Prompted by the latest posts here, we paid a visit to our local distributor who in the past, has been super helpful and nice to deal with. They did not have the new columns yet. But did show me some of the capabilities in their freezer bottom unit. Note that I am just passing on what we were told :). The Mastercool controls look both cool and not so cool :). On the positive front, you get to set the temp and humidity of each bit electronically. I seem to recall on the Bosch, etc it is those plastic sliders. Those sliders donÂt seem all the functional to me as they are easy to bang into/change. On the down side, she had to touch the controls multiple times to get the system to detect. A real switch to control them would have been better than a touch control that is fussy. The main thing my wife liked, and someone should verify that Bosch series donÂt do, is that you there is a bucket where the ice falls into that can be slid left and right. In doing so, you can then use the entire larger slider under it to fill with ice for parties and such. On doors being easier to mount, she said that once the panels are mounted to the door grid, they are hung and then can be adjusted in that way using some mechanism on the door. She said the time to do this is 75 minutes (!). With the other units, she said the panel needs to be taken on and off to adjust the panels and that is what takes a lot of time. The door panels had heavy stainless rails into which the glass buckets hung. You could push the glass bucket up and remove them without removing the slides which hold not. Seemed nice to have them be this way. On wifi connection, in our case, it is a useful thing in that it can detect unit failure or door being left open. We will be having the unit in our vacation house and hate to come to it after a month of being gone, just to find everything gone bad due to unit failure. Not a huge deal mind you, but useful. I asked if there is a charge and she said "not currently." Not sure what that means as far as them charging in the future. I asked her the cost and she gave me an MSRP of $12,000 for dual 30 inch units. I seem to recall that the Gagg was less than $10K so this is quite a premium for the few features. Availability apparently is pretty poor for the freezer. She said someone just ordered a set and the freezer is scheduled for October! Yikes. Overall, it seems that they have done some homework on refining everything around the core of the unit. I donÂt feel that they have created enough value to go beyond the Gagg unit. But for people where price is no object, I think they should seriously consider Miele. We are not quite in that category although close when it comes to our kitchen remodel :).

The thermador columns are also my leading contender and after looking at the 18" freezer in person (and bringing some empty containers with me to test out) I am going to try to adjust my kitchen design to fit in the 24". I've never had a side by side before but its been drilled into my head from my sister (she has a smaller sxs) that the freezer space is terrible. I have 3 children 13, 9, 7 (2 of whom are boys but the girl can certainly hold her own eating wise - especially when friends are over). We currently have a "regular" sized fridge and also have an additional freezer which is currently packed. one trip to Sam's or Costco and I'm creatively stuffing frozen items into any available nook and cranny. My opinion is to try and fit the larger freezer into your space. As you said, your kids will only get bigger and eat more and have more friends over! Good luck.

For those of you considering Thermador and are concerned about present day Performance, Reliability and Service, here is a Thermador customer experience that was recently posted elsewhere by Carl T... The authorized Thermador repair person just left my house after the second major problem with my 36" dual fuel range with grill (Model PD364GL). Some background: Like many of you, I did a major remodel of my home (completed two and a half years ago) and, after doing due diligence, I settled on the Thermador because I liked the design and the features and the fact that it got pretty good consumer ratings. Upon using the oven for the very first time I discovered that if I used the oven and grill at the same time the air from the oven fan would blow on the grill ignitor, causing the grill to continuously ignite. I assumed that it was a design flaw and when I called Thermador their representative confirmed my suspicions - with no offer of a solution. One year and one month after installing the stove (or, more precisely, one month after the warranty expired) I had a power outage in my neighborhood. When power was restored the master circuit board on my range blew out. One service call (and $400) later I was back in business. Kind of. After the repair was completed I noticed that the temperature gauge would automatically go to the designated temperature as opposed to the actual temperature in the oven itself. When I asked the service technician about this he told me that this was a new feature. I spoke to the Thermador service representative on the phone and he told me the same thing. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I KNOW what temperature I set the oven to, I need to know what the actual temperature is. My current situation is that I made the fatal mistake of using the self-cleaning feature for the first time six months ago. Right after using the self cleaning oven I noticed that the oven was not heating up to its designated temperature and that the problem was getting worse. Finally the oven quit heating at all. Diagnosis: the baking and the broiler elements are both burned out. I have since been told by a good friend and by the service representative that one should never use the self cleaning feature. Live and learn. The bottom line is that I would never ever buy a Thermador product again and I would strongly caution anyone against doing the same. The product design, manufacture and customer support are all very sub-standard. This is especially galling in light of how much the Thermador products cost. Posted by: Carl T : September 21, 2007 at 06:14 PM

Yes, it's a reasonable fee. If the contract was signed without the appliances being selected yet, then I wouldn't expect the GC to absorb the fee for installing any built in appliances. It's a lot more complicated and takes much longer than standard consumer grade stuff that just gets plugged in and slid in place. Time is money. Not everyone has the skill set to do this. He was probably expecting standard consumer grade built in appliances. If, on the other hand, y'all drew up the contract where the appliances and their specs were part of it, and now he sees that he doesn't have the skill to do the job, I'd want him to refund the amount out of the contract to cover the other labor to do the job. And, I'd also want to be taking a fine toothed comb to the project. If he's not comfortable having the skills to do the built in appliances, I'd want to know what else he wasn't really skilled enough to do but was able to BS his way past on the job.