Auto Ignition for LP/propane gas appliances (can it be added?)

[SmallDiscoveries1]

Sent: 3/30/2005 3:11 PM

Anyone know if an auto ignition system can be added to a coaches appliances? All of my appliances are manual ignition. It would be nice if I didn't have to light the fridge or the water heater or the stove or the furnace. Would you have to replace the appliances with new instead?

Thanks,

Steve

[denisondc]

From: denison
Sent: 3/30/2005 4:28 PM

You could have an ignition coil/condenser/momentary switch to create a nice blue spark any place you wanted to mount it; but having it work automatically with an appliance would mean engineering a control circuit.

I thought all appliances that didn’t have “automatic igniters” had pilot lights. Thats how all of mine work. So the short answer is, new appliances that included automatic ignition would be required. Then you have more parts to possibly fail. I have seen lots of posts on RV sites about the failures of ignitor boards in refrigerators. Pricey$$

We have one of the long-nosed grill-lighters that generates a piezo-electric spark as you push its button, which spark would light the butane that came out when you had the button held down. It was out of butane and someone threw it away, but the little piezo-spark does a nice job of lighting propane by itself. We hold it at the burner to light the stove. I think its long enough to reach into the furnace to light the pilot light in there, and Im sure it would do a good job of lighting the hot water heater too.

I light the fridge burner in the mornings when we unplug from a campground, and the fridge runs by itself until I switch it back to shore power; at the next campground or wherever. It has a pilot light for when the main burner is cycled off.
The furnace pilot light has to remain on in order for the furnace to be able to cycle off-to-on, and that pilot light would stay on for however long you were going to be needing the furnace. Our vacations are usually in hot weather, but the few times we went camping in freezing weather, I lit the furnace pilot light when we first parked, and didn’t shut it off till we started home several days later. We used the thermostat on the wall to turn the furnace down when we werent in it.
The little “spark-lighter” works well enough to light the stove so that we don’t use the stoves pilot burner. I don’t think ours has a pilot burner for the oven. But we havent used the oven for several years, and we used matches to light it the last time I think.

When we light our fridge, I have to hold the red button in (the pilot gas valve), light the pilot burner, and count to about 30 before I let go of the red button. (The fridge used to have a flint lighter, but that didn’t work and I havent bothered to try fixing it). The same is true of the pilot burners for the water heater and the furnace. The hardest thing is making sure an insect hasn’t plugged up the tiny pilot burner outlet; and if its been days or weeks since we used the appliance, waiting for the propane to purge the air from the line.

[SmallDiscoveries1]

Sent: 3/31/2005 9:17 AM

Good answer. Very thorough. The reason I posed my question was because on a newer winnebago I looked at, you could kick on the furnace by just setting the temp to 72 or whatever temperature you wanted. I know the refrigerator had an ignitor on it too.

Thanks.

Steve

[denisondc]

Sent: 3/31/2005 10:58 AM

I wonder what the price of the igniter and other control circuitry is?   

[DaveVA78Chieftain]

Sent: 3/31/2005 2:12 PM

By the time you bought all the parts, if you can even find them, you will be getting close to or above the price of a new one.  The ignitor board for a fridge/furnance alone is $100 (Dinosaur).  Then there is all the rewiring and such.  Would also have to change over from a pilot style control valve to one that does not need the pilot light signal to allow full gas flow operation.  The ignitor board monitors the burner flame (via either the spark probe directly or a seperate probe beside it) and shuts off the gas control valve if it does not detect burner flame ignition within a few seconds.  Pilot style gas valve would not allow the gas to flow without the pilot signal  therfore the burner would never light. Original ignitor boards may not have retry capability either.  Many a battery has been run down because the furnance blower stayed on all night when the burner did not light.

Dave     

[bluebird]

You could buy a grill kit and install it, but that would still require you to push a button while you turn the knob. I replaced the sparker box on my grill last summer with a kit from Lowes. It came with all new wires and electrodes, for about $35.00.