I've spent the afternoon troubleshooting this. It has me stumped, unless its simply that the sparker module is weak. I always assumed the sparker was in parallel, but now that I think of it, each lead probably has its own source of high voltage, so the electronic component path is not the same path between them. Or does it round robin the leads?
GE Profile free standing gas range (JGB918BEK7BB). Sealed burners. Burners have an aluminum burner with a cap. It is ... maybe 15 years old, but these burners have been flakey for years. I finally got the gumption to try to fix them. Igniters are W13K10014.
Two burners have weak sparks (I'm using a mirror to observe). But one is really troublesome.
Middle "griddle" burner is a little weak, sometimes works, now that I cleaned it. Back right "simmer" burner is currently really weak or no spark at all.
This is what I have done:
- Purchased new electrodes from Amazon (4 for $10, so they are the cheap ones)
- Removed every aluminum burner, cleaned them, cleaned their gas spark ports.
- Steel wool cleaning around the sparking area.
- Cleaned the steel screws that the burner sits on, cleaned the aluminum posts as well with steel wool.
- There are three screws per burner. Ohms between stainless steel screws at any one burner was 1ohm on every burner, except the troublesome one. Removed screws, cleaned them, put deoxy contact cleaner on them, cleaned a little bit of rust or something at top of hole. Reinserted screws. Ohms was back to 1ohm from 50ohms on the troublesome burner.
- Swapped electrode more than once.
- Tried electrode removed from clip, holding wire very near screw. Still weak. Did shock myself once or twice holding the porcelain body. I assume this is normal?
- Cleaned the electrode/clip hole with a straw brush using glass cleaner.
- Two sparkers have an oddity. One works fine, the other is this problematic weak one. These both have 370ohms from electrode to ground screws. All others have 0ohms.
- Something I did at one point actually caused this troublesome simmer burner to start sparking strongly again. Then it went week or non existent again.
Again, I'm looking visually at the sparks -- this isn't about gas flow to the sparker. I'm comparing with the other burners that have nice bright thick sparks.
Is it possible for the sparker to have a couple of the leads be weaker than the other leads? How does the sparker work in terms of allowing all sparks to occur? If it was in parallel, then the burner with the least resistance would "consume" the spark, would it not? It doesn't look like it is round robin, but it is hard to see all igniters at once!
edit:
The burner looks like this:
On the right side of the burner is a little "cave" that the electrode sits under. It has a small hole leading to it for the gas, which you can see as a groove. On the bottom of the burner are three pegs that touch four stainless screws. On top of the burner is a black cap to "seal" it. I don't think my problem is conductivity to the burner itself. I've measured the ohms from the burner to other screws.
