Whirlpool gas range — the last working burner finally quit — Hackensack, NJ

The call

The customer called because the last burner that still worked had stopped working. That sentence carries the history: they had been failing one at a time over years, and the kitchen had been getting by on whatever was left.

What we found

Under the cooktop everything was in the same condition, and it was worse than the symptom suggested. Burner bases eaten through with corrosion, ports packed solid, dirt worked into places that have to stay clear. The igniters were not dirty or out of position — they were finished. Wiring had gone the same way, insulation perished where years of heat and spills had been getting at it.

And someone had been in here before us. One igniter was held in place by a twist of ordinary wire instead of its bracket — the photograph below is not staged.

That improvised fix is worth pausing on, because it explains the rest. It probably worked for a while. And that is how a cooktop arrives in this state: each failure patched instead of repaired, one burner at a time, until there is nothing sound left to patch onto.

The fix

Replaced every burner on the cooktop and every igniter, and made the wiring good. There was no smaller version of this job. Doing one and leaving the others would have meant coming back for each of them in turn, at a visit apiece.

A repair this size deserves a decision rather than a surprise, so the full price was on the table before anything started. That is how every visit works here, but it matters more when the answer is not a single part.

What causes this, for anyone with an older gas range: moisture and spills reaching underneath the burner caps and staying there. Wiping under the caps when they are cool, now and then, is most of the prevention — and a burner that has started lighting slowly is telling you something long before it stops.