Last September I bought a beautiful KitchenAid side-in gas range. I've had so many service calls on it this year that I'm actually thinking that I may need to buy the extended warantee (which I usually avoid like the plague). I'm wondering if anyone else has had as much bad luck with this appliance.

To begin with, when the range was installed, two of the four burners wouldn't light. The installer suspected that the gas lines had gotten plugged by spiders and told me a serviceman would come to clean them out. When they came to service the stove, they discovered that the orifices for these two burners were set up for LP instead of natural gas - go figure, how did that ever pass QA at the factory???

The first big crisis came on Thanksgiving morning when I went to put my turkey in the oven. I had two or three pots going on the range, when suddenly I heard a 'beep' and an error message displayed across the control panel 'communications error' - and the oven would NOT light. I searched through all of the manuals and didn't find this error listed. They claimed that to clear any error, I would hold down the "Clear/Off" button, but that did not work either. I had to put the bird in the car and make an emergency run to my sister's house.

I then discovered that any time I had more than one burner going for more than just a few minutes, this same error would occur - I could only reset it by throwing the circuit breaker and resetting it. It took three service calls and replacement of something in the control panel before this seemed to be fixed.

Since I live alone, and seldom use more than one burner at a time, all seemed well until a couple weeks ago when a friend from Louisiana came and offered to cook up a big pot of Jambalaya for my extended family. A couple hours into the cooking process, this same error returned. This time, the serviceman was real disgusted with the unit and said he would replace the entire control panel. I'm still waiting for him to return with those parts.

My second issue is that the left front burner burns so hot that it has caused the porcelain coating on the cast iron grates to bubble up. I had asked one of the repairmen if they could lower that flame to keep this from happening, but they said they could not. Now the damaged areas of the porcelain is falling off in big chunks, leaving bare cast iron, which I'm sure will rust and become unsightly.

Do you think I have a prayer of getting the retailer (a highly reputable applicance store) or KitchenAid to replace the grates and fix the problem that caused the porcelain to fail in the first place?