Mayorswife, If you're still interested in comments from Aga owners, we have a 2-oven Aga. We have had it for a bit over 10 years now, and we love it. You opened this post with concerns over two reports: that AGAs make your kitchen hot, and that the learning curve is very steep. Responding to the second concern first, I do not remember the learning curve as being that steep. There is one, certainly. I also recall there being a learning curve when I, who grew up with and learned to cook on gas cooktops and ranges, moved into an apartment with an electric stove. I remember learning curves associated with the charcoal grill, the crock pot, and the microwave. The AGA was certainly no worse than any of those. As Wa8b and Trixieinthegarden noted, the main change is the shift in emphasis to positioning rather than temperature and time. As to your second concern, heating up the kitchen, much depends on what you mean by "hot" and how you use your kitchen in the summer. Since you have seen a working AGA, you have some idea how hot it feels. Your description sounds correct to me. The concern most people have is heat during warm weather. If your kitchen is tiny and enclosed and does not have any air circulation, the AGA will make it uncomfortably hot when your house gets over a certain temperature (what that would be depends on you and your climate). In my part of the country at least, the AGA dealer recommends that you have an HVAC vent near the AGA to help with air circulation and to keep the heat from the AGA from building up in its immediate vicinity. I have thought that this helped in our house. In addition, our kitchen has a very open plan, which has also helped, and a ceiling fan. A point in connection with summer heat that is often overlooked in this context is that serious cooking on a modern cooktop or range, particularly baking, will also heat up your kitchen during warm weather. For most situations, the heat in the kitchen will be greater than with an AGA, although for a shorter period of time during the day. You should consider this aspect when thinking about how the AGA would compare. If baking, say, a chicken casserole in one of the Wolf ovens you were looking at wouldn't heat up your kitchen uncomfortably during the height of summer, I wouldn't think the AGA would bother you. As a case in point, we live in piedmont North Carolina, and it certainly gets hot and muggy here during the summer. Because of the heat created in the kitchen by cooking, we rarely used the gas range we had before we got the AGA during the hottest part of the summer. We often weren't at home for dinner (extended daylight activities), and when we were, as much as possible we ate salads and other food that did not require cooking (I ate a lot of tuna salad for dinner, growing up!). Instead of the range, we used the microwave, or, if we wanted something more substantial, the outdoor grill. When we got the AGA, we decided that we could turn it off between July 4 and Labor Day. We had a portable burner/broiler combination that would heat water for tea in the morning, and that was really the only use we were making of the old range during those months. We have more or less followed that pattern ever since. If, for some reason, we want/need real cooking ability during that time that we can't get from the combination of the portable burner, the grill, the microwave, and the toaster oven, we can always turn the AGA up for that particular occasion. I am not aware of any exceptional expense in starting it back up. Other AGA owners in this State whom I know keep their AGAs up and running throughout the summer. They have concluded that the heat assistance they get from the AGA during the winter balances the extra air conditioning they need during the summer, and/or that the heat from the AGA during the summer is not cumulatively more than the heat caused by their old ranges when they used them. As to the AGA's performance, I checked with my husband before completing this response, and we agree that its results are excellent. We both cook on it. He said that if asked what he liked best about the AGA, he would say that he liked what it does to food. For example, just this last week, we cooked yet another Thanksgiving turkey for the extended family. We get this job every year for Thanksgiving and Christmas because (i) everyone in the family likes the roasted turkeys the AGA produces better than anyone else's efforts, and (ii) we're willing to do it every year, twice a year, because it really doesn't take much effort on our part. As to your husband's concern over smells, it hasn't been a problem for us. Smells are an individual matter, and we may have no problem because we mostly like the smells associated with cooking food. I find some fishy smells a bit strong, but we cook fish in the ovens and the only odor problem comes from the cooking pan itself before it's washed or goes into the dish washer. As Wa8b noted, if this is a concern for you, you could go on and install a range hood, which some AGA owners do (we don't have one). Alternatively, you could arrange your kitchen so that you leave yourself the option of installing a hood or exhaust fan later on if you want. You wanted to know what AGA owners like best and what we dislike most. I have already mentioned what my husband said he liked best (the way the food comes out). His biggest dislike is that you have to be careful of the top, because it will scratch. I thought about this question, and I confess to being somewhat at a loss. I would probably have done a better job six or eight years ago. At this point, the AGA is part of my life, and I wouldn't trade it for any other range or cooktop/oven combo. I like not having to ride herd on the AGA while it's cooking, once I put food into the ovens. Getting over the learning curve is probably necessary for this, but it seems to me that I can produce better food for less effort with the AGA. The AGA has become something more like a cooking partner than an appliance. I do my part getting the food ready to be cooked, then the AGA does its part. I like being free from the tyranny of a timer. The AGA's ovens are more forgiving of time vagaries than other ovens. The AGA is a truly great range for working parents, which is what we were when we got ours. If some domestic emergency occurs just as the meatloaf is supposed to come out, there is no need to worry; the meatloaf will be just fine while you wash off and bandaid up the scraped knee or quell the dispute (or whatever. And it IS possible to burn something in an AGA oven; you just have to work harder to do it. We put a roast in one evening, had some crisis come up and forgot about it for two days. The roast was an inedible lump of charcoal by that time). As to cons, it would be nice if there was another row or two of runners lower down in each oven, and the simmering oven does not oxidize its spills as efficiently as the roasting oven and must be cleaned from time to time. The AGA can be used for noncooking purposes. It makes a reasonably good quicky dryer or iron. Although the AGA suits us, we recognize that it may not suit everyone else. If someone's preferred foods include foods that are not suited to the AGA's style of cooking, the AGA is probably not for them. For example, those who prefer cooking in a wok shouldn't get an AGA. I think there are some cooks who really like the continued interaction with food as it cooks that stovetop cooking involves; they would probably find an AGA unsatisfying. Other people prefer other types of ranges or cooktops/ovens for different reasons. AGA owners in my State were willing to talk about their AGAs to potential buyers, to answer questions, and to offer helpful suggestions. I found that helpful when we were deciding on our AGA. In fact, we talked to three of them. Your area dealer may be able to put you in touch with other AGA owners in your area for information about heat during the summer, for instance. Meanwhile, whatever you have or do decide, good luck!

Your woodstove is significantly less efficient at turning fuel into heat than a modern gas furnace. Furthermore, controlling temperature by moving the pan further away is inherently wasteful, simply throwing away the heat you don't need instead of controlling the fuel input to reduce it. No big deal in the winter when you can use the heat, but in the summer - big waste. OTOH, one could argue that a woodstove's fuel is renewable, while natural gas and electricity (usually) aren't. Pick your poison. But you are thinking in the right direction. There are certainly a lot of interesting possibilities for improving efficiency. Some of them are proven methods (passive solar design, sensible home siting, windows one can actually use, etc.) These are relatively easy to implement. It just takes a cooperative contractor and a few wheelbarrows full of money. Others are more "high tech." For example, wouldn't it be nice to have a home-sized fuel cell that produced your heat from natural gas, AND at the same time fed the grid with electricity? Such a device was designed and prototyped many years ago, but I don't believe it ever got into production. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong about that. It would be nice if it had.) There are some established energy conservation techniques that are just now finally becoming mainstream in the states. They are really pretty minimal - we are WAY behind such nations as Denmark and Sweden on this - but they're a start, and you have some chance of finding a contractor who can handle them. Go outside those established techniques and you are on your own. You may have trouble getting the building inspector to approve them. You will be either buying expensive limited-production products (and living with their quirks), or designing and building them yourself (and living with quirks you created yourself ;-). But somebody's gotta do it, or it'll never happen. That's what being an early adopter is all about.

Oh, I agree with you there (e.g. about graph data presentation, a tool that can stretch truths and deceive the uninitiated through visual and communicative distortion) - I'm ignoring those (I immediately did with that graph lol) and haven't even fully read the info on that page - trust me, I hold healthy skepticism (yet, crucial openness), to all matters when it comes to health, healing, and science - but the fact is I know the benefits of the various rays of light that the sun provides and its beneficial health effects, (or if you will, detrimental effects of not receiving it or receiving it in less natural ways), already, and that's (all) the common ground I need to share with mercola to appreciate the information they state on that page - obvious product promotion undertone notwithstanding. I appreciate your information and thoughts - nothing I don't appreciate or ignore, certainly when it is friendly and respectful. The simple matter is, I want lights that offer (appropriate levels of) UVA, UVB, UVC, and infrared light, in addition to highly accurate colour rendering, and midday-like colour temperature. I want whatever those 80's studies in Germany (that their government concluded to ban traditional LFLs from), quoted as being far better for you than normal LFLs. I know that for MONTHS (both in summer and winter), after living such a natural outdoor lifestyle out in full sun, I have been severely irritated (physiologically, in the eyes), by what I can only describe as a highly uncomfortable experience, that is the fluorescent lighting in our kitchen. So that is the data and experience I base my views on, rather than any silly 'cancelling out' conjecture like this. (I'm aware of my opposite.) Maybe our kitchen lights are just OLD LFLs that are really bad. (But they're modern current market bulbs, so how could they be? Additionally, our electrician apparently told us years ago those fluorescents we have in the kitchen are terribly inefficient, (in fact the worst watt-suckers in the house, I've been told), so I don't know what that means.) Again - more important than all of this, I want to avoid artificial lighting where I can anyway. But an interest in the healthiest form of artificial lighting, is really worthwhile. So where others think 'UV radiation' in lighting should be avoided at all costs due to 'skin cancer', I beg to differ... (Because I know that what causes skin cancer isn't just UV radiation, but other lifestyle choices in combination with it that were never meant for the human body to sustainably endure.) (And where they don't give second thought to OTHER forms of (unnatural) radiation like mobile phone or Wi-Fi or general electronic EMR - I beg to differ...) If that's the difference between them and me in one's opinion of lighting choice when it comes to health, than so be it. My goal is to try and emulate natural conditions as much as possible, as the simple yet powerful philosophy behind one's choices! :).

Actually the current owner, according to the public tax records has been there for seven years. Its harder than it sounds for many people to conceive putting in a kitchen in something other than the current mode, so I don't want to be too hard on the current owner. At least its natural wood and not neo-Edwardian. I think its the hutch that really grates and thats not such a big piece of the picture, I guess. The original kitchen in this house was probably stick built, not incredibly functional and maybe kinda ugly--I've seen some of the originals and I dunno...There was an iconic Louis Kahn glass and wood box up for auction last year or so, in order to try and save it from being torn down and replace with something neo-palatial, and one of the problems really was the kitchen: Tiny; shallow cabinets; some with sliding thin ply doors, that old 60s track light and 60s appliances. And you almost would have had to do an addition of another glass box in order to get what is currently considered a functional kitchen in the house.