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I have a Whirlpool gas oven Super Capacity 465.

The four cook-top burners work ok.

When I turn on the oven on broil, I hear gas hissing and igniters ticking. Within a second it ignites the top burner inside the oven. I could see flames from the jets.

On the other hand if I use the bake setting (to use the lower burner). I hear gas hissing, igniter ticking but it doesn't light up. It stops for a minute or so and tries again. It does light up rarely sporadically but not dependable. I opened the bottom panel to expose the burner and sprayed some oven cleaner over the jets. No luck. If I manually ignite the lower burner, it ignites. To try this I lighted up a small piece of paper, close the oven door and turn on the oven on bake setting. When the lower burner is burning, I can see all jets have a flame. I did this only to diagnose and later closed the bottom panel.

I have used the self cleaning feature of the oven a few times already without any luck.

My issue is similar to this but in my case the igniter is firing.

Some time back I discovered a gas leak from behind the oven but it was fixed by the gas company. They unscrewed the gas inlet hose and applied some kind of grease and tightened it again. I'm not sure if this could be related.

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  • I believe that the bottom igniter is dead. I opened up the base plate and while I can see the sparks from the top igniter, there were no sparks at all from the bottom igniter. Amazingly it worked somehow yesterday.
    – Chetan Bhargava
    Commented Jan 12, 2013 at 0:51

3 Answers 3

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Since the oven has two burners, it would of course have two igniters - but either igniter could be busted and the other would still make noise. Can you look at the igniters? Are you sure both are firing? Because it would be easy for something to have fouled the lower igniter.

You really want to see that the igniter sparks at least as bright as the upper one before you say that it works.

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  • Yes, I see the bottom igniter firing. I see blue sparks from the igniter. As I mentioned, it works sporadically.
    – Chetan Bhargava
    Commented Dec 23, 2012 at 20:29
  • @ChetanBhargava - ahh. I missed that it was working sometimes. When you manually light it, do all the gas ports on the burner work? I'm guessing yes. In that case, it's gotta be the igniter itself - I think they are basically a spark gap, and if something gets in that gap, or if one side gets tapped (making the gap close) the amount of energy in the spark will end up changing, and may not light the burner. You could try looking at the igniter with a magnifier and see if it looks fouled or damaged, but it's probably got to be replaced.
    – Michael Kohne
    Commented Dec 23, 2012 at 22:15
  • To look at the igniter, I would have to remove it. It is located in the deep end of the oven. Is it easy to remove the igniter? Thanks.
    – Chetan Bhargava
    Commented Dec 24, 2012 at 20:12
  • It seems that the bottom igniter doesn't fire at cold start. My oven worked yesterday but did not today. So I opened the base plate and manually ignited it and replaced the plates. The baking started and after some time, the bottom burner stopped to maintain the temperature. A few minutes later when the temperature was down, it ignited by itself. I I heard the clicks and it ignited.
    – Chetan Bhargava
    Commented Jan 12, 2013 at 1:04
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There would be a flame sensor (usually a thermocouple mounted in the burner flame envelope) that causes the gas valve to close if the flame fails to ignite after a few seconds. They tend to weaken (produce lower voltage) over time. It's usually an easy replacement, at least if you're a contortionist.

Good luck and let us know how it goes!

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Pull out the bottom drawer and make sure that the wire is still connected to the igniter. That was the problem with mine. Reconnected and now everything works fine.

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  • Yes, the wires are connected and the igniter ignites for first time. It fails to re-ignite when oven tries to bring up the temperature again.
    – Chetan Bhargava
    Commented Jan 12, 2016 at 3:11

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