Just bought a house with an AGA (gas).
Nice thing but I’m guessing expensive to run and service…?
Can’t help thinking that it’s daft to burn fuel constantly.
Any thoughts?

owners are not called aga louts for nothing

my dad paid £10k for an electric one to be installed & he is most certainly daft as a mahogany frying pan

It’s amazing 🙂 If the house is designed round it. It should heat a chunk of the house for you.

The cooking is different but brilliant, the top oven is much hotter and the lower one is only about 130c.

As bad as it sounds get the Mary Berry aga Book
http://www.amazon.com/Mary-Berrys-New-Aga-Cookbook/dp/0755363167
It explains how it works for cooking.

Ours was in a rented house and was serviced once a year. It was temperamental due to the crap way the oil was piped but apart from that it was great.

Fuel wise that and oil central heating was on a par with other heating forms.

They are a luxury item, for those who see the cost of fuel as either an irrelevance or worthwhile for the status of having one.

Costs a fortune to keep running as it should, or you have to wait forever for the bloody thing to heat up each time you want to cook on it.

Lovely when it’s going at full chat on a cold day, and makes nice toast.

Some folk will have a secondary oven/hob for day to day use.

You’ll learn to love it, and gloss over all it’s many and varied flaws.

Friend of mine bought a house with a gas aga. They sold it and managed to get a really nice standard type range oven to fit the hole that the aga left and had money to spare.
We have an Aga shop in town (Alton Hampshire) which is locally known as the ‘I saw you coming cook shop’ for good reason.

Mrs North’s great aunt has one of the old coke ones. Gets serviced now and again and last year needed a replacement barrel, but otherwise suits her in a big old farmhouse just fine.

It may well have been expensive, but she did buy it second hand. In 1947.

Love the fact that the negative comments are exclusively from people who dont own one, and never have!

We have a gas Aga, intentionally fitted by ourselves, and it saved us 10% on our energy bill over the year, and we were warmer in the winter. the advantage is that the kitchen is always warm, and you always have a hot oven, and as mentioend above if you are careful to leave doors open internally it can keep the whole house warm.

Negatives are that you do tend to only live in the kitchen! 😀 And you’ll burn everything you make for the first couple of weeks! Strongly recommend buying the aga cookbook to teach you how to get the best out of it, it’s not just a double over 🙂

I have a 2 oven gas one. It was in the house when i bought it.
It’s surprisingly not so expensive to run considering its gas. I have no mains, just a tank buried in the garden.
Cooking is great. Making joints of meat as an example, 10 minutes in tbe hot oven then 3 hours in the simmering producers the softest most delicious meat.
Make a casserole in the evening. Stick it in the simmering oven. It’s done when you come home.
You can buy bakalite sheets. Place one on the simmering hob. Crack an egg onto it. Fried eggs without mess or fat.
The mary berry book is excellent and I’m slowly working though the recipes.
Last weekend it was raspberry jam as the garden is full of them just now. It was bloody lovely.

Lovely if you have a nice big ‘living kitchen’, and the cash to run it.
EDIT: Had oil, no idea if they are better or worse than gas. Make sure its doing water/heating not just cooking or you might as well cook over a bonfire of ten pound notes 🙂

Wouldn’t buy one too fit though. Plus make sure you’ve got plenty of ventilation if it’s a hot summer!

Love the fact that the negative comments are exclusively from people who dont own one, and never have!

Except they’re not.

So it costs ten grand, and you have to learn how to deal with its weirdness.

Well I’m sold*..!

* note sarcasm. But then, I have gears and FS on my bikes too..

If it comes in the house and you like to cook it’s perfect molgrips.

Beard, FS & Gears here.

If I bought a house with one in I’d flog it and get a proper cooker and plenty of soft drinks and rugby players.

I also like to cook but I don’t want to have to work around my equippment.

I reckon it might cost a bit to ship with MyHermes!

Can you also do ironing on one?

😉

Lol.. ok so now it’s overtaking, ECUs and speeding fines, anything else? 🙂

molgrips
I also like to cook but I don’t want to have to work around my equippment.

What does that actually mean?

Place my wife was staying for 6 months had one, we used it quite a bit. It was an old farmhouse and it heated the big kitchen which was the main living space, so relatively efficient. I didn’t really like it for cooking, it worked but it just seemed worse than a normal hob / oven. I can see it would be useful if you were baking a lot and making bread for the masses, otherwise no. It was also oil fired and if it was windy outside it didn’t vent well and all the food tasted like it have been cooked on an engine block. Rank.