I know absolutely zero about the operation of household appliances, as will become clear in a moment from my inability to accurately name the parts to which I refer.
Here is the problem: sometimes the oven lights, and sometimes it doesn’t. The pilot light is not the problem. As far as I can tell from sticking my head in the oven far too many times, when I turn on the oven, the flame from the pilot light becomes much larger. This allows it to heat a small piece of wire (the ignition?) which is supposed to light the heating element. When it works, I can see the flames running around the heating element. I assume that the heating element (like my gas stove burners) has a bunch of holes from which the gas is being released, and that each of these little gas jets is being lit. However, increasingly frequently, this is not what happens. Instead, I turn on the oven, the pilot light flares up, and…nothing. Sometimes it takes 3 tries to get it to light, sometimes it takes 30, and sometimes, like tonight, it takes an hour of flicking the switch, cursing, and sticking my head in the oven to get it to work.
So is there anything that I can do to fix this problem without having to go through my landlord and a repair person? Is it possible for me to light the heating element myself without risking serious injury?
The small piece of wire that the pilot light heats is probably a sensor which controls the gas flow to the burner. This site, has a trouble shooting guide for several different types of gas oven.
I once had a gas range that would only light intermittently, if at all. It turned out that the house had settled a bit so that the pilot light was higher up than the burner. The gas, being heavier than air, flowed downslope from the burner, away from the pilot light, and thus was not exposed to the flame. Releveling the stove was all it took to cure the problem.
Squink, your link was very helpful, but now I’m wondering if maybe the problem is that the pilot light assembly is dirty, since I have never cleaned it. So now I’m curious as to how I would go about doing this. I tend to stay far, far away from flames, including the pilot light.
The pilot light assembly doesn’t normally need to be cleaned, but it’s possible that a chunk of burnt food has gotten lodged in there somewhere.
On many ovens the pilot light assembly can be inspected by removing the bottom panel of the oven compartment. You’ll probably need to take the racks out too. If the bottom isn’t removable, you’ll have to try going in through the broiler drawer.
Don’t get carried away with cleaning. It’s possible to bend things so that they don’t work right anymore. Just look for and remove any large chunks of crud. There will be some sort of downhill pathway for gas to flow from the burner to the pilot light. Check to be sure that nothing is blocking that path.
You might also want to watch the pilot light after turning the oven on, to see whether it is actually heating the thermocouple.
Thanks, Squink, I will take a look at it when I get home. I had already removed the bottom panel to check out the pilot light, which is how I saw what I described in the OP. So how would I identify the thermocouple to know whether the light from the pilot is reaching it? I can see that the flame gets much larger, and it seems to reach the wire you identified as the sensor.
handy - Not sure of the model, but the assembly looks just like one pictured at Squink’s link. The pilot light is not out, and I don’t think that it’s safe to light the burner directly.
The thermocouple will have some electrical wires attached to it. I called it a sensor rather than a thermocouple because there are other, less common, ways for the oven to detect whether the pilot is lit.
I forgot to mention, Im in california & when something like this happens, I call the Gas comp, they come out for free & fix it. Give them a call, I know it might sound weird, but they have come out a few times for me & my friends.