We have a gas fireplace in our family room that was here when we moved in, so I'm not sure how old it is. A few months ago it stopped working, which I considered to be a blessing but really distressed my girlfriend; that fireplace is the best way she knows to get the room up to 125 degrees, which is how she likes it.
<The rest of this post will be long and boring, so I advise you to quit now unless you geek out on this stuff.>
The problem was that the pilot light would not stay on once the "pilot" button was released. You're supposed to push in the pilot button, push the ignitor button to light it, then leave the pilot button depressed for 30 seconds. When you release it, the pilot light *should* stay on, but it wouldn't and therefore there was no way to make the stove light for normal operation.
So being the manly man that I am, I pulled the surround off of the fireplace, pulled it away from the wall a bit, pulled out the fake logs and determined for sure that I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. I did a little YouTubing, though, and decided that the thermocouple was probably bad. Well, that sounded like something that a professional could fix in a jiffy, but was still scary to me so we called Aqua Quip. A few weeks later the AQ repairman showed up, spent a bunch of time and finally decided that the thermocouple was bad.
That visit cost me $177, and all I had was a diagnosis.
AQ told me that they couldn't replace just the thermocouple since the stove is so old, so they ordered an entire pilot assembly which consists of a thermocouple, a thermopile, the pilot light and the ignitor.
That part cost me $195.80. This little project is seriously cutting into my gun budget at this point.
Then AQ came to install the pilot assembly. They got it installed and looking good, but the original problem still persisted: The pilot light wouldn't stay lit. The AQ team decided that the main gas valve must be bad.
That visit, to install the new pilot assembly, cost me $179. We're up to a total of $551.80 now.
And then I got the quote from AQ for a new gas valve: $409.10 for the labor and $275 for the part, for a total of $684.10.
At this point, I'm getting pretty damned suspicious that these guys don't REALLY know what they're doing. Also, I was able to find a brand-new gas valve on eBay for $99 . . . .
So today, after staring at a disassembled fireplace for several months, I decided to tackle the project myself. I pulled the whole damn thing apart (about 3x what I really needed to, in hindsight). I checked the thermocouple with help from a propane torch and my multimeter, and concluded that it was working. I pulled the gas valve apart and concluded that it was working properly. I then pulled the actual valve out of the big valve assembly, connected the valve to the thermocouple, and it didn't work.
Then I noticed that there was a little square connector on the end of the thermocouple wire that hadn't been there on the old one:
I removed that square connector and plugged the thermocouple directly into the valve, and suddenly the valve seemed to be working properly.
If you look at the pic above you might be able to see that there's a small gap between the thermocouple tip and the contact inside the connector; look into the little window. That's when it's hand-tightened; when cranked with a wrench, it makes contact but not very good contact.
I put the whole thing back together (more work that it sounds like), hoped for the best, and finally:
So yeah . . . I'm feeling good about myself, and I'm not very happy with AQ at the moment.
We're going to contact them to tell them the story, and see if they'll refund some of the $551.80 as I really don't think it should have been that expensive if they had diagnosed it properly.