After you guys posted, especially Monday night last, I sent a bunch of emails to my friend with the bad boiler, He went in Tuesday early morning and lit the pilot with a match and it was fine. He stopped by Tuesday evening and it was till burning. But Wednesday morning it had gone out and he let the boiler company come and they replaced the thermocouple.
He's run this boiler for 20 years and doesn't remember ever having the pilot go out, or of cours, having to light it. But he still complains to me that he is, or it was, stupid. (He also used to own his own metal plating company, until new water pollution laws put him out of business, and it had a steam boiler.. )
It seems there are a few boilers that use a sparker to light the pilot (not directly the burner) , but this is not one of them. And they have manually pushed sparkers, not electric ones, so it still takes more than we were doing Monday to light the pilot. I expect to be there in the next year or two for some reason and I'll look at the charrt on the boiler to see if it was called an electric pilot or an automatic pilot. That, and his thinking the pilot should light by itself, is what confused me.
At least I kept him from buying the $175 Low water cutoff, and you and I kept him from buying the $85 Pilot Swtich.