Natural Gas Pilot Assembly, SP20127

I have a Ruud model p2-50f1 water heater and this is a perfect replacement. It comes with instructions which are great, but always well supplemented by a YouTube video for replacing a pilot assembly. For my situation, the gas company came, turned the gas off, then couldn't relight the pilot light on the water heater, leaving me to deal with it. The sparked was not clearly sparking and I couldn't even get the pilot to flame at all. Not sure exactly the issue, but this kit fixed it like a charm! Also, Supply House was the only place I could find a manufacturer part that could get to me overnight. Not to mention they offered 1 day delivery as their standard shipping! I needed this fixed by the weekend, and most plumbing companies would've have decided to replace the whole unit. I am so grateful because if it weren't for Supply House I wouldn't have even been able to attempt a fix. Worth noting that the wire that goes to the Piezo sparker had a different female end, but if your spark is good enough you can just jam it in there and it will bridge any gap.

I was sent this kit for warranty replacement after a Rheem customer assistance technician correctly identified it as being likely to solve my reported problem--being unable to relight a 2-year-old natural gas water heater after a brief interruption of its gas supply to facilitate replacement of another appliance. The kit arrived complete, and protectively packaged with clear, well-written instructions which nevertheless failed to alert me to problems with the installation that other users may also encounter. The first problem, a minor one in my opinion, was in trying to peal off the adhesive protective liner from the new fiberglass gasket without unintentionally separating the adhesive from the gasket itself. It is a very delicate operation! Next, the electric spark pilot burner igniter in this unit did not generate any sparks, after the first one or two sparks. I did not discover this behavior until after the new pilot assembly had been completely installed in the water heater. After observing good sparks at each of the first two actuations of the piezo-electric generator, but none subsequently, even after 20 or more tries at lighting the pilot with differing wait intervals between tries, I decided to remove the igniter and burner assembly from the water heater to facilitate investigation. I made the following observations of the Pilot Assembly operation on the laboratory bench: 1. The piezo-generator reliably and repetitively produced adequate voltage to produce strong sparks from a different insulated copper wire end to any point on the old slightly rusty main burner of at least the same gap distance as fixed between the actual igniter wire and the pilot burner hood in the kit. 2. The actual igniter wire checked good, end-to-end, for both electrical continuity and no leakage or shorts to ground. 3. The actual igniter wire end produced a spark to the pilot burner hood only after scraping the burner hood with my fingernail. (The pilot burner, out of the box, was bright and shiny with no visible corrosion.) However, after the first two good sparks were drawn, the igniter failed to produce any more sparks until it was again scraped with my fingernail. 4. Scraping a small, fine steel file across the tip of the pilot burner hood restored effective spark operation of the igniter with no diminution of effectiveness after 10 (or more) consecutive operations. Thus modified by this scraping operation, but without understanding the cause of this failure mode or what insulating material, if any, was deposited on the hood by a landing spark, or why scraping the hood apparently inhibited this hypothetical deposition, I reassembled the burner to the heater and was then able to light the pilot and the main burner normally with no further problem.