I’m just curious how they work or differ from other stoves. Can you turn it off? Does it make your house too warm? Etc. Etc. Etc.
I personally don’t have an Aga, but I have friends who do. It’s a gas-fired Aga, which is in a small kitchen. My understanding is that it works by continually burning a small flame to heat a block of metal in the middle of the stove, from which heat is drawn to the hobs and ovens. There’s certainly no need to turn it on before starting to use it. It has two hobs, both with insulated lids that are shut when the stove isn’t in use, and four ovens of varying temperatures.
Something like this, in fact: http://www.aga-web.co.uk/185.htm
In summer, it does tend to heat the kitchen quite a bit, but in winter, it’s marvellously toasty. I don’t think there’s any way to shut it off on a regular basis, since that would mean that all the heat built up would just gradually leak out and you’d have to wait for it to come up to operating temperature again before using it in the morning. I do know that it has turned out rather expensive to run, for that very reason.
Cooking on an Aga is certainly an interesting experience - because of the size of the hob, flat-bottomed pans transfer a huge amount of heat very quickly, but you have no way of controlling that other than moving to the other, cooler hob. This does mean some pan-juggling (or oven-juggling, if you’re baking) and co-ordination when cooking more than one thing at a time. The hob lids are perfect for warming your hands on in winter, and the kettle-heating pad is wonderful when it comes to Needing Tea Now. I do get the feeling that Agas are something of a lifestyle statement rather than a truly efficient way of cooking and heating, but there’s no denying they have a certain charm.
I see Devorin is in London, but it looks like you’re in the US, valleyofthedolls. Is that right? I didn’t even know Agas were available here in the US. My grandmother lives in Kinross, Scotland, and she’s had an Aga for as long as I can remember (probably for longer than the thirty-plus years I’ve been alive.) I’ve always wondered what benefit, if any, the AGA had over a regular kitchen stove. From what I can tell, none whatsoever besides the dubious advantage of conspicuous consumption. They seem to be lodged in the public consciousness in the UK for some reason, but as I said, I had no idea they even existed on this side of the pond.
Yes, I checked years ago, they are (were) available, but were insanely expensive.
This really isn’t a very GQ worthy answer, but I can share my experiences with one.
I once lived in a house with an AGA and found it to be a pain in the backside. It was very warm in summer, you couldn’t turn it off, it was expensive to run and cooking on it required more culinary skills than I ever had. It also smelled pretty bad if it wasn’t cleaned properly and required expensive servicing on a fairly regular basis. Mine developed some kind of problem and started continually pouring out black sooty smoke, which made the whole place smell awful. I ended up just disconnecting it and never using it, I’m guessing the previous residents also had similar problems as there was also a standard gas oven installed in a utility room.
That said, some people really love them and I suppose if you have a large family in a large house and are a keen cook it may be a different story. For me though, as a single guy at the time it was totally unsuitable.
What’s the advantage supposed to be to it staying on all the time? In the summer, you’re just either making your home less comfortable or making your air conditioning work harder, and even in the winter, an actual furnace will do a better job of distributing the heat. If it’s just that you don’t have to wait for the burners to get up to temperature, that’s only, what, a minute? Two? That hardly seems enough to justify leaving it hot 24/7.
Well then one needs to add a summer kitchen to the home:D
I have a wood cooking stove in my Cabin/hunting Shack. Its imposable to use in the summer, but that is all I heat with in the fall/winter. Its wonderful!
and as for duel fuel, I put in two ash stick at a time.
Keep in mind, this was developed in the UK where 85 degrees is considered a heat wave.
You can purchase them in the United States not that I know anyone who has one nor am I interested in purchasing one. I’ve just read a lot of novels where they’ve been mentioned (P.D James, I’m looking at you) and was curious about how they worked.
In any event, thank you and everyone else for the information.
Yeah, it’s a climate thing. I wouldn’t buy an Aga here in Virginia, even though I think of it longingly from Oct. to April. August comes around once a year to remind me that I really don’t want one. But in Ireland if it’s not chilly, it’s wet, so you want it around either way.
If you had grown up cooking on a wood stove then the Aga cooking method would make perfect sense. The different sections of oven heat to different temperatures, and you have to move things around. They are really meant for making three meals a day plus baking for large numbers of people.
Lovely though . . . sigh.
Most of my cousins with rural homes have them. I love them. For some reason you just don’t see them in the city, or rarely at least.
Looking at the website and seeing that you had to actually request a brochure to find out prices, that was the first thing I suspected. Companies that don’t tell the general public how much their products cost have either priced it insanely high or are being majorly pretentious. Or both.
Those ovens look terribly small. I know the British tend to have small ovens though. Americans usually have pretty big ovens to use once a year for Thanksgiving.
Even living in a cold climate, I can’t imagine wanting one. Yes, our winters are long and cold… but even in the coldest summer (and we do get cold summers… I had to wear gloves while running a few days before the fourth of July last year), it gets 80 or 90 at least a few times a year, and I avoid using the oven on those days. The last thing I want is a stove I can’t turn off.
Fuel savings. (Let me operate off memory here.) The Aga (Something Gas Accumulator) was developed in WWI to save city gas. A small flame going 24/7 is more economical that trying to get a regular cast iron stove hot from a standing start a couple of times a day. The same is true of the modern incarnation.
Also the cat likes to sleep on it.
I don’t know if they’re cheaper over in the UK, but here in Toronto they’ll run you between$15-30K. I only know one person who has one and she definitely bought it for the look. She’s not a cook and the most I’ve seen her do on it is scrambled eggs. Her kitchen does look amazing though.
Am I missing something? Where’s the fuel savings with a stove that’s always on versus one that you turn on for an hour when you need to cook?
Huh?
I know of no way consistent with the laws of thermodynamics to make this work. The way you lose energy (and thereby end up having to use more) is by heat loss, and heat loss is proportional to the temperature difference, so you only waste energy while the oven is hot. If the oven is hot all the time, then you’re wasting energy all the time, as opposed to only wasting energy while you’re using it.
According to Wikipedia an Aga uses almost forty times as much fuel as a typical gas stove! :eek:
Really? Ignorance fought!
So why does such a thing exist?