Here is a quick update of my visit from the Bluestar technician. He replaced the ignition box and now all burners are up and running. He was not able to reconfigure the burners, so I will continue to have the two simmer burners. He told me that Bluestar emailed him the day before his visit and told him he could not do it. It would have been nice if Bluestar had also contacted me so I could find out from them instead of the technician. I can live quite well with the burners, although I will need to replace my two griddle pans, which rest on two burners, which will probably cost me $130 (I'll replace them with single burner griddles). I hope that Bluestar updates their website soon, so that consumers like me can make an informed decision between the rangetop and cooktop. My other issue is still outstanding, which is that the cooktop does not sit flush with my granite countertop. In the front it does, but on the rear 8" of the cooktop (on both sides) there is a 1/4" gap between the cooktop and the counter. This looks like a perfect place for gunk to accumulate. The technician kind of avoided the problem, and said maybe it was the cooktop and maybe the hole in the granite was causing the problem. He suggested that maybe I could put a little caulking or something there to close the gap. I don't think it is the granite, as the cooktop is not tight in the hole and it feels like there is some room there. The installer didn't complain about the cutout when he did the installation (I didn't notice it wasn't flat until after he had left). I don't want to be too picky, but I think the cooktop should not have a gap. I also have some concerns about the burners. When the technician was at my house, I told him that it looked like the 15K burner was not hot enough and that the simmer burners were too hot. He seemed to agree with me, but after fiddling with them said that they were adjusted as much as he could. He recommended that I buy a diffuser or simmer plate at Williams Sonoma if the simmer burner is still too hot. I don't think he really addressed whether or not the 15K burner was working properly. I was cooking on Wednesday and needed to warm up some milk. I thought I would give the famous Bluestar simmer a test now that it had been adjusted. I put a small pot of milk on the burner (lowest setting) and went about some other activities in the kitchen. The milk boiled over and made quite a mess. Perhaps I am just expecting too much from the cooktop. I have been so busy with Passover that I haven't even called Bluestar to address these issues- I will post the outcome after they have had a chance to help me out.

Hey Trevor, Thanks for the offer of an introduction. I tried to email you but your page doesn't have an email link for some reason. I just enabled email on my page to make things easier.

Xicano, our island is 8 feet wide by a bit over 4 feet deep. There is 1 foot (plus 1.5 inch of overhang) to the left of the range top. The range top is 3 feet wide. There is a 24" inch cabinet holding the spice drawer, microwave and another drawer between the rangetop and the sink cabinet which is also 24" wide. Definitely not symmetrical. 1. Symmetry was never a design goal for us. Neither my husband nor I find it necessary or desirable. An L plus island layout is inherently asymmetric anyway. Even more so with a refrigerator and wall ovens at the end of one leg of the L. 2. To us, the kitchen is primarily a workspace for making food - a big tool holding other tools. We cook quite a bit and it has to function well both for a single cook and multiple cooks. We spend a lot of time there, have family visiting and sometimes entertain there so we want it to look nice and be a pleasant space, but it has to work. So even if symmetry was something we wanted, we wouldn't sacrifice usability to get it. 3. There is more than one way to look at symmetry especially with an L layout. It turns out that by putting the rangetop off-center in the island, the rangetop and hood are centered against the wall (the long leg of the L). I think it ends up looking more balanced than it would if we had put the rangetop in the center of the island. We find that this layout works very well for us. I wouldn't want any less space between the rangetop and the sink. We have times when 3 or 4 people are doing food prep and the space works well for that. Sometimes we have two people prepping at the prep sink. One at the end of the island with the sink on their left and one between the rangetop and the sink. We thought about that when we chose the sink and the position for the faucet. The 1 foot wide cabinet to the left of the range top is a pull out for bottled staples (oil, vinegar, etc.) which is very convenient when working at the range. I wouldn't want any less space there. If we had room for it, another few inches would be nice but it is workable the way it is. Possibly, we could have gone with a 15" wide sink in an 18" cabinet and had 6 more inches of counter to the left of the rangetop or between the rangetop and the sink. However, there are times when the sink is pretty fully utilized too, so that might not be any better. It would not have worked well for us with the range centered. That would have left only 6 inches between the rangetop and the sink. I think that would also have looked odd and out of balance with the prep sink, wall ovens, fridge and rangetop all piled up at one edge of the kitchen.

Well, to put another opinion in to the mix---I don't know of any granite fabricators in my neck of the woods who will do a cutout on an already existing installed countertop that another fabricator has installed. Yes, you can get them to come out and drill holes, or modify cutouts in place, but there will be NO WARRANTY about the top cracking and you would have to sign a waiver acknowledging that fact. In an existing situation, the house can have settled, the cabinets settled, and there can be invisible stresses on the granite top if that's happened, and then you apply cutting tools to the situation and you have a stress crack manifest itself. Not to mention, your "pinch hitters" didn't help select the slab or layout, and the original fabricator may have installed a piece with a fissure there that just naturally broke when the larger cutout stresses were applied with the bigger and heavier cooktop. There are a lot of reasons granite cracks, but in an existing situation that is being modified, you really can't hold the fabricators responsible. Now, they should have made you aware of this on the front end, had you sign a waiver, and shown you the issue and let you sign off on the repair efforts before they left. I'm not defending that behavior at all.