Apologies Iain, i misread your first post. Looking at the instructions for the example oven you posted, it says "Cooling Fan. A gentle flow of air will be blown below the control panel when the grill control is used and after a short period of time when the ovens are used. Note: Whenever the appliance has been used, the cooling fan may run on or restart itself after all the controls have been turned off. This indicates that the appliance is still warm", so it sounds like the fan for the top oven might come on if only the bottom oven is used. You could check with the manufacture whether this should be the case with your oven, and you could check whether the upper oven fan does actually come on. 100 deg C does sound excessive.

Apologies Iain, i misread your first post. Looking at the instructions for the example oven you posted, it says "Cooling Fan. A gentle flow of air will be blown below the control panel when the grill control is used and after a short period of time when the ovens are used. Note: Whenever the appliance has been used, the cooling fan may run on or restart itself after all the controls have been turned off. This indicates that the appliance is still warm", so it sounds like the fan for the top oven might come on if only the bottom oven is used. You could check with the manufacture whether this should be the case with your oven, and you could check whether the upper oven fan does actually come on. 100 deg C does sound excessive.

Out of interest, while cooking dinner I thought I'd borrow my wife's thermal imager and check ours. With the main oven at 190C, the metalwork in the top oven is between 95C (coolest areas) and 130C (shelves and hottest areas of the sides). 

Not being great at thermodynamics I'm not sure if that equates to

Iain Robinson said:

measured at 100C of heat transfer

but just to throw into the mix.

(Lisa Miles this is indeed where we heat the plates, they've always been fine  )

The point is that at 100C you can burn yourself - it should not get that hot when switched off. Perhaps the issue is greater than just my new double oven.

Well the current standards for accessible parts, (see above) which I would have thought were more of an issue than the inside of something that gets hot by design, allows well above ' safe to touch' temperatures anyway - 100 degrees above ambient for a non-metallic handle and 60C above ambient for a metal panel is still going to hurt !

But It may be that the standards writers never really foresaw the modern era.

I suggest that the cooker temperature standards are based on material that is now quite dated, and originally evolved from the cooking on a range - the sort of thing my grand parents had * , which was more or less a fire in a box and an arrangement of dampers and flaps to steer the flames around one box or the other for water, or main or side oven. Obviously that gets hot - indeed as a kid I recall trying to see how hot, and being fascinated by getting the cast iron glowing dull red, before being told off for wasting firewood.

Mike.

* similar to but not quite the model below- hers had a water boiler on opposite side to the oven). The earliest version of the modern standards came in at about the same time as the sort of things that came in post war, which were of course a huge improvement in terms of controls and safety, (my parents had a 1960 gas oven rather like the second figure) but I suspect the idea that a small child would be roaming free in the kitchen and the parents not to expect him or her  to be injured or develop self preservation instincts was not contemplated.

 
Grandparents and parents era cooking compared - note the gas 'wand' at the LH side for of the Parkinson-Cowan Prince, a portable flame intended for lighting the grill and oven by transferring a flame from the pilot for the rings, and also great fun for childhood  experiments with gas - something else that would raise eyebrows today.

mapj1 said:

something else that would raise eyebrows today.

You mean raze?

Iain how did you measure the temp?

Andy borrowed a thermal imaging camera, and I have seen differences between surface temps measured with these and the temperature recorded with a thermometer. 

Also did you check with manufacturer about the fan?

I asked an engineer from the manufacturer to measure the temperature with their thermometer, that way it must be accurate. I have not asked about fan as i am out of the country.