Please help me decide whether to go for an AGA

calleyw

Magentasue wrote:

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

I personally would say not a chance as it is very specialised. And has been said before they are like gold dust.

As also has been mentioned you need have another form of cooking for during the summer as most people tend to turn them off other wise you are going to be sweating like a little piggy in the middle of july.

Not sure how much it costs for a service but am sure that someone who owns one will tell you.

Yours

Calley

Debt_Free_Chick

Magentasue wrote:

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?

Not a DIY job at all, although I suspect you could learn how to do it. Messy, if nothing else though.

If it's oil fired, you need a service every 6 months. Mine costs about £90. I bought a second hand reconditioned AGA in January this year and it cost £4500 including installation, but that included about £800 trade-in on my old AGA. I think the AGA starts at around £6,000 but you then pay for installation & commissioning. Not cheap, but they should last a lifetime - provided you stay in the same house, of course.

Magentasue

Can anyone give me some idea how much installation would cost? The place I am thinking of is an old fireplace where there was once an old range so there's a chimney there. There's also a gas pipe/tap there. Does commissioning mean someone coming out to do a 'survey' to cost the installation or do you mean the finding of the one you wanted. Sorry if that sounds a bit thick!

I'm seriously coming round to the idea - need to know how much Imeed to save up.

Debt_Free_Chick

cath-w wrote:

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.

AGAs dismantle too (I had mine replaced this year). Is there much difference in price? I know a new AGA starts at around £6,000. Some friends in the village had a new Rayburn this year and I seem to recall it cost more than that - about £8,000 IIRC.

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.

Any standard pans should be fine - I've just got John Lewis stainless steel pans. Non stick pans might not be ideal, but I never use them so can't tell. Can't say I've ever had a pan "burn through". The base does need to be completely flat though, otherwise you'll get "hot spots" ... is that what you mean?

As for gloves, the Coolskin range is best.

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.

Really? I have mine on all the time .... it doesn't "chuck out heat" - if it does, then there's something wrong and I would suggest the insulation has gone. The whole point about the AGA is that is stores heat as it has massive amounts of insulation. I'll admit that it emits a warm glow, but nothing like unbearable heat - even in the hot summer we had two years ago, my AGA stayed on. It really does seem a little odd to have £6,000 worth of cooker and then buy something else, but each to their own

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.

You and I really have had very different experiences. Mine cools down in about 6 hours. Usually, you turn it off the night before the service - before you go to bed is sufficient. I forgot in August though and only remembered when I woke up at 5.30am! It was just about cool by the time the engineer arrived at 10am.

Once relit, mine takes about 5 hours to get back up to heat - so it's only out of action for breakfast & lunch, but ready again for supper.

Agapanthus

Many years ago, we moved to a house that has an Aga. It was oil-fired then and the oil burner wasn't powerful enough. We had it converted to gas, which was a revelation - it can now heat up much more quickly.

However... if you want to cook a big roast dinner then it's advisable to turn it right up several hours before, as it can run out of steam otherwise. My parents in law used to have one that was linked into the same hot water system as the central heating boiler, so the Aga provided basic heating and the boiler topped it up as necessary.

It's fairly expensive to run, I'd say, but the ovens are always hot the instant that you want them and the kitchen is warm and welcoming. The cat loves it. The kids learnt to cook on it, as it's so simple and safe. Ours heats water and runs one radiator. I wish I had room for a four oven model, but I haven't.

Mine's also in a single-storey extension, so I leave the kitchen door open to let the heat filter into the house. We sometimes turn it off for a week or two in the summer and use a gas hob instead, but we didn't this year.

It doesn't have a grill, so you'll need something else for doing that. We fitted a wall mounted gas grill, but have recently acquired a combination microwave/oven/grill - not that we've ever used it as an oven!

As others have said, the cooking technique is quite different - the ovens are at fixed temperatures, so you just cook things for less time if the oven's too hot - I leave the oven door ajar if necessary, too.

If the wind's in the wrong direction it sometimes fails to heat up enough - which can baffle your dinner guests when you have to explain why dinner is late! My sister recently acquired a house with an Aga and wrote to me " I now know the secret of cooking on an Aga - by the time dinner is ready, you've consumed so much wine that you don't care!"

Would I part from mine? Definitely not.

maryb

thanks very much everyone - apologies if I forgot to thank anyone individually

DH met up with a friend who has an AGA. He hates it (and he did go to catering college so knows how to cook) but his wife loves it and a couple of her friends have one and they all love theirs. So the sage words of advice to DH were - "just say yes- it's one of those things that makes women happy"

So now DH is no longer saying "You don't really want an AGA" (in that irritating way men have when it's obvious that the object in question is precisely what you DO want)

It's a bit like when I talked him into having a baby

tootles_2

I have just cooked our supper on an Aga on which the flame had blown out at lunch time, there was still sufficient heat in it to cook a chicken, roast spuds and stuffing in the oven and steam veg and a pudding as well as make the gravy on the hot plate......ok, it is cooling down now, but we have to wait until the morning before we can relight it...... then it will take between 12 and 24 hours to come back up to heat......in the mean time will have to use the electric cooker.....

lifesachallenge

This is great.
We are just about to buy a house that needs comlete refurb and the first issue is do we put in an aga?
OH and I both want one, it is just a case of justifying csot - and I think you all have just helpe there!
We were advised by my sister that to make it heat water is better use of it than just for kitchen duties.
We have also been told that it can put upto £10k on the value of the hgouse - and as it is detached victorian stone house in a village - I think it will be almost expected when we come to sell in a few years.

Thank you all!

Optimisticpair

almacmil wrote: »

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.

The new house we plan to buy (cross fingers) already has a Stanley in the 'dining room'.

Please, oh please tell me how to use this for the central heating and cooking as I've never used one before! It is coal fired.

How often do you feed them coal (or can we use wood also?) and what's the best way to handle it to have a warm bedroom on a cold winter morning?

I am warm during the night but we both have poor circulation and aren't 'morning people' we feel the cold on a morning.

How often does a coal fired range need servicing please?

Thanks in advance if anyone can advise.

CoD_2

we have a Stanley, a range, i love it, it does our heating, our hot water, most of our cooking, we can set the temp in the main oven bit, and likewise roughly on the top. it keeps heat for ages once turned off so i generally turn it off 30mins before cooking has finished. we like it for the ease of turning on and off as needed, my parents have an aga which is on all through the year, which costs much more in oil and doesn't heat the water or the house.

it's certainly different from cooking on gas, though i prefer this oven i do miss gas for stir fries/ super quick cooking. turning on a range to fry an egg seems expensive to me! and obviously you have to wait a little while for it to get hot. however we have a portable gas cooker so i use this, or i use the steamer, or microwave, or the george. however where we live doesn't have mains gas so this is fine.

servicing every year, plus the cost of oil -faints- we never run out of hot water and it's on for about 30 mins a day (without the oven being hot)