Decent toaster?

[Huge]

Generally made by ... Dualit.

[Dieseldes]

Oh Dave don't be so blinkered.....I also went through various toasters supermarket and branded (tefal being one), the branded ones I tried didn't toast properly and the supermarket ones didn't last! some less than a year!!

I found a Dualit in the local ads and it does what it says, hasn't failed in

10+ years and (admittedly s/h though hardly used) cost me about the same as a branded toaster. and if it does fail I can get the spares and fix it myself*! Also saves me getting stressed in the morning if I don't get my toast....

A mate of mine has a a 4 slot one, after he had tried other brands (mine is a 3 slot with one side slot for toasties) he has had it for about 15 years and has needed one element (*he fixed it himself ).. Probably the reason I even looked at a Dualit,

For someone like yourself I would have thought that something that has spares and can be fixed with a screwdriver and pliers would have appealed to you, and in the past you have extolled the virtues of higher priced tools for there longevity and sturdiness!!

Des

• sorry for the references to DIY!!

[The Medway Handyman]

Is AOL the same as 'woosh' and if so, why?

[The Wanderer]

No, 'me too, me too'!

It stems from AOL seeming to attract lots of brain-dead Americans who had not an original thought between them and would merely echo someone else's comments.

[tinnews]

We've never managed to break a non Dualit toaster. Our current one is many years old and still works just as well as it did when we first bought it. The only reason we have ever replaced a toaster is for its ability to cope with large slices or to have a different colour/finish.

From what I read of the Dualit toasters they have *exactly* the same faults as our existing much cheaper toaster. I.e. they make no attempt to produce toast of a given brownness, they just have a simple timer, hence different bread requires different settings and a second slice of identical bread will end up charred if you use the same setting as for the first slice.

[Brian L Johnson]

Dualit Lites are rubbish.

Back when they were called 'Soft Touch', we had 3 in succession. The last 2 were provided as free-of-charge replacements by Dualit.

They actually toasted quickly and evenly, but the reliability (caused by poor quality control) was truly dire.

Faults:

1. Pop-up contacts burned away.
2. Welded mains connections corroded through.
3. Connector block melted internally.

For eg:

[nightjar]

The Samuel Vimes Boots Theory of Socio-Economic Injustice - the rich stay rich because they buy boots (although the theory applies to almost anything) that cost five times as much but last ten times as long, so, in the long term, they spend much less of their disposable income. Oh, and the poor, who buy cheap boots still get wet feet.

Colin Bignell

[Stuart Noble]

You can have the best of both worlds. I bought 2 pairs of shoes from Clarks for a fiver. Downside is, they're not exactly the same colour (but hopefully will be when the left shoe has been in the sun for a while). Doesn't say much for the lightfastness of the dyes though.

[<me9]

I solved that problem by using the timer. Works well apart from the odd occasion I forget to set it.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember geoff saying something like:

Was that him?

Best ignored.

[Tim Lamb]

In message , The Wanderer writes

Correct:-)

and, yes, I am that old!

regards

[David Klyne]

Dualit.

Is there any other sort of toaster? At least you can repair a Dualit yourself, ideal for a DIY newsgroup!

David - Milton Keynes

[Clint Sharp]

In message , [e-mail] writes

Same here, ours is almost 20 years old, it's a cheapo cool wall one and it can make anything form warm bread to charcoal.

I'd be gutted if I'd bought a Dualit and found it had the same problems as my cheapo, which it sounds like they do.

What TMH needs is a McD bun toaster I reckon, constant heat with a variable speed belt to drive the bread past the contact element, a bit like the pizza ovens that the delivery places use but vertical.

[Pete Verdon]

Heh. Well, as I said, the pop-up Dualits we did have were still probably better than any other pop-up toasters. It's just that quasi-domestic pop-up toasters were the wrong answer to the problem of providing toast for a couple of hundred teenage boys every morning. Especially where the toasters were operated by the boys themselves.

Pete

[John]

Shh! It may be made illegal!

[Huge]

The Hilton hotel in Veranasi had what one might think was a typically Indian solution to the problem of providing many guests with toast at breakfast times - dozens of domestic 2 slice popup toasters all wired together in a rats nest of cabling, with two little men to operate them, like a whack-a-mole game played with slices of bread...

[Andrew Gabriel]

Reminds me of a colleague visiting, IIRC, India. Stopped off to have his shoes shined at a street trader for

10 rupees. Guy starts working on left shoe, complete with thick polish, which actually did a good job of restoring the original colour, long since faded. Finishes off with a high polish -- good job actually. Then asks to be paid, which my friend does. Friend sits there waiting for the right shoe to be done. After a while he points to it. Trader, all surpised, says "oh, you want the other one too". It's 100 rupees for the right shoe. You really did have to admire him - friend paid up partly out of admiration, and partly because he would otherwise be walking around with two completely different coloured shoes ;-)

(I can't actually recall the costs, but it was a 1:10 ratio between the two shoes, albeit insignificant in Western amounts.)

[Rod]

I've lost what's where in this thread!

Has anyone tried the Kuhn Rikon branded stainless one? - Currently at Robert Dyas - GBP14-99.

We have an 'as cheap as they come' one at present but its days are surely numbered. One problem with the Dualits is that they are really set up for standard slices - not the oversize ones you get from breadmakers. This is a dual long slot model.

[chris French]

In message , [e-mail] writes

True, but does any toaster achieve this anyway?

True, but you soon learn what sort of setting to use for which bread.

Not true. There may be a slight variation in the second batch of toast, compared to the first from cold, but I can't say I've ever noticed. Probably the variation you'd get from the slightly different setting of the timer is just as great.

What I really miss on other toasters, it the lift up function. I can easily check the progress of the toast and pop it back down if it needs a bit longer without it stopping the progress of toasting like the typical pop up toaster. Very useful for this household, where my wife likes her toast less toasted than me.

Pop the in (4 slices), start timer, lift hers out at suitable point, butter, toaster stops and I take mine out to butter that :-)

I think I'd find it hard to go and spend the money on a Dualit, but I'm very pleased that someone bought it for us of the wedding list

[The Medway Handyman]

Dualit outside the budget and being more interested in performance than longevity, bought a Tefal Avanti for £40.

It toasts perfectly and quickly and takes large slices of bread - just what I wanted.

Ta for all the input.