A couple with a 6 month old baby daughter are actively looking at a small house near us and well away from London where they work. They will be aiming to spend from late Friday to mid Sunday most weeks in the house with the aim of eventually re-locating to it permanently.
The place they are looking at is small with a Rayburn Royal gas powered device, which has always been lit when we have looked round. I didn't see a normal cooker.
I have read through an old thread via GGroups, and still can't get my head to believe that this is a sensible device for a kitchen that is only frequented part time. The estate agent said that she had one of these in her cottage and it took 24 hours to reach full functionality. The house seems to also have a gas boiler, presumably for the radiators.
I'd be very interested in any comments from owners of one of these.
Back in the day my parents had an anthracite powered one, but all I remember was the dust and that most cooking was done on the gas cooker at the other end of the kitchen.
Until a couple of years ago, I used an oil-fired Rayburn, which did the hot water, central heating and cooking. It's fine in winter, and when you're in the house for more than just the weekends; In summer, I shut the Rayburn down and used a Baby Belling cooker, because the kitchen could become uncomfortably hot with the Rayburn running all day.
Because mine also did the hot water and central heating, I looked at its cooking facility as a bonus - but if your friends are only there at the weekend, and their Rayburn is just a cooker, they'll be spending (IMNSHO)far too much on gas.
I've no idea about a Gas powered Rayburn, but when we moved into our current house, it had a coal (anthracite) fueled Rayburn.
We ran it for a year and it was mostly fine - however it was a cooker for another age - when the housewife was at home to tend it and fuel it when it needed it, waiting for hubby to come home - with 2 people out at work, it was often a PITA and had gone out by the time we came home - so light it, get it up to heat, cook/eat, then go to bed when when it would promptly boil the water in the tank in the middle of the night if we forgot to damp it down again )-:
Unlike an Aga which are always hot and far better insulated, the idea is that they run on tick-over most of the time, then you open them up (& fuel them if needed) to get them up to heat, cook, then close the dampers for the next time...
After a year, we decided to upgrade, but due to the way the house works, it would have been challenging to extend the central heating into the kitchen, so the range needed to be there to keep the kitchen warm in winter...
So now we have a gas fired Stanley. Same idea as the Rayburn - it runs at tick-over, keeping the kitchen warm and heating (some) water and we can crank it up to cook on. It takes about 20 miuntes of full blast to get the oven from gas mark 1 to gas mark 7, although the hot-plate is usable almost immediately. It seemed a good idea 10 years ago when gas was relatively cheap although it is now somewhat expensive to run... We're stuck with it for now as there is no other practical way to heat that part of the house in winter without some major work to extend the (gas) CH through.
And we turn it off in the summer too and cook on the BBQ most of the time (when it's not raining or a portable induction hob when it is) firing it up (mostly at weekends if catering) to use the oven (Although we now have a separate electric fan oven)
But for a long time it was the only cooker we had (and the Rayburn before that)
So if this old Rayburn works like our Stanley, then it's not that hard - they could come to the house, turn it on (auto lights, hopefully) and let it heat up... In the winter they might be recommended to leave it on all the time on tick-over as we do with the Stanley - which also has a timer we sometime use.
It may well take 24 hours to heat the kitchen up - that's about right for ours when we turn it on in a cold snap - the background heat output on tick-over is about 1Kw IIRC and there's several feet of stonework to warm up...
Our nieces (now 2 & 5) never had issues with it when they visit - a fireguard to keep the toddler back might be an idea if the surface gets really hot though.
I had one in the past. You're quite right. They will need an additional cooker of some sort. Horribly inefficient. They were desgned for wood and coal.
You don't need an additional cooker with a range if it's running correctly. We have lived with one for about 12 years now, cooked dinners for 12, catered (in a commercial way) for small company buffets (50 people) and afternoon tea partys (100+) with nothing more than just ours. Our annual xmas eve party sees 50+ people through our door and we prepared a huge buffet spread for that.
All it takes is a tiny bit of thought and planning.
I now have a 2nd oven because the range oven can only comfortably bake 2 loaves of bread at once and I do much more now. (Daily bread making for a small local wholefoods shop)
You may well be right there though, but coal and wood used to be cheap... (so did gas )-:
We used to have a coal fired Rayburn (with both of us out to work during the day). It did the cooking and heating autumn to spring (with oil fired boiler supplementing heating in winter). In the summer we used a separate electric/gas cooker. It was great.
Having said that, I would share your concern that it's not really ideal for their use. A timer so that it started up noon on Friday would help.
If willing to make a bit of an effort, yes. They're not exactly rocket science to make work. Slightly less primitive than an open fire, but hey..
And my sister in-law has a 2 and 5 year old daughters - and she's not had any issues using her oil fired rayburn for the past 5 years...
But to each their own - a modern young couple from London with a newborn might reel back in horror if it's something completely alien to them. Or they may see it as a challenge. Who knows.
Maybe, but the "green arses" have only exacerbated matters and illegal foreign wars (and threat of same) have heaped cost upon cost. God help us all if they invade Iran, the bastards.
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