After twenty years of faithful service our pristine double oven blew its last fuse ten days ago. I’m a member of Which, and value their advice on this sort of stuff. They recommended a Neff or a Bosch (both from the same stable, one might add). So with model numbers in hand we embarked on the usual internet search, but no luck.
We visited Ubaldi, they contacted the manufactures and said they’d get back to us. Some hope. We went to Darty and at least they had the honesty to say that double ovens are no longer available in France. That left us with a big hole in our kitchen which I had zero confidence in our local artisans (much as I love ’em) not to butcher if we put in a 60X60.
I accepted the cost of a replacement was about twice what I considered reasonable, but offsetting that against a butchered kitchen I looked online in the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain, no Joy. So, despite the distance I looked in Dublin and…. bingo. The Neff model which Which had endorsed was 1,599 in Ireland vs 2,300 (if you could get it) here. Shipping was €250. It was delivered by TNT today (while we were in the village having a coffee).
So, I’ve saved €450 by not buying from a Ubalidi salelsman who, despite being very friendly, couldn’t bother his arse getting back to us. No wonder Amazon is eating these badly run companies’ lunch.
It seems here in the UK the large range cookers have become very popular. Not sure how our cooking will change when we move to France. Maybe we can do some cooking outside.
We have a large range (bottle gas) cooker which we installed when we renovated our house 16 years ago. It was great for large parties - so that’s about 5 occasions over these years. For just the two of us it is a waste of space and money. These days we use our air fryer virtually every day except in the height of summer when it’s salads, even then the occasional quiche is cooked in it.
When we come to revamp the kitchen I’d put much more emphasis on space for small, efficient cooking utensils like air fryers than a huge oven.
The light has failed in our oven… second time in 25 years, so not bad…
OH replaced the bulb again… but it still won’t light up… so if I get around to using said oven, it will be like in days of old and I’ll have to peep inside as and when…