The short answer
A Maytag oven showing E22 has flagged the temperature sensor circuit. The table below carries the manufacturer wording for it, and the ranked causes under that put the likely ones first. It is usable if it still holds temperature; stop if it overshoots or cuts out.
The documented code and its meaning
Reference| Code | Meaning |
|---|---|
| E22 | The Thermal Sensor circuit reported a short to the control board. There may a problem with the Thermal Sensor, the Appliance Control Board, or the associated wiring. |
What you actually observe
- Temperatures run high or low against the setting — A drifting sensor shows up in the cooking or drying result weeks before the code does.
- The oven takes far longer than it used to — A control that cannot trust its reading waits rather than stops.
- The code appears once the unit is hot, not at the start — That timing is the most useful thing you can tell a technician.
- NEAR MISS — no heat at all, ever — That is a heating-circuit or supply question and it belongs elsewhere.
Causes, most likely first on this oven
- The sensing element drifting out of band, or going open — A resistance sensor fails gradually, so the appliance often runs badly for weeks before the control finally rejects the reading.
- A corroded or loose connector at the sensor plug — That plug lives in the hottest, dampest part of the run, which is why it — and not the element — is so often what has failed.
- Insulation worn where the sensor loom passes the cavity wall — The grommet at the wall is where the covering wears, and bare copper against steel presents to the control as a short.
- The control board input that reads the sensor — Last, and genuinely uncommon: the input stage fails far less often than the sensor and its wiring.
Check in this order, and why
- Establish whether it faults cold or only once hot — Cold faults and hot faults come from different halves of this circuit, so the timing is the first thing to establish.
- Ask a technician to read the sensor resistance at room temperature — A single resistance figure at the plug tells element, wiring and board apart at once.
- Have the sensor plug examined for corrosion and heat damage — Heat damage or green on the pins is cheap to find and cheap to fix, and it is found often.
- Treat the board as the last suspect, not the first — Every other item in the chain is cheaper and more likely.
What an owner can safely check
- Power the unit down at the breaker for a minute and restore it — Sometimes a stored fault goes for good; an immediate return means it is live.
About 3 min
- Set down the temperature behaviour of recent weeks — Uneven results in the weeks beforehand are the history that actually helps here.
Tools: pen and paperAbout 5 min
- Stop before the cavity wall or the rear cover is opened — The sensor run is not an owner-serviceable path, and the checks stop at the cavity wall.
Before anything is opened
Safety
Isolate first. Unplug the appliance or switch off its breaker before removing any panel, because a capacitor can hold a charge after the power is off. Isolation on a built-in oven means the breaker, not a cord. Give the cavity and the inner door glass real time to cool before working anywhere near them. Do not re-route or hold closed anything on the door circuit; it takes power away at a point the design depends on.
When this stops being an owner job
Call as soon as the code repeats after a power-down. Beyond that the diagnosis needs instruments rather than observation, and a wall oven has to be unseated from its cabinet before the rear connections are reachable. Do not wait at all if there is a burning smell, visible scorching, or a breaker that trips the moment the appliance starts. Those three override everything above.
Nearest error-code pages
What this page does not cover
This is the platform-level reading of E22: it holds for the Maytag oven families that share that control generation. It does not cover older generations that reuse the same characters for something else, and it deliberately carries no wiring colours, no connector pin numbers, no torque figures and no part numbers, because every one of those differs by family. Where a page exists for your specific family or model, that page is the more specific answer and it is the one to follow; the code index linked below is where those pages are listed.
Other Maytag oven codes
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