Please help me decide whether to go for an AGA

VickyA_2

My mum LOVES her Aga and you'd have to wrestle it off her (if you could lift the damn thing!). Make sure you choose a colour you like. My mum inherited her Aga from my gran which is a very fetching bright red..................... which doesn't go well in my mum's pale "apple green" kitchen.

calleyw

I am rayburn girl. But only because I was brought up with one. Aga and Rayburns are made by the same people. I am really sad and even visited there factory museum.

I would love to have one now but just not practical in my house which is all gas.

My parents have a wood burning version and it is used to heat the water tank as well as running 4 radiators but believe you can run up to 13 off of one.

It is always warm well a bit to hot sometimes. But it makes the kitchen a real nice place to be.

Rayburns are the poor mans agas.

As have been said they need to be serviced once a year and the people who do this are like gold dust.

If you can afford it and think it is for you go for it.

Yours

Calley

maryb

Thanks to everyone who replied. It does seem that once you have one you love it. One thing that holds me back is that the kitchen is in a single storey extension so I suspect we wouldn't get much heat spreading through the house. But I'd forgotten about the water heating - that would be some saving to offset.

Someone at work has one - and would you believe it she got a Panasonic breadmaker for Christmas!! I asked why on earth when AGAs must bake wonderful bread and she said the advantage of the BM is that it bakes the bread without you having to be around.

It's partly emotional - it just seems to sum up so much about what I want my life to be and what my values are. And yet I've always managed to resist the lure of a gas guzzling 4x4 which presses the same buttons for a lot of people

almacmil

I'd agree with all the positives above (and maybe some of the negs as well!). I grew up on a farm with an Esse in the kitchen (always on, oil fired). I have great memories of sticking our feet in the bottom oven to warm them after being in the snow and also of my dad doing the same with lambs to revive them.

We renovated a farm cottage and put in a Stanley which did hot water and central heating as well as a cooker. It had a timer on it so you could use it like a normal "boiler" control unit, but the controller would also do the cooker if you wanted. Heat up time for the main oven was comparable to an electric one. We got ours from an agricultural engineering firm in Northern Ireland (honest! - they are Stanley agents) delivered to Scotland on his normal weekly articulated lorry run. Luckily the farmer had a forklift to hellp us move it about! It was at least £1.2k cheaper than the local Rayburn agent, plus it was £80 delivery on the lorry from NI, but £120 to come 8 miles from the local agent! PM me if you'd like the name of the company in NI.

tootles_2

An Aga is lovely but really you would be better off looking at something that will run your heating as well, as a child we lived in a bungalow on a small holding, we had a Rayburn, coal fired, but it never went out in the winter, the airing cupboard was in my bedroom, so it was always warm, no cylinder lagging in those days although my mother did wrap old towels round it to try and keep some of the heat in the water.....the kitchen was the warmest place in the house in the winter until the pump was switched on to heat the other rooms, the radiator in my bedroom was never switched on....... it got too hot with the tank in there as well. The Rayburn was converted to gas when the house was sold amny years ago, but as far as I know it is still in there......

katieowl_2

LOL! I don't know many people who have one.... like you say you need to throw away the book and start again. I was convinced by one in friends house we holiday-sat.

Maryb, I know you said that your kitchen would be an extension, and that the Aga might not warm through, but if you could position it on the wall that joined the house I'm sure it would make a difference.... Mine vents up the chimney, but I'm sure the newer balanced flue ones can go out sideways. The wall over the Aga is always warm, even upstairs. Also keeping the kitchen door always open makes a difference.

Re the panasonic breadmaker (!) It only makes one loaf...the Aga can cook 4 - 6 loaves at a time, depending on the size of the tins, or I can do three big square Pizza's at a time - You might not have to be around with a breadmaker, but she is missing the point IMHO (I also freeze the bread if I bulk cook(sliced first)). Bread cooks superbly in an Aga, it needs a hot oven, and there is no pre-heating as it is always on. It's also a good place to put dough near to rise. What is the point of home made bread if you don't have the whole experience, including seeeing all the goodies stacked on the cooling tray?

My family all love food, so it is a central point of the house, and safer for kids....no flames, no matches needed, and 'obviously' hot around it so they tend to be on alert. Slow cooking in the bottom oven is good for cheaper cuts of meat too..... Oh I could go on all day!
Regards

Kate

Avogirly

Yep, I agree with everyone who loves their Aga. We do everything on ours. It keeps us fed, provides us with a frest loaf of bread a day (with a bit of help from my Mum), dries the clothes and most importantly pleases the cats and dogs as they snuggle up in their beds in front of it. We have had our Aga for about 7 years now, it runs on oil and is as good as the day they installed it.

Debt_Free_Chick

I have an AGA, since moving to this house 2 1/2 years ago. I would never go back to any other form of cooking. And I don't have a microwave or any other way of cooking - other than the kettle and the BM, which I use for convenience to mix the dough, but the bread is then shaped, risen and cooked in the AGA.

Yes, it is a different way of cooking, but in many ways it is much more forgiving. You don't need to be precise about temperatures and timings. You get to know your AGA and adjust your cooking accordingly. Anyway, the vast majority of cooking does not need such precision, except, perhaps for baking. Casseroles? Forget your slow cooker, use the slow oven in the AGA.

Contrary to popular opinion (and this really does define those who know how to cook on the AGA and those who don't) you CAN regulate the heat in the hot oven - you use the cold shelf. A solid baking tray that you place at the top of the hot oven, to diffuse the heat - it stops things browning.

You certainly need to think about doing 80% of your cooking in the ovens and only 20% on the hotplates. But let's just think about that .... what is it you do on a hotplate that you can't do in the oven? Boil? put the lid on the saucepan and place it in the AGA hot oven. Mine runs at 500°F, so anything will definitely boil! Sweat? put oil & onions (or whatever) in a shallow pan, put the lid on and put it in the hot oven. Fry? place pan on the floor of the hot oven. Simmer? place pan with lid in the simmering oven. Anything I've missed?

The AGA also replaces a tumble drier in our house. Sheets are simply folded and placed on the lids of the hotplates and smoothed. They're turned periodically, smooothed some more and the result is "ironed" sheets without the ironing.

Our oil costs £1200 p.a. but that includes an oil-fired boiler for the central heating and oil prices are particularly high, at the moment. Who knows where they'll go, but when we moved in two and a half years ago, our oil only cost £700p.a. My AGA engineer tells me that the AGA is extremely efficient and that most of our oil consumption is due to the oil-fired central heating boiler which, apparently, is nowhere near as efficient as the AGA.

Is it actually all that easy to fit stuff in? Especially as my back feels its age some days and I wonder how easy it would be bending down to get food right out of the back of the bottom oven.

You need stacking saucepans so you can fit one on top of the other. If you don't have these, then invert the lids so you can stack them anyway. I reckon you can get at least six saucepans in each oven. I did a roast pork lunch for eleven at the weekend, including a crumble and a bread & butter pudding for dessert

Plus some people seem to suggest that it loses a lot of heat just cooking an ordinary roast dinner which makes it difficult to get really crisp roast potatoes or yorkshire puddings.

It uses the heat that it previously stored - so, in a sense, yes it does "lose" heat. However, you can boost the heat before you cook using the "high fire" switch, or simply increase the setting. Don't do either for much more than 2-3 hours, however. Anyway, move the meat to the slow oven about an hour (or more) before it's finished. This frees up the top of the top (hot oven) to allow crisping of roast pots (which can, anyway, be done on the floor of the hot oven) and/or cooking the yorkshire. It's all entirely possible - you just need to be organised. With respect, your friends might have an AGA but are they accomplished AGA cooks? There is a method!

If anyone can point me in the direction of a balanced assessment I'd be grateful

I'm not sure you'll find one. You'll get comments from people who, with no experience and no research, tried it once and failed (not surprisingly!) miserably. Then you'll comments from those who have cooked on nothing else and so can't compare the AGA with anything else. Then you'll comments from those like me who made the transition, did the research, attended the local AGA course and would never go back to anything else. And then you'll comments from those who'll tell you that they need to supplement the AGA with a breadmaker, sandwich toaster, slow cooker and deep fat frier!

My final word .. honestly, is that I think the AGA is particularly suited to those who like to cook "intuitively". But it will do the "precise" stuff too, although you have to work with the AGA even if it means going against the suggested temperature and timings.

It's an expensive mistake to make, if you get it wrong. Do you know anyone with an AGA who will let you use their kitchen? Why not enrol on the local AGA cooking course (one day, usually Saturday) and see what you think?

Personally, I am never, ever having anything else - end of story!

cath-w

One of the main difference between AGAs and Rayburns are that Rayburns are cheaper. AGAs come in more of less one piece and so you have to be able to fit them in through your door, whereas Rayburns can be dismanteled.

You may need to buy new pans as you cannot use all pans on AGAs as they will just burn through. You will also need to buy some long oven gloves otherwise you will burn your arms when taking things from the oven.

If you only have an AGA and it cannot be switched off in the kitchen be prepared for the undereable heat as it will be chucking out heat ALL the time.

You need to factor in the cost of having the cooker serviced. You will need to have the cooker serviced at least once a year. New cookers can cool down and heat up quickly, old ones take much longer. We rented a house in the middle of nowhere for five years that had an AGA (other than a coal fire it was the only source of heat in the house). It took 2 days for the cooker to cool properly so it could be serviced and about 24 hours to re-heat. So no cooker was available in this time.

C.

Magentasue

Oh dear, caught myself looking at the local paper to see how much a second-hand Aga would be. Not good - this is how it usually starts for me.

How much for an annual service? Not a DIY job, I suppose?