In this case you don't get the best having paid for it. If you want it for "lifestyle" reasons then of course logic and cost is irrelevant. If you want to buy a cooker then both price and performance are usually important factors.
As marketing slogans go I'm sure this one will work
Because most people have to buy things and both cost and performance are factors. When the performance is mediocre and both the purchase cost and running cost astronomic there is no sense in buying one unless it is for other intangible reasons.
Yours appears to be the only Aga in the world to achieve this though. Every other Aga manages more like 1000W standing load and this increases up to 5,000W when cooking.
"The running costs of these cookers is about £400-500 per annum" (Aga salesman).
From the figures Aga quote a 4 oven gas Aga uses 527kw/hr a week or
27.4 Megawatt/hrs per year. At present gas prices that is an annual bill of GBP 540 - GBP 600 per year depending upon supplier. That is significantly more than I spend on heating the whole house, the hot water and all the cooking fuel for a complete year.
I have foudn that agas dry food LESS than fan ovens.
OIf course, if youy stuff the roast that you did an hour earlier in te warming oven while you make a mess of overboiled vegetables on the hot plates..;-)
It would in the interest groups I live in :-)
Mary
That's your assertion based on criteria that you deem to be valid for you. You can't say that something is or isn't the best for other people, because their criteria are almost certainly different.
Of course. An even more important factor than price is value. If somebody perceives enough value in something and has the means to pay, then the price is irrelevant. If they don't perceive value or don't have the means to pay for it then they don't buy it - simple as that.
Performance is also a very subjective term and completely dependent on the factors that are important to the buyer/user of a product.
Again, you can't assume that everyone's criteria are the same as yours.
material, your nose has been scoured by the sand to bare bone.
This is completelt untrue. I have had serious fires regularly with gas, a couple of fat fires with electric, never had a single fire with an aga.
The plate temeperature is below the flash point of anything bar possibly alcohol or gasoline.
There is no way that anythung combustible can get to the burner - unlike gas hobs, ahich are bloody dangerious, and its easy enough to catch a sleeve alight with them
I suspect that when your stupid girlfriend/ex wife who had an aga, dumped you for being a stuck up prig, you took against her wellington boots as well?
The fan blows it out. In a fan blown oven.
But Peter Parry in the vicinity of an aga blows so much hot air - mainly out of his aree - and is always opening the doors to show how crap they are at cooking, and to ensure hat teh food isn;t cooked yert, that he manages to dry the food to a leathery wasteland.
Yes, they are. The cost of running them is exorbitant, and its a helluva way to get a fashion statement.
They are for people oin Islington who dream of black labradors, with money to burn, and no gas and nowhere to put the ugly oil tank.
Its why meringues can cook nicely in a fan blown oven.
Although they are best done in the aga bottom oven over a period of several hours..drying is what you want in this case. It takes a LONG time to dry stuff in an aga.
Mind you, the lack of whirring noises and red lights all over it may allow you to forget food is actually IN there.
I do admit to scraping out mummified baked potaties several days after they had been installed.
Even an aga won't keepo things moist for EVER,
I see your point, but was not trying to suggest a scientific measurement. In fact, the cast iron vertical flue after the flue break is relatively hot (I may measure it later if I have time and can find the IR meter or thermocouple probe); however at the point where the flue enters the loft (some metres away), it is considerably cooler. This represents heat released within the fabric of the house.
If the cooker were a balanced or power flue type, I agree that that would be a different matter.
No, they cook food fast in restaurants, and they require massive volumes of cookers. They can have the luxury of a cooker for every dish they do more or less. Agas are not space efficient either - eye level ovens and gas hobs are the way to go in a busy commercial kitchen.
Its is not customary to present the customer with fresh baked lasagne either - like as not is is prepacked and microwaved up for the plate..or was made yesterday.
Agas are about good HOME cooking, not good commercial cooking.
One aga can priduce a superb nmeal for 6-8 people. It can't produce an endless stream of fast food for 10-0 cutsomers. It's not designed to either.
You won't find many homes with planer thicknessers either, or many joinery shops without one...
Actually, that suits jam making. Masisve pot on to boil, then shift to the slow hob and let it simmer and reduce..which it will.
That plate will just about sustain as simmer indefinitely..but if it doesn't then use the hot one again for the last hour or so.
After jam making who wants to cook a roast dinner anyway? give the kids a cold salad.
What actually matters is value to the buyer and ability to pay rather than cost, and performance is a subjective thing in the context of a cooker.
You are describing the performance as mediochre based on your experiences of an old model and whatever criteria you subjectively apply. I completely disagree, based on my criteria and experience of a more recent product. It is not legitimate to make a blanket statement suggesting mediochre performance as you have done, since that is limited to your criteria only.
Running costs are not astronomic. I already gave you the figures that I get, and do not regard those as astronomic. Again, this depends on your scale of values. I could gather firewood for free and cook on that, and argue that anything where I have to pay for the energy is astronomic. It's a relative term.
How many modern gas models have you measured at 1000W?
I can only tell you what I measured on mine, 700W quiescent.
Given that situation, it would be rather difficult fo ryou to assert that mine is the only one that achieves those figures.
If you read *all* of the data sheet you would see that the word "typical" is used. They don't say what "typical" means or how they measure it.
They are economical if the space is large enough to need the heat output anyway.
I realise few people live in the size of house we have, but frankly, the aga is a saving over having central heating running everywhere - it heats the bits we use in the day.
Its enough of a game this time of year fiddling with stats and so on to control heat in the bits we don't use much.
As a cooker? well its very good at some things, covers about 85% of everything we need, and with an electric hob, kettle and microwave, 95%, the one exception being stir frying PROPERLY or barbequeing, but only a gas hob and a charcoal barbecue work for those anyway. Gas barbecues taste simply WRONG to me.
I ceratinly would not install an electric aga, unless for someone with bad taste. I wouldn't put an aga in a small town house or a smaller suburban property either. But for large kitchens in rural locations they do the job very well indeed.
At least we CAN still cook when the electricity goes out, and have hot cups of coffee. Which it does, for hours at a time, several times a year, it seems.
LOL
Solid fuel is almost impossible to use and a hugely dirty and labour intensive affair. I hpope I never see a coal fired anything ever again.
I've cooked on two coal fired agas, and had to manage a coal ffred central heating system. and they are voracious consumer of filthy coal, and require twice daily servicing to get the new stuff in and the old stuff out. Woer betide you if you get it wrong - they are impssoble to control temperature wise, and if they go out, require at least an hour to get going, and about
3-4 to be up to whatever temperature they decide to be at. If the temp drops because te coal is running low, you have two choces. Let them get cold, or add caol, when they cool down even faster.To actually get a coal fired appliance working properly, requires a full time fireman.
One of the major reasons, apart from the high maintenance, that steam engines vanished so rapidly.
In the 50's when coal was cheap and husewives were HOUSE wives, and oil was something you saw other pople putting on the axles of steam locmotives, the daily round of lighting the coal fired appliances after de -ashing and de clinkering was, simply, as good as it got.
Hby got up and befoire dersssing would put te kettle on take out the ash and clinker and add a shot of coal...then go to work...
Once the aga was up to tempreature, you could make a cup of tea before boilig up the solied nappies in a coffer on it, and spending a merry afternoon with a hand mangle and clothes line.
Another quick shot of coal and then down the shops for todays vegetables and bread and milk...walking carrying your string bag, or on a bicycle...then a quick tea and cakes to replace the lost calories before lighting the open fire for the evening, revving up the back boiler so that one bath might be feasible (who's having a bath tonight?) and cooking from todays fresh ingredients everyones dinner...
This was before womens lib dears, when women actually WORKED HARD. And so did men, because if you didn't, you ended up cold, miserable and hungry pretty damned quick.
No even I will not sing the praises of coal fired Agas. Better than nothing in the days when central heating was a rarity, but a last resort only these days.
Not really. Only in summer do you need to cool the place down, and I turn mine off.
The air required for the burner is actually less than that specified for a gas hob, and the ventilation requirements to extract the combustion products are far more onerous. Agas end most of the cooking smells up the chimney too.
No need for extractor fans.
And the efflux temperature on an aga pipe is well below that of my newish oil CH boiler. So its apaprent its a better cinverter to low garde heat than that is.
Condensing boilers would be similar I suspect,. however. If you were to encase teh aga in a small room and allow it to get insufferably hot, it most likely would use less fuel as well.
"Perhaps you're a crap cook, who has barely learnt to boil an egg on a gas hob, who will never get to use its full potential as you haven't bothered to learn how these highly practical and versatile things really work. They can be left on all year round, consuming 1/2 a bucket of coal a day and you don't need another cooker at all unless you can't handle the coal or don't make the Holy Ritual of the Riddle every day. Oh, they make fabulous toast to die for, so yah boo sucks to you!"
*ROFLM effing AO*
Since when have haggis-hunters been sufficient gentlemen to not shoot in the back?
Owain
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