Swapping Out An RV Oven – Part 1

Swapping out a gas RV oven is not as difficult as you might think. Even though the stove top and oven appear as one piece, they can be separated by removing a couple of screws and detaching some gas lines. I know it sounds intimidating, messing with gas lines and such. Actually, it’s really simple, just take some safety precautions and you should have no worries!

I will show you how I swapped our gas RV oven and replaced it with an electric convection oven. As a disclaimer, I am not a professional RV mechanic, electrician or propane gas expert. I do however have a good knowledge of how things work and I am familiar with working with electricity and gas lines. Of course, you have to be careful when working with gas and electricity. Please take proper precautions, turn off propane and disconnecting electricity, when doing this type of work.

Let’s Take This Thing Out!

The first part of the swap was removing the stove/oven combo from the kitchen counter. Before trying to remove anything, turn off the propane at the tank! Now we’re ready to start taking out the RV oven. With the stove cover removed, I first disconnected the gas line from the stove. Then I moved on to removing the unit. It is held in place with about 6 screws, 4 under the stove-top cover and 2 below the oven. With the screws removed I was able to slide the unit right out.

Coming Up With A Plan

With the RV oven removed and sitting on the floor where I could work on it, I went about separating the stove from the oven. First thing I did was pull the knobs off the front of the stove and remove the cover hiding the control valves. This gave me a good look at how everything was put together and how I wanted to proceed. Removing the oven control vale from the unit didn’t appear to be a good option since I had no way to seal the holes in the line supplying gas to the valve. Leaving the valve in place was the better option and as long as the valve remained off there should be no issues with gas leaking. Attached to the control valve are 2 gas lines, a pilot light thermocouple wire , and the oven thermostat. Here is how I dealt with each of these items.

Unplug The Thermocouple

The thermocouple wire just unplugged from the valve, easy enough. I tried for a moment to remove the thermostat from the valve, but it was just way easier to cut the copper line off. If you didn’t want to cut off, you could just pull the thermostat probe out of the oven and just leave it under the stove-top cover.

Dealing With The Gas Lines

Next was disconnecting the 2 gas lines, one for the pilot light and the other for the burner. You could get some plugs and screw them into the valve, which should provide the best seal. I chose, however, to cut a few inches of the original lines off. Then I bent the ends over with some pliers and flattened them down with a hammer. Now I just reattached these back to the control valve. There shouldn’t be any issues with gas leaking out. For gas to be supplied to the burner the pilot light thermocouple would have to be heated, I removed that. The pilot light line is only live when the knob is turned to pilot and pushed in, again until the thermocouple is heated. As long as the knob remains off, and even by some chance gets turned on, no gas should be supplied to the lines. With the bradded down lines reattached to the valve, if by some chance some gas gets supplied to the lines, any leakage would be very minor.

Get It Separated

Now, with all the lines detached, the RV oven and stove could be separated. This part was super easy. The 2 pieces are held together with a few screws, that were removed with the stove-top cover off. With the screw removed I was able to pull the stove off the oven. Then I reattached the control valve cover and put all the knobs back on. The stove-top was now ready to reinstall, but we had to prep for our new electric oven before that could happen.

Be sure to check out Swapping Out An RV Oven – Part 2, where I cover all the work we did to install our Breville Smart Oven Air.

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