Mains extension leads - daisy-chaining

[charles]

We had a bayonet fitting long before natural gas. Something like 1965.

[Owain Lastname]

I remember a neighbour having a gas cooker in the kitchen which had a gas poker attached to the side of it.

Owain

[NY]

My mum's old cooker, which probably dated from the early 60s when they got married, had a gas poker for lighting the oven by transporting a flame from a hob burner. The flexible hose was very prone to getting trapped in the oven door (it was on the hinge side rather than the handle side of the door) so a gas engineer removed it and blanked it off, probably round about the time that the cooker was converted from coal gas to natural gas.

That cooker kept going until a few years ago when a gas engineer who was looking at a problem with the CH boiler saw it, checked it for gas leaks because it was old, and condemned it immediately (disconnect it, blank off the pipe to it) so mum and dad had to find a replacement to be delivered ASAP. They had to have takeaways for a couple of days and dig out an ancient toaster. Mum misses the eye-level grill of the old cooker: the new one is below the hob and above the oven, which means you have to bend down to see whether toast or bacon is cooked.

[Chris J Dixon]

I have seen similar ones, but incorporating an ignition mechanism. As you rotated the lighter in its holder from vertical to horizontal, which turned on the gas flow, a flint sparked and lit the gas jet.

Chris

[Andrew Gabriel]

It was ripped out of lots of tower blocks after Ronan Point, particularly badly constructed ones.

[Andrew Gabriel]

My parents had a Canon cooker with a poker on the side. The cooker had a pilot light under the centre of the hob which ignited the 4 burners and could be used by itself to keep something warm. For lighting the oven or eye-level grill, you used the poker to transfer a flame from the pilot light.

The poker was also used for peeling tomatoes and similar, which I remember doing as a child.

I have a recollection the poker and possibly pilot light were disconnected when the cooker was converted to natural gas.

[Andy Burns]

Parents had similar, can't remember the make, found this 'beauty' over the weekend while searching

[NY]

Pilot lights were the standard way of lighting hob, grill and oven until piezoelectric spark-gap ignition took over. My parents' cooker had one in the centre of the square of the four hob burners. There were little aluminium tubes from the pilot light housing to each burner to feed a bit of gas from the burner to the pilot light and once this lit, the flame travelled back up the tube to the burner.

I'm not sure how hot the pilot light housing got and whether it could be used for keeping pans warm/simmering. I *think* the housing may have protruded above the level of the hob bars which would have made it very difficult to balance a pan on there.

And old gas ovens had the thermostat calibrated in Regulo numbers ("Gas Mark

4") rather than real temperatures in Fahrenheit or Celsius. The Regulo was unusual in that it varied the gas flow *gradually* as the oven temperature rose, so you got big flames when you lit the over which got gradually smaller and smaller as the temperature got closer to the desired value; most thermostats are simple off/on so you get full power until the desired temp is reached, and then the heat turns off (or very low, for gas) until the temp drops again, without any gradual variation. I remember proving this with an old Regulo when the "gas man" had to fit a new one: I connected it up to the hosepipe and got a water jet which gradually reduced in height as I heated the temp-sensing end with a blowtorch.

[NY]

My parents' cooker was similar to this

though that one doesn't have any obvious pilot light area in the centre of the four hob burners. I wonder if the white object at the bottom left of the grill is a lighting port for the grill - lift the white cap, apply a flame (eg lit taper) and turn on the gas control at bottom right of grill. On mum's cooker, you had to hold the taper near the grill burner to light it. The oven had a 1/2" hole in the floor of the oven at the front for lighting - I remember the "whoomf" as the gas lit.