Viking igniter clicking, and no flame arriving

If it is clicking, the expensive half of the system is already proving itself. The module is firing, the electrode is receiving the pulse, and the appliance believes it is being asked for a flame. What has failed is the meeting between the spark and the gas, and that meeting has only a few ways to go wrong.

Start with the one that costs nothing

Lift the cap off and look at where it sits. Sealed burners have a locating feature — a notch, a pin, a flat — and a cap that was washed and dropped back on without engaging it will sit a millimetre proud and a few degrees out of rotation. The spark then jumps to the nearest metal instead of across the gas port, and it will go on doing that for years. Seat the cap properly, dry, and try again before anybody is called.

Two more free checks belong here. A cap or head still damp from the sink will spark to the water rather than the gas. And a port ring clogged with boil-over will carry gas nowhere near the electrode, which looks identical from standing height.

Then the electrode itself

An electrode is a steel pin in a ceramic insulator, and it fails in two ways that are easy to tell apart with a torch. Carbon tracking shows as a dull grey or black path glazed across the ceramic; the spark follows that path to ground and never crosses the gap. A cracked insulator does the same thing invisibly. Neither is repairable and neither is dear.

This is the check that matters most within sight of the water. On Davis Shores and around Camachee Island, salt settles on everything an appliance leaves exposed, and the spark terminals under a rangetop are exposed by design. A corroded terminal, a green crust on the spade connector, or a lead that has gone brittle at the boot will all produce a weak, wandering spark that clicks perfectly and lights nothing.

Last, the module

A spark module fires each burner on its own channel. When one channel dies, one burner clicks and never lights while the rest behave normally — and because every burner clicks together on most of these appliances, an owner watching the wrong burner concludes the whole thing is broken. We test at the module output, per channel, rather than replacing it on the evidence of a noise.

The thing that is not a fault

All burners clicking when you turn one is normal on a shared module. It sounds alarming and it is how the appliance was built. Nothing needs doing, and we will say so on the telephone rather than book a visit to say it in person.

Where this lands on the bill

Ignition is the cheap end of this book, which is the point worth making before anybody starts worrying about a range. The band is published below with the diagnostic, and the two free checks above are the ones that most often make the band irrelevant.

When clicking is the wrong question

If a burner lights and then drops out a second or two later, stop looking at ignition. That is flame supervision or a weak flame — gas pressure at the appliance, a partly blocked orifice, or a sensing circuit that is not seeing the flame it lit. It is a different measurement and a different conversation, and mixing the two is how a good igniter gets replaced for nothing.