My oven does something similar at times, so I'm interested in seeing other responses. The ignition clicks repeatedly, but the gas doesn't light. It only happens when the oven is warm, like when I have the range burners going and the oven is cooling from previous use. If I turn off the burners, open the oven door, and let everything cool down for a few minutes, then the oven will work. I suspect it may be the motherboard, but I'm waiting until total oven failure before I replace it. I recently replaced the front touchpad after the oven went on a runaway overheating binge. Just before it fried, the touchpad was kind enough to give me a code indicating that the touchpad, and possibly the motherboard, were toast. Now everything works again, except for that occasional oven ignition hiccup, so I suspect the motherboard was also slightly damaged. The motherboard is sandwiched between the top of the oven box and the range, where it was probably hotter than hell during the big meltdown. By the way, as you already know, you can save a lot of money by doing your own appliance repairs. I was quoted $800 for a house call and installation of a new touchpad with a one-month part guarantee. (The whole stove cost $1200.) Two outfits refused to give me a quote, saying it would be cheaper to buy another stove. I searched on line and ordered the part for $125, added a lifetime replacement part warrantee for $50, downloaded installation instructions, and installed it in about 3 hours--with help from my spouse. Talk about empowerment!

I've had my 36" range Bluestar for almost seven years and we have replaced every single ignitor at least two times, many three or more. We've also had issues where we have had to replace the entire burner because the screws had rusted into place (our original range was built without stainless steel screws ... oops) and then they've broken off when we tried to make the ignitor change. In addition, we've had to have the spark modules (ignitor control boxes) replaced twice on one side, once on the other. On several occasions, "shorts" (that's the term we were told by repair people), have caused the wires to melt and fuse together--meaning the ignitor wire that goes from the ignitor itself and then plugs into another wire that goes into the spark module fused--requiring replacement of not only the ignitor, but the second wire (which also requires removal of the front plate). We also continue to have issues with all of our burners clicking constantly, even when the lit burner is fully on, unless the flame is on full high. (But only on two of the six burners.) So, yes, replacing an ignitor is a fairly trivial, if annoying and potentially expensive prospect, IF you don't also have melted wires, rusted screws that shear off when you try to remove the ignitor or broken spark modules. Oh, and you can actually get Bluestar to send you the ignitors you order and pay for in the first place. That's never really gone smoothly for me, either. In my experience, 6-12 week waits are the norm for parts from Bluestar. Plus, once you get the parts, you better hope they're right. We've had at least four replacement ignitors that didn't work, right out of the bag: cracked in shipment. The fragile, unprotected ceramic ignitors are sent loose--hitting against each other, if you order more than one--in small bubble mailers. A little rough handling in route and you're bound to get at least one pre-cracked ignitor per-batch ... At $25/pop, for what I've been told by several service people is a "$3 part." (But we've also not found off-brand ignitors that fit the Bluestar without modification.) "Stooxie," and others, I'm glad it hasn't happened to you but the ignitor issue (no air quotes) is, or at least, was, NOT "nonsensical." It's possible they've addressed these problems in later models, but I can attest the issue is most certainly a legit one. I don't have one, but I was very impressed with the Capital Culinarian, for many reasons, but at least in part because they had a large metal shield covering part of their ceramic ignitors, making me think they'll be a LOT less fragile. Oh and, in terms of Bluestar issues ... I will also say that, it's likely these are not current concerns, but we were certainly not thrilled to need two oven door replacements (locking itself shut) and a new oven bottom (support collapsed) ... Just more "non-issues" experienced by myself and many other Bluestar owners of the same generation. When the range works, it's impressive, but the shoddy build-quality I've seen (mine also came with loose screws floating free and missing parts) and abysmal customer service means I would never, ever buy another Bluestar, no matter what their next, latest-greatest is. They may have cleaned up their act now, but they treated their early adopters like Beta testers ... Without the service and support such positions usually come with. EDITED TO ADD: I'm not saying no one else should buy a Bluestar, or that they haven't solved the problems I've described above in later builds (I haven't cooked on one built later than mine, but I've read anecdotal evidence seems to indicate at least some changes have been made). I'm simply saying that I, personally, based solely on my own experience, would not. This post was edited by applnut on Tue, Apr 30, 13 at 8:57

When my wife and I started looking for a replacement for our 28 year old electric coil piece of manure that was in the house when we bought it many years ago, we originally started looking in that exact price range, 800-1300. We were also (at the time) looking for resale value as we "were" planning on selling our house so we wanted the best bang for the buck and kitchens are by far the best bang for your dollar as far as resale. So we looked and looked, the best resale wise was obviously either Induction or Gas. Induction was ridiculously expensive so we dropped that from the lineup almost immediately. So a gas stove that was decent about the best we could find were the Kenmores, which BTW are made by various different manufacturers from Whirlpool, Electrolux, GE etc. depends on what model and you can figure out who made it by the first 3 numbers in the model number and compare it to a chart. We looked at all the various Kenmore models and were about to buy one that was $1300 but I looked on Garden Web and saw several people talking about a NXR range. Basically a pro style gas range for about $500 more than we were going to spend on frankly a rather cheaply made, lite duty, lite little grates, only one burner putting out decent BTUs and had a electric panel of which if it goes out the whole stove is worthless and cost several hundred to replace. So we sprung for the NXR and did so largely because we wanted our kitchen remodel to really sell the house and the NXR looks fantastic, hell of a lot better than any of the standard sub $2000 ranges. So glad that we did, now we are staying for probably at least another 5-6+ years and I am really enjoying cooking on this range, so much better than ANY of the Kenmores. My wifes best friend bought a Kenmore Elite for over $1900 and it is no where close to as nice as our NXR that we got for $1799.00 delivered to the door. It weighs in around 350# on the shipping crate which is at least 100# more than her Kenmore Elite. It is a very solid stove with heavy grates, heavy racks in the oven, excellent very nice solid brass double stack burners same ones that come on Wolf stoves and all 4 put out 15,000BTU and also go down to a very low simmer, very solid well insulated door and 100% 304 stainless on all four sides and the top. All in all well worth the extra few hundred that we were about to spend on a stove that was no where even close to as nice. It was a major stretch for us to spring for $1800 for the stove alone, but the NXR was soooooo much better and all the other pro style ranges you can pretty much add another $1000+ so those were not even an option for us. If you can't do the $1800-$2000 then probably stick with the kenmore. Here is a link that might be useful: Who makes Kenmore?

We love this range, the burners have plenty of power. 2qts of water will boil on the high-powered corner burner in about 5 minutes, even faster in a big pot on the center burner. The center burner has plenty of power for authentic stir-frying with a residential-sized wok. The oven is fantastic and the even heat has really upped our baking game. (Note that the unit I bought also had gas orifices for each burner that that were sized for propane; these orifices are much smaller than those for natural gas and I had to drill them out to achieve the approximately equivalent BTU rating for natural gas as stock natural gas orifices were not available for any source I could find. Drilling all 5 orifices required getting consulting a chart to determine the right size drill bits but only took 15 minutes.) A couple of issues we have found: there is some coupling between the air supply for the top burners and the oven, which has a very tight seal; we have found that closing the oven door abruptly when there are many burners in use can cause the smaller burners to go out. However, the auto-relighting system immediately kicks in and the spark generator will cause them to fire up again. Another issue is that the top burner grates have been designed with a pattern that is very stylish but fails to support smaller saucepans at more than the 4 closest points, so a small saucepan or frying pan has to be centered carefully or it may tip over without the outer 4 points of the grating to support it.