October 27: Our New "Range"
Feast your eyes, at last! Our new "range" is revealed.
For those just joining in the story, our "old" range became "old" at the shocking age of three-and-a-half, when nothing major failed. The heating elements were fine, the electrical connections good, the body of the oven was great. What failed was the circuit board that no range really needs. The computer died, of all things: refused to tell the oven to turn on. Fortunately, the stovetop was not controlled by this computer, and we still had a stove.
The repairman got it going again, apparently the circuit board gets too hot in this model - and apparently it's a design flaw running through many appliances of many brands! Electronic computers, instead of bringing greater reliability via "no moving parts" have dropped reliability drastically by being the most-likely component to fail. It's infuriating.
The repairman flatly told us that if it went again, it would be better to not spend $1000 on the repair, but nearly $2000 on a new range. At age five, as it turned out, since it failed again a year later. We've used a roaster oven - which has a rheostat for a control, invented in the nineteenth century. That works.
And Dora herself can speak to the problem: her dryer's computer died over a year ago, and now only goes back to "start" after a dry cycle if you power-cycle it. And the repairman wouldn't even come: just took in the model number, and told us the circuit-board wasn't made any more. The machine was eight years old.
We couldn't pick a range we considered reliable, since "expensive" brands have been dropping to the reliability of "cheap" brands more-often lately, once the entire company has been sold.
Connie finally succumbed to my pleadings that we ditch the entire tradition of a home "range" that combined stove and oven. It's a historical creation of wood-burning, coal-burning stoves that leveraged the one fire to do two jobs. It's been obsolete for two generations; my long-dead mom never used a combustion stove since her Depression childhood.
So, Behold: The new, modular food-heating station(?) OK, "new range", as constructed from multiple purchases.
On the top, three induction heaters, a one-burner 1600W on the left that can heat a pot as fast as any range element I ever used, and a two-burner 1800W on the right, with a 600W "back-burner" for simmering, and a 1200W at front. We tried to remember a meal that used all four burners, and came up dry. (Besides, I have five campstoves, and we have a patio.)
In the middle, a $600 Wolf oven. Obviously smaller than a real range oven, but big enough for any job we actually have, except feast-day turkeys. This one does have more electronics, but they're fairly simple, have actual controls, not "soft buttons", and the main point is that we cannot lose $2000 any more because somebody in Asia didn't seat a chip firmly. If $600 only lasts six years, that's not too infuriating. Being smaller, it heats up faster, with less energy, too.
At bottom, the roaster oven that can handle those turkeys. Both ovens can do bread, or casseroles.
The power comes from the same 220V socket as powered the range! There's an adapter plug you can buy for those sockets, that turns it into two 110V plugs, each with 1800W capacity. So both those induction plates can run at once; or one plate and the Wolf oven running full. (We will have to remember to move the plug for the other plate, to a wall socket, if we want to run all three appliances at once. This may come up for two meals a year.)
Unlike a giant range, the roaster oven can be moved out to the patio on hot summer days, to spare the kitchen becoming an oven in its own right; there are other gains from modularity.
While I hog the credit for pushing this idea, Connie (of course) did all the shopping for that smart steel table, for the Wolf, and the new induction heater. We've had the single-burner for years and loved it, and a prolonged shopping effort yielded that the Cuisinart products were the best, so we got another.
It's all taken quite a while to work it out, but we're very happy with it!