Range that lights with 9 volt battery

Automatic Washer - The world's coolest Washing Machines, Dryers and Dishwashers

Help Support :

I could relight the pilot myself-no problem if it went out.Otherwise the apartments building engineer could light it for you-other tenants.Relighting pilot lights was common in older homes-folks knew how to do it.Now I sort of miss that pilot light as the butter,sauce and syrup warmer!The stove I had in that apt had the pilot in the center of the cooktop-it folded up like a WP washer so you could restart the pilot if it ever went out.Zip tubes went to the burners.If the top of the stove was cold-time to relight!!!
 
Not all stoves had the pilot close enough to the surface to throw off any appreciable warmth. I can tell you 2 of my grandmother's stoves (one was a Bengal, IIRC) didn't. Neither did my mom's '68 Magic Chef. In fact, I encountered this for the first time in my BF's kitchen. I'll have to check the make next time I'm over. I can tell you it's BOL, though.

Everyone I knew had gas growing up and nobody gave any thought to pilot lights. If they went out for some reason you simply re-lit it. Other point I remember hearing over and over as a kid was that the flame was always supposed to be blue. If there was more than a speck or 2 of yellow that meant you had to have something adjusted.

First time cooking on an electric was in HS at a friend's house. I tried to make a grilled cheese sandwich... didn't come out too well, lol.
 
Brown Gas Ranges And Pilot Issues

Brown started making these battery ignition ranges mainly for apartment owners who were too cheap to install a 120 volt outlets in older apartments when they had to replace the ranges.

 

Constant burning pilots were a HUGE waste of gas and an unnecessary hazard as well as an undesirable source of heat and carbon monoxide in homes with gas ranges. Smart states like California and most countries banned constant burning pilots more than 30 years ago.

 

The small pilot flame always makes a lot of carbon monoxide when properly adjusted they are supposed to have a small yellow tip, small pilot flames do not by design burn anywhere nearly as efficiency as the larger oven and top burner flames. Now that carbon monoxide detectors are common in home we often see just the pilots of older pilot equipped ranges setting the CMDs off.

 

Every gas range that comes back to our shop that has CBPs gets junked I would not sell one as they cause too many problems complaints of excessive heat, smell as well as major complaints of gas leaks if a pilot should ever go out. Like wise when we are working for property owners where are gas ranges with CBPs when we get the first complaints about gas smells we insist that the range be replaced with one with electric ignition, it saves a lot of headaches and future service call expense.

 

Brown Stove Works does make self-cleaning electric ovens in their dual-fuel Five-Star [ so called professional ranges ]. BSWs ranges are diffidently low end ranges and their Five-Star ranges are no better, I would rank their 5S ranges as being about equal with Vikings junky so called professional ranges.
 
Brown and Viking are  neighbors.  Brown here in Tn.  Viking headquarters are in Greenwood Ms.   I was surprised to see a "Viking" cooking school  in  Ameristar in St. Louis.  I have been to the Alluvian Hotel for cocktails.  The whole complex is basically old storefronts ( read, another tiny town with a Walmart). 

http://https//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_Range
 
Alluvian, Opened as The Irving in 1917..

alluvian.jpg
 
A self-cleaning Brown Stove

Boy, wouldn't that be a disaster waiting to happen! It would be proof that nuclear reactors were not the only things to melt down. You probably could not get fire insurance if you had one of those.

What gets really stinky is when carbon would build up a cone on the underside of the little baffle above the pilot light and the carbon would sort of glow in the pilot flame. Once the carbon cone was scraped away, and the pilot set so that it did not touch the little baffle above it, the stove would not be as stinky, although sometimes the burners did not light as easily if the pilot were turned down. As with anything, maintenance is important.
 
My caloric

with the pilots.....it worked flawlessly, but it did heat the cooktop from the 2 pilots underneath...and it also rusted.  My biggest concern was the fact that there were no thermocouples for the cooktop pilot lights.  If I had the kitchen window open on a breezy day, the pilots would blow out!  I would begin smelling gas and know what the problem was and just relight them, but I didn't like that.  the oven pilot had a thermocouple and would shut off if it went out. 

 

I used to let my bread and rolls rise in the oven...it was also a great place to dry shoes that had just been washed in the Asko...gentle warmth didn't harm the leather and overnight they would be completely dry.
 
Thermocouple Equipped Gas ovens

Wow Greg you had an old Coloric, the last of the thermocouple equipped gas ovens sold in this country were made before 1962, these older thermostats systems were very good bakers because the oven flame just tapered down rather than cycling on and off. These were the only gas ovens that actually baked as well as most electric ovens.

 

In the early 60s the American Gas Association AGA approved gas ranges where the oven pilot gas flow did not shut off if the pilot flame blew out. Range top burner pilots never had a system that stopped the gas flow if they blew out. This was allowed because the amount of gas from even four pilots all being out on a gas range would never allow enough gas to accumulate in a home to become a hazard.
 
I was looking at the Premiere web site

And I wonder, even if they go after section 8 and apartments, I would think they have to give a price break to the apartments or the government to sell those ranges at all. Even the images make them look like junk and I cannot believe the price they charge, as much as 150 more than a GE/Whirlpool/Frigidaire low priced range. How can their product be at all competitive?
 
How can their product be at all competitive?

There are contracts, sweetheart deals, kickbacks, graft, corruption and nefarious deals we could not even dream of. In cities where the deal has to go to the lowest minority contractor's bid, honest people would weep at the huge theft of public funds. I heard about a staggering deal in Baltimore while picking up parts this summer and it was all perfectly legal, if not ethical or honest. That is the market for this dreck.
 
Brown Stove Pricing

I don't know where you guys are looking at prices but Brown has always been available at fairly low prices to us. I have sold many Brown ranges and the main reason we sell them is price is lower than GE, HP, WP, FD etc. We mostly have used Brown for 20" and 24" models and the occasional 36" wide range. Brown would not be in business long if they were not competitive on price.

 

Section 8 housing is all privately owned, it is up to the owner to buy what ever appliances that they want used or new for their properties.

 

While the quality of Brown ranges is nothing to wright home about it is still much better than the junk that Whirlpool imports from Mexico for their cheaper non-self-cleaning gas and electric ranges.
 
Perhaps the Brown is lower priced...

But if you look on the Home Depot site there is, for example, a Premiere range that is more than $800, no self clean, no sealed burners, in white, when one could buy the Hotpoint or the Amana for less than half that price so even on the low end, it strikes me as a ripoff. I have never seen a Premiere range in real life, so maybe they are more solidly built but from the images, they look kind of junky, a lot like 70s Kenmore ranges (maybe Premiere built them then?). Premiere does not seem to be competitive and I wonder why HD and Amazon even sell them at all.
 
I saw a Premier apartment size gas range at the Lowes here maybe last year. And I don't remember how much it was, but it wasn't cheap at all. Definitely a cheaply built stove though, very basic, no clock, no oven window, nothing.

Were apartment ranges always rather expensive? I always thought they were cheap, but perhaps not because they wouldn't have sold as many as 30" I don't think. I have early 90s Sears catalogs with them, and 24", but I forget the prices.
 
I've seen numerous Brown ranges in manufactured housing units. Usually in the form of a 20" range but also bol 30" in park models as well as older mobile homes from the 60s-80s. After that they made a big deal of selling the fact that they were going with "name brand appliances" such as GE, which it usually is/was.

As for standing pilots, several good points about the problems with it have been made.
Another problem is for those who are not so discerning, are not such good house keepers, and their household fosters other live-in residence that can multiply quickly and are drawn to warm areas for nesting. Standing pilots are perfect for that. Basically the entire range is warm all the time, so is the surrounding cabinets and the area behind and above the range. Having been a landlord, I've seen places where if you turn the oven on, a few minutes later there are bugs running up the walls to get away from the sudden boost of heat.

And standing pilots are not just for stoves. Water heaters still today, and less frequently today, furnaces. Even some pool heaters and gas fireplaces.

A standing pilot in a water heater is still fairly common and not such a safety hazard so long as it's a gravity vented heater. However, I had a situation with a ten year old house I bought in 2005. It had a direct vented water heater, using inside air for combustion. I naturally expected it had an electric ignition. No, it was a standing pilot. So, the fan only runs when the flame comes up to full burn. On pilot there is no fan and there is no vent. Ridiculous. I replaced that.

If you want to know just how much heat a standing pilot gives off, and you have a standard vent gas water heater, try this easy experiment that I purposely chose a while back.
Always wanting to conserve, I put my water heater on vacation setting (pilot only) to see how long the water would stay hot or warm. Now I've done this with an electric water heater, so there is a point of reference.

With the gas water heater on pilot, the water stays warm enough to take a warm shower. It stays warm enough for washing hands. The only time I needed to turn it on full burn was if I was doing the odd load of hot laundry, or something else where I specifically needed a large batch of hot water. For me, that was like once a week for about an hour. The rest of the time, that water heater sucked up the heat given off by just the pilot. So much waste.

We have remember, in the early part of last century, The U.S. was awash in oil and it's bi-products. It was all we could do to burn it up and play with our new toy. And as Americans, void of nearly any common sense, we burned through it and enticed other cultures to do the same.

Now, we're paying the price. So strung out on the stuff, most people don't know anything different. It isn't easy to make the necessary changes. Its really sad.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/17/s...test-year-on-record-surpassing-2010.html?_r=0
 
A lot of mobile homes here had Magic Chef ranges in the 80s and 90s, electric or gas and always very BOL ones. I think 1960s and 70s mobile homes tended to have a gas cooktop with the wall oven next to it, which was sometimes removed and the cooktop replaced with a standard range.

In the 90s they seemed to use GE appliances and often very BOL gas ranges, and more recent mobiles are tending to use MOL electric ranges and nicer appliances in general. Although I have seen 80s mobile homes with MOL Whirlpool appliances.

I guess it depend on the manufacturer and price point.
 
Back
Top