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Gas stoves with pilot lights

You can still use the Bic long after it runs out of fuel - all you need is the spark. And with a little patience one can also replace the flint in the Bic or use a piezo lighter

Reply to
Martik
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The answer is to have a valve to turn on and off the pilot on the front panel next to the one that controls the flame.

Starting dinner? Turn on the burner, light with Bic or similar, open the pilot valve and back-light the pilot automatically. Now turn on and off your burners as required.

Dinner all over? Turn off the pilot valves. Best of both worlds.

There's a reason all commercial ranges have pilot lights.

Reply to
YouDontNeedToKnow

Leave pilot offg permanetely if you want.

Open valve slightly a IMMEDIATELY light with fireplace lighter or whatever.

Dont turn burner off till your completely done cooking. Burner off means gas is off/

Just think of how you use a gas grill:)

Reply to
hallerb

A very good reason to have a pilot light they don’t tear up. I bought a gas stove with pilotless ignition and the oven is now tore up and needs a new ignition system for the oven to work. If I had me with a pilot light I wouldn’t have this problem. You may burn a little gas but in the long run the ones with a pilot are best.

Reply to
Asardee

They burn quite a bit of gas and waste it in thousands of homes. Just because you had a problem, most of us never had.

How much does it cost to run a pilot light for a month? Monthly costs of running a pilot light range from $4.49/month (natural gas) to $11.34/month (propane). Pilot lights that run on propane are about 2 times more expensive to run than pilot lights running on natural gas (that's because natural gas is cheaper per produced BTU ? British Thermal Unit).

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

I have a gas stove top. The pilot lights are shut off. I light the burners with a grill lighter when I want to use them.

Reply to
Dean Hoffman

So you're saying the pilot light on my stove burns 3 or 4 gallons of propane a month? I'll call bullshit on that. Just because you read it on the internet doesn't mean it's true.

Reply to
rbowman

I'm not saying anything but they do use gas. Here is another figure.

How much does a gas pilot light use? Just how much gas does a pilot light consume? Most pilot lights will consume about 600 BTU's of gas/hour. With 24 hours in a day, that's roughly 14,400/BTU's each day. Figuring 30 days, a pilot light will use approximately 432,000 BTU each month

Gallon of propane is 84,250 BTU so you can do the math on yours.

Instead of just calling bullshit, show some other numbers. What do the specs in the manual say?

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

Manual? It's an A-B stove. A-B was bought by the Detroit-Michigan Stove Company in 1945 and Detroit-Michign went out of business in '57. The stove is probably 70 years old and I've been using it for over 30 years. You don't need a manual to figure out how to turn burners on. The oven doesn't have a pilot light so bring your own matches.

After buying propane since the fall of '89 I can safely say it doesn't use 4 gallons a month for the pilot. I turn the furnace off in April and back on in October usually. In the five months I don't use 20 gallons cooking two meals a day on it.

So as I said, bullshit. I've got real life experience, not some BTU calculation from a manual.

Now if you said the pilot in the furnace uses that much I might believe it. When it starts to get warm the pilot generates enough heat to turn the circulating fan on so I turn it off when it starts to warm up and relight it in the fall.

Reply to
rbowman

I do the same thing with an electronic ignition gas range.

One advantage is that you don't have to turn the gas up all the way to start the spark -- the lighter will light the burner, even on a low setting.

Reply to
Fishrrman

I suppose it depends on the pilot light. The ones in my furnace and water heater were pretty good sized flames and had thermocouples on them. I knew people who turned off the furnace pilot in the summer. The water heater was still heating water so it wasn't a total waste. The one for the stove was under the top plate around the burners, not even a candle sized flame. The top of the plate was barely warm enough to rise bread if you put foil over it. It didn't even discolor the paint (at least for several years). You certainly weren't heating a pint of water over it 100 degrees in 20 minutes (300 BTU/hrs)

Reply to
gfretwell

Based likely on a faulty memory and an inability to think clearly and concisely.

The BTU calculation is simple physics. Your memory is fantasy.

Reply to
Scott Lurndal

You boys are confusing a range pilot light with a furnace pilot light. A range pilot light is under the top cover that barely gets warm to the touch. Nowhere near 300 BTUs. Maybe 3 or less.

Reply to
gfretwell

There are a range of pilot lights and most of what I see Googling is just generic. Seems water heater ones are on the low side. I'm curious now, I'm going to see if I can measure the draw from my water heater pilot light. The number Ed found seems high to me.

Reply to
trader_4

Also depends on the range. Some have three pilot lights. One for each pair of burners and one for the oven.

The numbers I found may or may not be accurate but unless someone has something actually measured there is no more proof of accuracy.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

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'"Exactly" being the operative term as there[in] lies the rub. Because, even though there are many estimates out there, not all pilot lights operate in the same way. Their flow rate may vary from one make to the next, and from one appliance to the next: instantaneous water heater, standalone gas-fired boiler or water heater.'

followed by instructions on how to measure it yourself.

TL;DNR, the example shown amounts to 95 euros per annum at 0.06 euro/kWh.

(Compliments of our friends in Brussels. Stella and a plate of pomme frites please, hold the mayo).

Reply to
Scott Lurndal

That might be close for an old school furnace pilot. Those had quite a flame. Same for the water heater. I think they made them bigger than they had to be so they would heat up the thermocouple faster when you were lighting them. If you turned off the furnace in the summer, it wasn't as bad as it seems since most of that heat is going into the house anyway. It is almost a wash on the water heater since you are still heating water. Every range I have had (about 5) just had a little pilot between the 4 burners and you lit the oven with a match. I haven't had gas appliances since 1984 although I bet my ex still has that stove.

Reply to
gfretwell

Pomme frites without mayo? What are you, a heathen? :-)

Coming back to the US after nearly 8 years in Europe, it took me a long time to get used to ketchup on fries again.

Reply to
Jim Joyce

Sacrilege. Salt is the only thing to put on fries.

Reply to
Scott Lurndal

Seems like there should be an easy correlation between the height of the flame and the amount being burned. Maybe proportional to the cube of the height?

Seems like the width of the flame might be directly propportional to the height, so it would be enough to know the height.

Seems like the height is always a half-inch or mroe and never a full inch, so that the minimum to maximum would only be a factor of 2... oops, I forgot about cubing it, so that means up to a factor of 8 (if the range of heights is really as great as x2.)

Are there pilot flames outside those dimensions?

I could go read that part, but I admit, I didn't.

Reply to
micky

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