Broken grill

Broken Grill

The regulator on the gas grill finally died on me. It was leaking around the thin metal plate at the top of the assembly. So, I tried an experiment. I put a lot of glue on the top and let it dry. However, when I turned on the gas, a pressure release valve blew out. Oh well. It was worth a try.

This thing was a real pain to replace. The brass nut would not unscrew no matter how hard I tried. Finally I gave up and got my neighbor to help me. It was pretty embarrassing just how easy it unscrewed when we tried it again. I went to Home Depot to replace it. Unfortunately, they were out of new, single hose regulators. Luckily, an employee took one off of a model on the floor and rang it up for me.

Corroded circuit board

Unfortunately, bad luck seemed to come in threes fixing up the grill. The module which displays how much gas is left in the canister was not working. When I opened it up to replace the batteries, I noticed that they were badly corroded. Putting in new batteries didn’t fix it. So I took it apart. The circuit board was damaged from the corrosion. You can see where the chemical reaction was slowly consuming the circuit path. Ordering a new part was easy. And I replaced it.

The next problem was getting the grill to spark to ignite the gas. I kept messing around with the single battery with no luck. Finally I reversed the battery and tried it again. This time everything worked!