Electric Stove Burner Not Working: Coil or Glass Top

Electric cooktops split into two worlds. On the older coil design an owner can very nearly complete the diagnosis with their hands and no tools. On a glass top, almost nothing is reachable and guessing is expensive — so knowing which you have decides whether the next step is a swap or a phone call.

Coil Cooktops: the Swap Test

If your elements are the spiral coils that sit in a shallow bowl and unplug by lifting and pulling, you have the single most useful test in this whole subject available to you.

1. Switch the cooktop off and let everything cool completely. Coils hold heat well after the light goes out
2. Lift the dead element a couple of inches and pull it straight out of its socket. It should come away without force
3. Take a working element of the same size from another position and plug it into the dead one
4. Turn that position on. If the swapped element heats, the original element was faulty. If it stays cold, the fault is in the socket, the wiring or the switch behind it
5. Try the suspect element in the position that works. The mirror test confirms the same answer from the other direction
6. Look at the socket while everything is out and cold: burnt, blackened or melted contacts are a finding in themselves, and a common one

That sequence tells you element or socket, which is the entire question, and it costs nothing. What matters afterwards: a burnt socket is not just a bad connection, it is evidence of heat where there should not be any, and it needs replacing rather than cleaning. Elements and sockets are usually sold together for that reason.

Glass and Ceramic Tops

On a smooth top the radiant elements are sealed under the glass and there is no swap test. The honest position is that this one needs measuring, and the useful thing an owner can do is observe carefully rather than dismantle anything.

• Does it glow at all? Watch a dead zone in a dim kitchen. A radiant element glows visibly through the glass when working, and no glow at all is a different finding from a weak glow
• Does it cycle? Radiant elements switch on and off to hold a setting, so a burner that pulses is behaving normally, not faulting
• Is it only on some settings? A zone that works on high and not on low, or the reverse, usually points at the switch or the control rather than the element
• Any cracks or chips? A cracked glass top is a safety matter — moisture can reach the element and the wiring beneath. Stop using that zone
• Does the whole side go together? Two adjacent zones failing at once often means a shared supply leg rather than two failed elements

A cracked top deserves the emphasis. Glass cooktops crack from impact and from thermal shock — a cold pan onto a hot zone, or a boil-over of cold liquid — and once the surface is broken the appliance is no longer sealed. That is not a cosmetic problem. The replacement question is covered in glass cooktop replacement.

Reading the Symptom

Two rows are safety rather than diagnosis. A burner stuck on is an unattended heat source, and the breaker is the right response before any booking. Arcing under a glass top is the same category — audible or visible sparking beneath the surface means stop using that zone entirely rather than working around it.

The Lost Leg, Again

Electric cooktops run on 240 volts, arriving as two 120-volt legs. Different zones and different heat settings are distributed across those legs, which produces a symptom that reads as multiple simultaneous failures: two burners die together, or every burner works but none reaches full heat, or the panel lights while nothing gets hot.

Nothing in the appliance has failed in that case. One leg has gone, at a breaker that tripped on one half without looking tripped, at a loose connection in the terminal block behind the cooktop, or at a worn contact. So the first move is the same as on any 240-volt appliance: switch the breaker fully off and fully on, both halves together, deliberately.

If that restores it and it fails again later, stop resetting and have the circuit examined. A repeatedly tripping breaker on a cooking circuit is reporting something real, and the terminal block behind a cooktop is a place where heat damage genuinely happens.

Induction Is Not an Electric Cooktop

If your hob is induction, almost nothing above applies. There is no heating element under the glass at all: a coil creates a magnetic field and the pan itself becomes the heat source. So a zone that “will not heat” has a different list of causes, and one of them is the pan.

• The pan. Induction needs ferrous cookware. If a magnet does not stick firmly to the base, that pan will never heat, and a zone that works with one pan and not another is not faulty
• Pan size and position. A base smaller than the zone’s minimum, or off-centre, may not be detected at all
• Overheat protection. Induction electronics are cooled by a fan, and a blocked vent or a hot cabinet makes zones drop out and come back
• Error codes. These cooktops report faults far more specifically than radiant ones — photograph the code before clearing it
• The generator board. When it is genuinely electronic, it is the board rather than an element, and that is a different price class

The magnet test is worth doing before anything else, because it is instant and it resolves a fair number of “my new hob does not work” calls. Stainless that is not magnetic, aluminium and copper simply do not work on induction, regardless of what the pan cost.

What Wears Cooktops Out

• Boil-over into a coil socket. The commonest cause of a burnt socket, and the reason element and socket are usually replaced together
• Sliding heavy pans across glass, which scratches the surface and eventually leads to chips and cracks
• Cold liquid onto a hot glass zone, which is thermal shock and the classic way a top cracks
• Sugar spills on glass, which bond to the surface and take the coating with them if scraped off cold
• Warped or oversized pans, which hold heat against the surface and stress the element beneath
• Using the cooktop as a worktop, which is how impact cracks happen

One habit prevents most of it: wipe spills while the surface is warm rather than hot, and never scrape a cold sugar spill. On coil designs, lift the elements out twice a year and clean the bowls underneath — boil-over that sits in a socket is the single most expensive thing on this list.

What the Repair Costs

Counted the same way across this site: a completed repair is a job billed above the $99 diagnostic.

We show the cooktop sample size rather than hiding it: five repairs is not a basis for a median, and we do not publish one from fewer than twenty. Use the stove and range row, or the cooking row, as the honest guide. Coil elements, sockets and switches sit at the lower end of it; what raises a glass-top job is the surface itself, which is why a cracked top is a different conversation from a dead element. Part-by-part figures are in the oven repair cost database.

What a Proper Diagnosis Involves

The cooktop type established first, because it decides the whole method; both halves of the supply measured at the appliance, since a lost leg imitates several simultaneous failures; the breaker and the terminal block behind the cooktop inspected for heat damage; on coil designs, elements swapped between positions and every socket examined for burnt contacts; on glass designs, each radiant element measured for continuity and resistance rather than judged by glow; the infinite switches tested across their range, since a zone that works on high and not on low is a switch symptom; any relay on the control tested for actual switching; the glass surface inspected for cracks and chips, which is a safety finding and not cosmetic; and the wiring examined wherever an element has run hot.

Then the fault is named, the part named and the total quoted before anything is ordered. Cooktop work in general is on the cooktop repair page, and ranges on range repair. On gas the diagnosis is entirely different: see gas stove burner not lighting.

Frequently Asked Questions