I have what appears to be a defunct burner on my stove. The pilot light is fine. I can light the burner if I take the lid off and hold a match near the tube where the gas comes out, but it doesn’t permanently fix the problem.
Any ideas on what’s wrong and how to fix it?
hmmmm… would be easier to diagnose looking at your particular stove, but some things to check…
Many stove tops that use a pilot flame (as opposed to electric pilot), like it sounds like you have, have little metal tubes that run from the burner to the pilot flame. The gas from the burner is supposed to run down that tube to the flame and the back burn to the burner. If food or gunk blocks one of those tubes up, they don’t work.
So, maybe all you need is a little cleaning.
Other than that, I would need more specifics about your stove.
Also, the little metal tube must slope downward from the pilot to the burner. The design relies on the gas being heavier than air to get it to flow through the tube. You can check this with a level.
Yeah, I do have those tubes, but if I turn on the burner, light a match and hold it near where the gas is coming out, the burner will light up fine (which would seem to rule out the clogged tube theory).
The trouble is if I then turn the burner OFF, I can’t get it to relight without going through the whole match business again.
If you are putting the match where I think you are, you haven’t ruled out a clogged tube.
If you are putting the match at the burner end of the tube, you definitely haven’t ruled out a clogged tube.
The gas that flows through the tube is the unlit gas coming out of the burner. When the gas migrates down the tube to the pilot flame, it lights.
Whoa! You mean the gas goes FROM the burner TO the pilot light? I’m so confused…I never knew that!
My whole entire world view has been shaken…if the gas is coming out of the burner, why does there have to be a pilot light in the first place? Does that mean there are little pilot lights hiding behind the Bunsen burners we used in high school?
There has to be a connection from the burner to the pilot light, or the pilot light wouldn’t do anything. If the gas ran from the pilot light to the burner, the pilot light would burn it all (and would be what we call a “torch”).
Once the pilot light has lit the small stream from the burner, the flame spreads to the burner and lights the entire burner stream, including the little stream that USED TO run from the burner to the pilot light (the pilot light still has its own little stream, though).
Yes, the unignited gas flows down from the burner through the little tube to the pilot. Sorry, wrote it backwards the first time.