Appliance Repair Wisdom for the Ages

Sunday, August 18, 2002

If your gas oven burner is giving off black powdery soot, you're flirting with potentially deadly carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning. Sooting is one of the tell-tale clues of incomplete combustion and is always accompanied by high levels of CO. No, Grasshopper, it is not normal for a properly adjusted gas burner to give off soot, not even a little bit.

Sooting is caused by one of three things:

1. range not set up to burn the fuel you're supplying (i.e., natural gas or LP);
2. insufficient primary combustion air, usually corrected by simply opening the air shutter;
3. too much gas -- measure the gas pressure at the orifice using a manometer.

A diagram of how gas burner flames should and should not look is here.

Soot in my oven.
The Wolf rep said all is fine,
at my funeral.

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