The full-time RV community is the most generous knowledge-sharing group I’ve ever been part of. Someone has already fixed the exact problem you’re dealing with, documented it in a forum thread, and answered follow-up questions for free. This guide pulls together the best of that collective experience into one place. When your Crossroads Redwood’s furnace starts clicking endlessly without lighting — or goes completely silent on a 28-degree night — the culprit is almost always a failed igniter or a burned-out control board, and waiting on a mobile tech or dealer can mean days without heat that you simply don’t have. I’ve done this repair myself in a campground parking lot with basic hand tools, and once you understand how these two components work together, you’ll see it’s completely manageable — and a lot cheaper than the service estimate you’d otherwise be handed.
Understanding Your Furnace’s Two Critical Components
Before diving into a repair, it helps to know what you’re looking at. The igniter is a ceramic electrode that heats to around 1,500 degrees when the furnace cycles on, creating the spark that ignites your propane. The control board is the relay that tells everything when to turn on and off — it monitors your thermostat signal, energizes the igniter, and opens the gas valve in the right sequence. When either one fails, your furnace becomes a very expensive space heater that produces no heat.
The igniter typically fails first because it’s working the hardest. Repeated heating and cooling cycles make the ceramic brittle, and eventually it cracks or loses conductivity. The control board can fail from moisture (especially in humid climates), age, or surge damage if your RV’s electrical system has had any issues. Sometimes both fail at once, which is where the real decision point comes in.
The Individual Component Replacement Route
If you catch the problem early and you’re confident the igniter is the culprit — consistent clicking with a faint gas smell means the gas valve is opening but the spark isn’t lighting it — replacing just the igniter electrode is your cheapest path. You’ll need a multimeter to confirm there’s no voltage reaching the igniter during the firing cycle, and you’ll need to safely access the furnace burner box, which usually means removing a panel from your RV’s exterior sidewall or interior wall.
The igniter itself costs $20 to $40 and takes about 30 minutes to swap. You disconnect the ceramic electrode from its wire leads, slide it out, and push the new one in — no special tools required. The risk here is that you might replace the igniter only to discover the control board is also dead, which means you’ve spent an hour of work and still have no heat.
The Full Replacement That Saved Me From a Freezing Night (and a Repair Bill)
If your troubleshooting narrows it down to a dead control board or multiple failed components, sometimes a complete furnace swap is faster and cheaper than chasing individual parts. The Suburban/Atwood replacement unit drops straight into most Crossroads Redwood models without rewiring the propane line or blower connection.
What works
- Plug-and-play installation—propane and 12V connectors mate directly to existing RV harnesses with no splicing required
- Eliminates the guessing game of testing individual components when multiple parts are suspect, getting you heat back in under two hours
- Comes with a fresh igniter and control board, so you’re not replacing a 10-year-old unit with another 10-year-old unit
What doesn’t
- Overkill if the problem is just a $30 igniter electrode—you’ll spend four times the cost to replace the whole unit
- Shipping times can stretch 2–3 weeks during winter, so this works best when you catch the problem before the first freeze
My Personal Decision Point
I stood in my RV at 11 p.m. on a 28-degree night, multimeter in hand, staring at a control board that wouldn’t register any voltage—and realized I didn’t have the time or certainty to diagnose six different components. That’s when I decided to order a Suburban/Atwood RV furnace replacement unit and skip straight to the fix.
The whole unit arrived in five business days, which gave me just enough time to plan my workday around the installation. The moment I opened the box and confirmed the connectors matched my existing setup, I knew I’d made the right call. I disconnected the old furnace by unplugging three connectors and unbolting the mounting brackets — maybe 15 minutes of work. The new unit slid in, everything clicked into place, and when I turned on my thermostat, the igniter fired up immediately.
Installation Tips From the Parking Lot
If you go the full replacement route, take photos of your old furnace’s connections before you disconnect anything. Lay out your new unit on a clean surface and compare it to the old one — you want to make sure nothing is obviously different. Have your multimeter and a flashlight nearby; you’ll need both to ensure good connector contact. Once everything is bolted down, don’t fire up the furnace immediately. Wait 24 hours if possible so any moisture inside the new unit can dissipate. That sounds cautious, but it costs nothing and protects a component that’s keeping you alive in winter.
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