Oven repair?

[brewso.livejournal.com]

Anybody have any recommendations for oven repair? Ours will no longer heat up. We checked the pilot light, which is on, but it just no longer makes that "whoosh" sound when you turn it on and it never seems to much warmer, if at all. Eventually we smell a little gas and give up. Any advice or diirection on who could help us would be great. It's an ancient behemoth under the brand name Tappan, if that matters. Thanks! 

Comments

[tober.livejournal.com]

I have no recommendation for a repair person however here are a few things to check because sometimes these problems are extremely simple:

If you smell gas when you turn on the oven, presumably the burner gas valve is operating properly. If you turn on the oven with the oven door open, you should be able to hear the gas start flowing. Assuming that you can then the problem is probably either that the burner has gotten jostled so that it's not sitting properly on the venturi tube(s) or it may be dirty such that some of the holes in the burner near the pilot flame are plugged, or any flame tube that runs between the pilot and burner may have moved or gotten plugged. You can probably remove the burner, clean it, and place it back properly and the oven will work.

The only other common failure in ovens with pilot lights - if the oven is new enough that it uses a thermocouple - is failure of the thermocouple. When that happens, though, the pilot light will go out and you said yours was lit. I will assume that you did indeed check the oven pilot light and not the stovetop pilot light.

[csbermack.livejournal.com]

I'd call Sears. They might not have sold it, it might be so old they don't have paper on it, but I bet they'd have a guy who'd know what to do.

[masswich.livejournal.com]

Dells Appliance Repair will fix lots of things quickly - not cheap, but appliance repair never is...

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

I've had good success with Dell's appliance.

[pearlythebunny.livejournal.com]

Dell's fixed my oven. It stopped heating up, too. I forget the part that needed to be replaced, but he told me that newer ovens are made so that this part needs to be replaced about every 5 years. It's one of those stoves/ovens with an electronic ignition.

Older ovens are more durable, he said. But maybe it's the same problem.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

We had our gas oven fixed by Belmont Appliance (617-484-7300) and have been happy with the results.

[m00n.livejournal.com]

Sometimes ovens with thermocouples will not always turn off the pilot light. On ovens I've owned, usually the procedure is that turning the oven on first causes a larger valve to open, which lights what looks like a larger pilot light. This larger burner then heats up a thermocouple (for others watching, a thermocouple in this case is basically a valve that opens when it is heated), and when this thermocouple opens it activates the main burner.

The idea is basically to prevent the oven from rapidly flooding the room with unburned natural gas in the event that the pilot light is not working. I've found that often what happens is that the pilot light does not light this secondary flame for whatever reason, probably because the venturi gets clogged with soot or other debris. This secondary flame requires enough gas that if it does not light after 20 or 30 seconds, it will start to smell. You would definitely want to leave the oven doors open for a few minutes before trying to light it by hand lest you cause an explosion inside the oven.

Typically you can circumvent the problem by holding a match or a cigarette lighter in the area around the pilot light after turning the oven knob on. This should ignite the secondary flame and, after a minute or two when the thermocouple has warmed up, the main burner will light.

Fixing it permanently is probably a matter of cleaning the airways or adjusting the pilot light, the former of which would probably be done fairly easily with a brush and a screwdriver. The latter you'd probably want to call someone about.

[m00n.livejournal.com]

If the oven has a pilot light, that would make it part of the older variety.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_meej_/]

Definitely Dell's. Also, they sort their service records by client's name, so if you happen to know the prior owner/tenant's name they might be able to check if it's been called in before.