The lair has an old Gaffers & Sattler apartment stove, piped for propane and absolutely perfect for this application. I bring in propane in little portable bottles since the delivery guy couldn’t possibly get in or out of the hollow and I couldn’t pay for it if he could.
The stovetop works great. But the past two winters, the oven refused to light whenever the temperature went below freezing, which of course is often. I determined that the propane pressure regulator, which was parked outdoors, was to blame because in low temp the pressure clearly dropped. The top burners could still work, but the oven pilot couldn’t sufficiently heat the thermocouple.
I still think I was right about that. For the record.
Anyway, yesterday in town I argued the local propane guy, Al (I can’t do that because) The Propane Guy, into making me a new hose that would permit me to bring the pressure regulator inside the cabin where it’s warm. This seemed like a grand idea. At the time.
This morning I installed the new hose. Hooked everything back up, opened the propane bottle, lit the oven pilot, cranked the oven valve, and…
See that bottom blue flame? That’s aimed directly at the thermocouple. It’s nice and strong.
That horizontal thing under the pilot that’s held by the setscrew is the thermocouple. Which is definitely getting hot. And I think bumping the stove around while I diddled with hoses has caused it to no longer function. At least I’ve seen water heaters act like this. The oven won’t light at all now. That thermocouple has been bathed in flame for 45 minutes as I write this sentence, and no burner is hap’nin.
I’m screwed. G&S went out of business more than 40 years ago, and my craigslist-fu is not strong. Lack of an oven is going to make it very difficult to bake.
This just hasn’t been your year, has it? Sigh. Sorry, Joel.
FWIW, a lot of gas appliance parts are pretty generic. If you can figure out what’s wrong, you might be able to get a replacement part, or part assembly, online for not too much money.
I’ll bet another of your readers will have some idea what the problem is.
If worst comes to worst, old stoves can be gotten for $50 or $75 sometimes.
I’m with Claire, here. Use a generic part, or for that matter it’s easy enough (if you’ve got a junk yard source) to just tear out the entire burner bar assembly and replace the whole shebang. For this style of stove, a thermocouple is a thermocouple is a…..
hehe. “shebang”. haven’t used that in years.
Old oven valves are bad for sticking inside. Worse in cold weather. Might be better to find another stove.
Two possibilities here.
Antique Gas Stoves Rebuilding Services
http://www.antiquegasstoves.com/pages/rebuild.html
Gaffers & Sattler Oven / Range / Stove Parts
http://www.reliableparts.com/catalog/Gaffers-Sattler-Oven-Range-Parts-461425
Thermocouples are fairly generic (check thread sizes), & can be used across a range of gas appliances.
My garage heater died, so I scrounged a TC from a scrapped water heater @ the dump. It was kinda long, but a few coils to make it fit, & all was as good as new.
Go for the cheap fix first!
Sounds like you may have a bad valve, or an old thermocouple. It may be generating enough current to hold open the pilot valve, but not open the main valve, or the main valve coil could be bad, or the valve itself, as blindshooter says, could be stuck.
Fortunately, thermocouples these days are sold with adapters for just about any stove valve, and the valves themselves are relatively universal. It is highly likely that the valve or a direct substitution is still being manufactured. A scrounge for the valve is also possible…if you can find any marks or numbers on the valve itself, it is very possible to google-fu up a cross reference list.
Oh, and if you do scrounge a used stove, an orifice replacement kit and valve adjustment is all that is usually required to change natural gas over to propane…
If you’re willing to do a bit of search engine research you can find directions for testing a thermocouple with your multimeter. Likewise – it’s easier now than it’s ever been to track down odd parts online so a replacement t-couple may not be so hard to find. I’ve also occasionally seen a regulator dead-on-arrival so there is a chance that could be a factor. Finally – it’s also slightly possible that you dislodged some junk in the gas plumbing that’s plugging an orifice.
I just took a look at a gas stove in an RV here and the t-couple looks almost identical to yours – even the mount assembly – there’s a good chance the manufacturer of the stove used off-the-shelf components. There’s a lot of DIY instruction sites now so you could probably find some good resources for diagnosis and repair online.
We have a small propane heater that occaisionally will have a great pilot but won’t light. What I discovered is a small air intake hole that gets filled with dust(no idea what part is that it’s on). I can take a piece of wire and poke it out. Does that thermocouple have any possible air holes that might have gotten blocked by dust/dirt during the jostling?
Joel, are there any old campers lying about the desert from which you could, er, appropriate an oven, or the parts therein? As has been said, other than lab applications, TCs are pretty generic (I think they’re mostly K-type, but could be wrong). If you could rob one from a discarded oven, it might could be used; if functional, at worst you’d have to re-mark your temp dial to deal with any offset or span differences.
Then again, out there I reckon camper-type appliances are much in demand, & besides, you don’t exactly live in a metropolis, and good for you. That was the entire idea. This is just one of the inconveniences.
My first thought was almost the same as Claire’s: “(sigh) This just ain’t been Joel’s year.”
Maybe you’ll get lucky & find a replacement part at Mama L’s link, at a decent price. Will a Jeep run on 3 tires, if you heavily counterweight the other corner?
Best of luck.
I really have nothing to add beyond agreement with the previous 10 posts. Gas stuff is very generic so this is very fixable. I believe you have a multimeter, so check the thermocouple first. The instructions are a Google away.
You added a new length of hose and it doesn’t light anymore??? First thing I’d suspect is that the main gas orifice is plugged from crap that was in the hose. I’d start by disassembling the valve from the piping then the orifice from the valve.and cleaning everything. You may find a debris screen under the main connection fitting at the intake side of the valve.. Canned computer air works or sometimes just tapping it on a board so stuff falls out. Ditto on the volt meter check of the thermocouple, but if you didn’t crunch it, I’d really suspect some crap from the hose(s) got into the valve.
don’t get in a hurry and leak check when done.
A final thought in case it might help… I’ve also seen valves stick and be cured (sometimes only temporarily) by a sharp rap on the side of the body. Obviously it’s not much of a science as far as implementation goes – more from the ‘bigger hammer’ school of DIY. Following that logic… the colder the body of the valve is – the less likely to operate well – how you warm it up is up to you. A blow dryer is a safe way – but I bet you don’t have one of those!
How hot does the top of your woodstove get? The right type of contraption perched on top might just get bread baked. Then you’d have til summer to work out the gas oven business!
You can bake bread on top of your wood stove in a Dutch oven. Biscuits too. Cobbler. All kinds of things. Dutch ovens are the most useful cooking tool. You’ll be amazed at how good the bread is. You’ll need an iron trivet to get it up off the stove surface (canning jar rings work great if cast iron trivets are hard to find). Grease the Dutch oven well or use parchment paper inside it. Maybe your dollar store has parchment paper? You can also cook outside by putting a Dutch oven in the coals of a fire, maybe a good use for all that juniper? There are also bake ovens meant for campfires that will work on your wood stove. Of course you have to be able to get those things, but they do exist. You can still have bread. Old Dutch ovens are the best if you can find one for sale.
I’m agreeing with Zelda here – think alternative baking methods, the Dutch Oven is a good tool, just takes some practice and reading research from those who know how to get the best performance. Also – consider solar. Living in the desert, I’ll bet some solar oven designs would work great there.
The nice thing about both methods – very low cost, once you have the materials. And you don’t heat up the house in the summer – another good feature.
Hope you find a solution soon.
So whatever happened with the oven? I just found out that our new/old 1950s Gaffers and Sattler has a red reset button on the safety valve (I think that’s what it is) that must be held in, depressed, when you first turn on the oven dial after relighting the oven pilot light. This satety switch is underneath the right rear stovetop burner, a little back, and straight in line with the oven dial, to which it connects with metal tube.
After I lit the oven pilot light, I let it warm the thermocouple for 10 minutes or so, then pressed down the red button, turned the oven temperature knob on to 350, and the burner lit right up. I had tried turning the oven on previously without holding down the red button, and nothing happened — no gas, no light up. So I now know that the red reset button is the crucial step. I have yet to see this clearly explained on the Internet.
Oh, that! Wow, that was a long time ago. I completely forgot to finish the story.
As it turns out the propane contractor dicked up the new expensive hose. Since a new hose didn’t fix my problem I assumed that wasn’t the problem. But I couldn’t find any other problem either. So I rigged a test of the hose, found it faulty, and finally did what I should have done what I should have done at the very first: I plumbed the oven to the propane tank correctly rather than with an assortment of improvised rubber hoses.
That fixed the problem neatly, and I’ve had no more trouble with the oven.