Standing Pilot - Short #228

HVAC School - For Techs, By Techs

Bryan Orr

Training, Careers, Airconditioning, Self-improvement, Hvac, Business, Education, Refrigeration, Heating, Ac, Apprenticeship

4.8 • 985 Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this short podcast episode, Bryan talks about the standing pilot gas systems and the ignition strategy in gas-fired appliances.

Standing pilots are very simple devices that are common in fuel logs, water heaters, and some pool heaters. These devices have a thermocouple or thermopile; in a thermocouple, two dissimilar metals are connected at one end, and there is an electron flow between the metals when one is heated up. A thermopile is a collection of thermocouples in series or parallel to generate more millivolt signals. (Both of these can be damaged if cleaned; don't mistake these for the flame rod! Flame rods can be cleaned with a delicate material.)

To use a standing pilot, turn the dial to the pilot mode and press it in, which allows gas to come through the pilot. Then, you can light the gas (with a lighter or spark mechanism) and keep the dial depressed until there is enough heat generated on top of the thermocouple or thermopile, which allows it to lock in and keep the pilot lit (and pass the entire safety circuit). Then, you turn the gas valve on and let the main burner take over.

If one safety is open, the entire circuit breaks to prevent unspent fuel from accumulating and causing a dangerous condition. One of the main challenges with standing pilots is that they are prone and very sensitive to corrosion due to the low voltage and current. Clean and tight connections can mitigate these risks.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What's up, dogs? This is the HVAC school podcast, and I'm Brian. And after you do so many of these
0:09.4	intros, it just gets weird. It just gets weird after a while. You should try it sometime.
0:13.6	Start a podcast, have like 800 episodes, and try to come up with something cute to say at the start
0:17.6	of all of them. It's just, whew, it's tiring. But anyway, this is the podcast that
0:21.3	helps you remember some things. You might have forgotten along the way as well as helps you remember
0:24.7	some things you forgot to know in the first place. I'm Brian. And today we're going to talk about
0:29.1	standing pilot. Standing pilot gas systems. And what got me thinking about this is we don't work on a last standing pilot anymore, but I have this fire pit out of my house, and it was given me heck on the standing pilot system. I thought,
0:42.3	it's been a long time since I've talked about standing pilot. And in fact, I don't even know if I've
0:45.6	ever talked about standing pilot systems, but I got a funny story about that. To start, once we
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	...

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