RV Refrigerator Repair: Cleaning a Burner Assembly

A problem you may run into is a blocked or defective burner assembly. This unit right here has the burner tube coming right into the inside of it. There is a spider that actually likes the smell of propane and will go inside here and spin a web which will block the flow of propane in it. If we see an abnormal flame or it won't light at all, chances are we're gonna have to take that burner assembly out and clean it or replace it. So in this model, we've taken this unit out of the cavity so it's a lot easier to get out.

We're gonna do some other work to it as well, but you'll typically just open the back vent of your refrigerator and it'll be a little more confined to work in. So we're gonna start by taking, taking some of this stuff off, get it out of the way. This happens to be our drain pan. This is a condensation tube that's gonna come out of here, and so, if we have any moisture out of there, we don't want it dripping down into the bottom in here so we're just gonna kinda catch it in this little pan here and allow it to evaporate. Then I also wanna take this housing off, and this is the little site hole that I would look at my burner, my flame inside there prior to diagnosing it.

So that just comes off, slides back. Way out of the way here. So what we see down in here is the bottom one is our burner assembly that we're going to be taking out and cleaning. This is our spark ignited right here. Take a 7/16 inch wrench.

Now, taking this apart, one of the things I wanna be careful about is there's a small little compression fitting right in here. And we're just gonna move this out of the way and make sure that stays intact. So this is a really tight place in an old unit too, so it was rusty. We actually went in there, sprayed a little WD-40 right on the screw itself. It's really hard to get to inside there, but we got it loosened up now.

And so, go in and we can see it from underside. There we go. So one of the things we've gotta be careful of too is we have a little compression ring right inside here that we do not want to lose. Set that right down in there. Burner assembly.

So this is our burner assembly. Again, it's just gonna come through here. It'll light our spark assembly right up on the top there. And if we look inside here, we can see there's a lot of grit, dust. We'll keep our cone out.

And you don't wanna put anything inside this. Some people could use a pipe cleaner or the little plastic piece, but if we put anything metal or sharp in there, we could score the inside of this, do some damage to here. But as I look through these, they're pretty corroded. So with this, we can basically take a wire brush, clean all this out inside here. This is our orifice.

This is something that we do not want anything metal inside of it. We're gonna actually soak this in some rubbing alcohol, some isopropyl, and if you look inside here, I don't know if you can see it, it should have coming out of there just a very fine little hole inside, so. All right, just put it in that, shake it up and we're just gonna let it set for a while in there. And then, like I say, we can take a wire brush to this. We can look inside, tube looks pretty good.

Now, if you don't wanna go through this entire step of taking everything out of here and cleaning this, what you might wanna do, if you have a yellow flame or an inconsistent flame, before doing all this, you can just blow this burner assembly out. So I'm gonna put this back in here, there we go. So this is what the unit looks like in here, and keep in mind, once we took the LP line, we've shut the LP off at the tank itself. We've got the valve off here, so before we disconnect any of the LP lines, we wanna make sure we have that done. Now, if you had an inconsistent flame or a yellow flame, before disconnecting all this stuff, I could get right in here, take this box off, access that and just take an air compressor and hose and blow that out and make sure you wear safety glasses.

You're gonna get a lot of rust and dirt. A lot of times, what happens is this flu, so you can see it has a lot of rust that's building up inside of here. That'll have a tendency to work its way down when you're traveling down the road, sits on top of that burner assembly, those slots in there, and then blocks them. So the first thing you might wanna do is blow that out. If you still have inconsistent flame or yellow flame, take this out, blow some through here.

Then the last step would be to take the whole assembly out and clean it. What you see is a quite a job, especially in some of the tight confinements. We're lucky here, we've got a wide open spot to do this. So just a little bit of maintenance, check that every once in a while. And if you do get the chance to clean that out, you'll have a much better flame and a much more efficient refrigerator.