Gas and Oil Home Heating Furnaces - american aire ultra sx80 forced air furnace problem

I have an american aire ultra sx80 forced air furnace problem, the pilot lights, the burner kicks on for a few seconds then goes out, after a few more seconds the burner turns on again and the furnace runs as normal. This does not happen all the time. I looked for an error led light there is none, nor is there a list of error codes on the inside covers of the unit. (Someone told me to look for both of these things.) Any thoughts?

How old of a furnace is this? Does it have a control board in it? If so, your furnace would have a flame-proving electrical device. With hot surface ignition, you would have a flame sensor. But since you said you have a pilot, your electrical sensory for proving flame may go through the hood of the pilot assembly and simply require some polishing up of the hood, if yo have a pilot ignitionm syucstem where the wire goes to the control board. Sometimes these systems also utilize a flame sensor. If you have a flame sensor, you will see one white wire that is plugged into your control board that runs into the burner pilot area.

Describe what you have.

Thank you for responding, my best guess is the unit is about 10-12 years old, it does have a control board. There are two 18 gauge wires going to the pilot. The wires go to a honeywell grey box with male female connectors going to it. The two wires are connected to ports that say; sense and spark.

There you go. Trace the "sense" wire into the burner compartment and remove the screw that holds it in place and polish it up with some steel wool or fine sandpaper or the equivalent. You may fix your furnace for absloutely free.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate your help, I will try this when the temp get a little better. It's too cold to shut the furnace down right now, but I will post the results.

If you get your plan of attack all in order, in advance...this can be a fast job. Analyze what, if much, you have to remove to get to it, and what you have to do. Easiest furnace situations are when the furnace has "open combustion". In otherwords, the burner is not enclosed in a metal case with a glass peep hole....nor are there *2* pvc vent pipes. There is just one...one for the exhaust. You can actually see the burner flame there, out in the open. With these kinds of furnaces, you can just reach back in there with a Phillips screwdriver and remove the one screw and pull out the flame sensor, and polish it, and put it back. A few minutes job.