Wolf cooktop: burners click, catch for a second, then go out — Teaneck, NJ

The call

Most of the burners would not light. Some clicked and never caught; others caught for a second and died the moment the knob was let go. Nothing else was wrong in the kitchen — no smell of gas, no other appliance misbehaving.

What we found

A Wolf sealed burner is built in two tiers, and that is the whole of this story. The flame you cook on sits on the upper tier. Underneath, a much smaller flame burns almost invisibly, and its only job is to tell the control that fire is present. Lose it and the safety valve shuts the gas — precisely what it is meant to do.

Nothing on this cooktop was broken. The igniters sparked, the valves opened, the gas arrived. What had happened is slower than a failure: years of boil-overs had left deposits in the lower tier, where the ports are barely wider than a pin. Blocked there, the small flame could not establish, the confirmation never arrived, and the gas closed a moment after every attempt.

This is the fault that looks electrical and is not. Igniters get replaced over it, and the burners still go out.

The fix

Reaching those ports means taking the burner apart — cap, head and the well underneath all come off, and that is most of the time on a job like this. Cleared the lower tier on every affected burner with the tool meant for it, then tested each one under flame: lit, knob released, left burning steady.

One warning, because this is where the real damage comes from. Those ports are drilled to a size, and anything pushed into them harder or thicker than they are — a needle, a paperclip, a drill bit — opens them permanently. A burner with an enlarged port never burns right again, and on a Wolf that part is not cheap. Worth a visit rather than a poke.

Worth knowing too: this is wear, not a defect. A cooktop that cooks daily for years will do this eventually, and it says nothing bad about the machine.