One of the joys of home ownership (as opposed to renting) is maintaining your home. Most people are aware of the basics such as lawn care, snow shoveling, mowing the lawn, etc... What most people are unaware of our even find themselves a bit frightened by is appliance problems.
While many appliances in our modern age are designed to not be repaired (don't get me started) many of the larger tools in your home are quite easy to diagnose and repair. Naturally, extremely complex systems such as your central air or furnace are best left to professionals when they stop functioning properly but some of the systems you use on a daily basis can often be fixed with just a small amount of know-how.
About six months ago our gas oven started to act up. The temperature in the oven was a bit erratic (which impacts baking) and at times the oven simply would not turn on or would shut off in the middle of cooking. Clearly this could not stand and for a while we looked at replacing the oven with a higher quality one. That started to look very cost prohibitive as we are one of those "lucky" couples who have a 36" wide oven. You know, the kind often seen as in-home professional size.
If you look through the advertisements from your local appliance stores you will often see sales on individual or even matching sets of kitchen appliances. Let me tell you right now, these sets NEVER include the wider oven. In fact, most of these wider ovens start above the $2500 mark.
Since there was no way were going to drop that amount of money on a new oven we started to do some research on how a gas oven actually works.
After a few internet searches, and finding a copy of the owners manual for my oven, it quickly became apparent that the item in question that needed to be replaced was the igniter that both ignites the gas to heat the oven and controls the flow of the gas for the oven. This one part, while looking like it still worked, was just faulty enough to work some of the time but not in a reliable enough manner to ignore its failings.
Keep in mind that this is a gas range, propane to be exact. If there had been any smell of leaking gas when the oven was not in use it would have been replaced in a heart beat. The same goes for you, the reader. If you smell a gas leak DO NOT try to fix it yourself, call in a professional.
A quick visit to Amazon and a suitable replacement part was on its way to our door. Not a moment too soon either. As soon as I placed the order the igniter completely stopped working within 24 hours.
When the igniter arrived it was a very simple matter of removing a few screws and replacing the bad part with the new one. It was like night and day. Within 15 seconds of turning the oven knob on we could hear it ignite. We still have a problem with the oven temperature not matching the dial but it appears to be a solid 25 degree difference, which is something we can work with until I see about changing out the thermostat.
If your gas oven is having difficulty heating it might be your igniter. Even if you see it glowing it can still be bad and not activating the gas valve.
ERP IG9998 Universal Gas Range Oven Igniter