If you buy all your appliances at the same place you should get 20% off. That is a typical contractors discount and it is quite easy to say you are a contractor. The Thermador Freedom refrigerator and freezer columns are strikingly beautiful. I bought the Thermador T24IF70 24" freezer column (without an external icemaker as I loved the plain look of the stainless) and the Thermador T30IR70 30" refrigerator. Much depends on the size of your family on which columns you may want. I payed $6,250 for both delivered. If you need to save money, Samsung makes an excellent side by side freezer/refrigerator with four areas. And GE makes some nice large side by side ones up to 29.5 cubic feet that are far cheaper than separates, either by Thermador or Sub Zero. Bosch/Siemens owns Thermador and Gaggenau. Hence, the Thermador dishwashers are made by Bosch, but with Thermador making the handles and some slight alterations. As most Bosch DW's, they are very quiet. Like almost every European designed dishwasher, they don't have a heating element or a macerating unit in the filter. The evaporating drying system still works very well while saving you money on electricity. And occassionally checking the filter in the bottom is incredibly easy too. A quarter turn to the left and it comes right out for rinsing, if need be. My sister has a Fisher Paykel Dishdrawer. It is convenient for small families that want to wash small amounts, but it is much noisier than my Thermador DW and all dishdrawers are very over-priced and usually are more prone to repair. I changed from a gas rangetop to a 36" induction cooktop. Best move I ever made in the kitchen. It boils far more quickly than gas or electric and as the pot or pan is the only thing heated by the magnetic waves, the cooking surface rarely heats up, except a bit under the pan. It is also far easier to clean than a gas or electric cooktop. Pan grilling is also faster and more easily controlled on induction. The only thing a gas cooktop can do that induction can't is in grilling meat or veggies without a pan. Of course, this can make quite a mess, but some people like the ability to do this. When I want to grill I use my outdoor gas grill. But if you want a gas range, there are any number of good ones, with the dual fuel ones being rather expensive. Greg

I am curious about how the actual flow rate was measured. Typically, a door opening is utilized as an instrumented flow path. At the door, one could measure by the pressure drop through a calibrated venturi, but in that case there would be a pressure drop and not only would that cut the actual flow rate of the hood, but there would be some house leakage not measured. Alternatively, if there were also a fan in the path keeping the house pressure at zero to the outside, while also measuring the flow through the fan (by whatever means), then the flow rate measured should be the static value for the entire hood system. Of course, without the test fan providing zero differential, the actual flow will be less depending on where the MUA is sourced. No magic is involved. kas Correction: In an early message above, I asserted: "A fan at the hood can more easily overcome flow resistance between the hood and the outdoors, but normally this resistance is small, a few tenths of an inch w.g., so attic and roof mount fans work fine when properly sized." I now doubt that it matters much whether the restriction is before or after the fan, as most fans have fan curves that are based on total pressure drop around the path and do not differentiate between pushing and pulling. Differences could result from turbulence interacting with structures on one side or the other of the fan, and in such cases the actual flow might differ slightly for the same fan. I don't know how VAH squirrel-cage blowers might behave in this respect.

Dito what Phil says - why limit yourself to one brand ??? If you must - forget Dacor - they don't have a steam oven or dishwashe and they don't make fridge units in house and have no Fully Integrated options at all. Theramdor's rangetops aren't as robust as WOlf's and their ranges have had serious trouble over the last decade - a quick google will return you a month's reading if you fancy. I have had trouble with every single Tdor oven that I had to specify into a job for a client. Fixed under warranty but who needs the hassle ? Column fridges are very nice and no issues, steam oven is too new to get a real read on, but I suspect they borrowed heavily from their sister Gaggenau who has lead the steam oven market along with Miele for about a decade. Wolf/ Sub Zero has robust products and the network in place to service problems should they arise. Their steam oven is new and is made for them by an Italian outfit. Warming drawer is $$$ and a bit large so it doesn't blend well with Euro cabinets if that matters to you.

I don't know that I have much to add relative to the appliance forum, except to say that everything driving my interest in Bluestar had to do with cooking, and the way I cook, rather than any grand design plan (we don't have one and our kitchen, while pleasant looking and very functional, is nobody's idea of awesome, beautiful design). I like the more powerful burners both for fast searing and for, e.g., bringing a pot of pasta back to a rolling boil quickly, so that you are not poaching the life out of it. It's also very nice for wok cooking -- not my specialty, but something we really like here and there. The medium burners are versatile and the simmer burner rounds things out nicely. The large (gas) oven seems to be very stable once it's properly pre-heated; and the broiler is great, although not all that large. We had looked at the 30" before settling on the 36" model. Of the smaller ranges, it offered very nice spacing of the burners, which might be a plus for this range (and an issue with some alternatives) if you often work with 2 or 3 large pans at a time. Very good heavy continuous grates, which are nice for moving things around while you work. This is, of course, a large up-charge relative to many perfectly good ranges. For myself that was acceptable because (a) the range really mattered to me, (b) the cost, while substantial, was not great relative to many other things that might be done for a kitchen or home, and (c) the cost was manageable . . . for us -- we all operate under different budget constraints.