assume OP has, to use both, you had to go 360° all the way to a full circle where it "clicked", then go back to where you wanted it at. Much easier and sensible IMO than whatever the hell this headache is.
I'm really trying to understand what's going on here in a way that makes sense, even if it's a twisted kind of sense.
My best guess is that each of these burners are a different size and some have multiple rings and that by turning the knob left (Anti-clockwise), you're going from smaller number of rings to larger number of rings - however, the rings start at their highest heat level. So looking at the bottom right dial as an example, the first "Notch" on the left is the smallest burner on the highest setting, then as you turn left more, it'll dial down that burner until you get to the second ring on the burner - starting at full power for that second burner and continuing to lower power until you get to the 3rd ring, then it's same again for the 4th ring.
Is that right? am I even close? I don't understand why you'd go from smallest burner to highest burner anti-clockwise, but go from lowest burner-power to highest clockwise. That still doesn't make sense to me.
OP's stove is GCRE3060AF, or similar. The rightmost knob is inconsistent for reasons I cannot fathom, unless there is some obscure electrical reason. It is an electric stove, and the knobs with multiple ranges do indeed control burners that have multiple potential sizes. One of them has two selectable sizes, and other has three. On these I believe the rationale is that the high setting is the closest and most easily accessible because radiant electric ranges suck [citation not needed] and since they take forever and a day to heat up most users will just leap right to the full blast output setting immediately. I have no idea why the direction on the last knob is backwards from the others, clockwise versus counterclockwise, but it is.
If you're morbidly curious, you can view the entire control panel from OP's stove (or one similar) here.
Yep. It’s. GCRE3060AFF electric stove. (Other thing I hate is the fan noise when the oven is on, even when not on convection).
Your idea of Hi closest to off position makes sense except of that triple knob, the 3rd ring Hi position isn’t at the top.
The burner has two zones. A small one in the middle, and a wider ring around. If you turn to the left, you only turn the middle part on from High to low, and if you turn right, you turn both on from low to high.
Damnit... Great explanation... Also, it just pissed me off because it reminded me that I have a burner on my stove like this with the small and large and different settings for each... Unfortunately, it currently only works at all on the large burner on high... I need to slide it away from the wall and take the fucking thing apart and figure out why...
Has to do with the fact that several burners have multiple sizes that can be used. My stove is the same way, and there’s really not a much better way to do it imo, short of a touch screen, which I don’t want on a stove.
A dial with a mode select switch directly above it. That us the much better way.
If you want the inner burner at power level 6, you set the mode switch to inner and the dial to 6. Then every dial can work the exact same way, but you still have multi-sized burners.
I like the other commenter's idea, but I'd be happy with just consistent directions. Turn it a little bit counterclockwise and it's the minimum low, turn it a bit clockwise and it's max high.
I have an LG one with a single triple burner that doesn't match any of the others. The oven also sucks, I need to set it 25 degrees higher on convection (with normal cook time) for things to cook properly.
Oh and then there's the bottom drawer which is a second oven but it takes forever to preheat. I've used it twice and then stopped bothering.
I think I'll replace that piece of shit next time a big purchase is up.
I can explain this one! When the knob only has one set of hi/lo, it controls the burner's heat as you'd expect, and it all works in the same direction. Those with multiple hi/lo sets control the heat and the size of the burner, since there are 2 (and on one, maybe 3?) concentric heating elements available for that knob.
I've had something similar for years, and have never had an issue. I'm even less likely to accidentally choose the wrong knob since the single-size one tends to have a looser feel to it.
nice features, albeit highly situational, and probably useless for most home cooks. I imagine R&D needed something new for the model and over-engineered it.
The full words are "High" (not "Hi") and "Low", so to save space they use the first two letters "Hi" and "Lo". If they use "Hi" and "Low" it would be inconsistent, e.g. more infuriating.
Last one is the only one that's out of place to me. They all have counter clockwise when solo mode, when 2 modes available, low is at the bottom and high is at the top, makes sense, but the last one is different.
Also, why would it be Low? They're using 2 letters, Hi and Lo are different enough to identify. I'd have to check mine, but using Hi/Lo seems normal.
Yeah, the last one is different because it has three modes, but in a vacuum it seems like they could have set it up closer to the paradigm of the two-mode knobs. Depending on how those knobs are actually wired though, there may be a good reason why it was easier to make it that way.
There's your problem. Their appliances are junk. I've got a Frigidaire fridge and it has a bunch of known issues. The refrigerant line is too close to the back of the fridge, causing the back panel to rust. The line for the ice maker also freezes a lot. The bottom of the fridge is very cold to the point where stuff freezes (the water line runs near here).
All know issues for the model I've got. Outside of warranty, so all Frigidaire could offer was a 10% off coupon for a new fridge... As if I'd buy a Frigidaire again.
Frigidaire literally invented the modern fridge. You'd think they'd know how to build a good one by now.
One office I worked in had a toaster with a knob where "off" is almost all the way to the left.
Turning the knob to the right lets you control the toasting time, like any other knob-based timer.
But if you turn it left from the "off" position, that's the "stay on" position.
So if you'd set the timer, and then wanted to cancel it, you can't just turn it all the way left like on any other knob timer. If you do that, you're telling it to stay on forever and eventually scorch the table and set off the fire alarm.
Are these like different pictures of range knobs mashed together? I find it almost impossible to believe they put a different style control for each possible position.
Looking at the one in the top left... imagine if that was for an amplifier. Like, you have to pass through maximum to reach off. That would be the worst to live near.