help me decide...30" gas range w OTR MW: Berta or GE Cafe double
pemfan
8 years ago
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pemfan
8 years agoRelated Discussions
30-inch Gas Range: GE Cafe, Thermador, KitchenAid, Monogram?
Comments (59)Hi Kayla - overall I like the dual fuel range. My husband loves the digital meat thermometer that came with it and we've made the best prime rib roasts since we've gotten this oven. The pre-heat does take awhile but we've gotten used to it. I've made cookies and they turn out great. We have also started using the lower oven more if we're baking something in a shallow dish, frozen garlic bread, rolls and etc. because it doesn't take as long to heat up. We've used the griddle to make sandwiches and pancakes and I'm happy with how that works and the easy clean up. I would say the stove top is easy to scratch if you aren't careful when you clean around the burners. Make sure you lift the grates up, off and set aside to clean and not just lift the front of the grates so you can wipe underneath. You'll scratch the little raised lip on the back of the stove top with the burner grates. I'm still not crazy about the overall height of the stove top but that's not really a fault. My husband on the other hand (6'2" tall) LOVES the dual range and all of it's features. He would highly recommend it to everyone. I like it. We also bought the matching over the range microwave. We bought it because you can bake in it and I thought we would really use that feature a lot but have found it takes a really long time to pre-heat the oven feature of the microwave and you have to use this little round raised baking rack which I have very few dishes that will fit, actually none now that I think about it. I thought it would be more like my old toaster/convection oven that sat on my counter top and it's really not at all. For the most part we just use the microwave to re-heat and warm things. I hope this helped...See Morewhat 30" gas range for an ex-pro-style user
Comments (17)From personal experience, I would highly recommend induction cooking, but the reason I'm posting is to say that we have no ability to have a vent to the outside. We have a Zephyr Europa (Genova model) under cabinet hood, and it works brilliantly (for what it is). I had an OTR micro-hood in my previous apartment and it was terrible for a number of reasons - the height of the microwave, the fact that the vent did nothing. The Zephyr on the other hand does in fact completely contain the effluent as long as I remember to turn the fan on to get the air stream going before I start cooking. It has greatly reduced (to almost zero) the number of times I have set off the smoke detector (a regular occurrence in my previous apartment), and the grease on the surrounding cabinets and smells in the room. I'm not suggesting it's as good as venting outside, just that it works fabulously for an under-cabinet recirculating hood....See MoreGE Cafe Induction Range Questions
Comments (248)Donna I had the same issue with the range being higher than the countertop. The countertop is exactly at the proper height of 36" but the lowest you can adjust the range down to is 36-3/16. My bet is this is a carry over from the older GE frame design where the slide in range top slightly overlapped the countertop. The minimum range height was designed so you could not go any lower and put strain on the range top. The best solution I have found is to use the optional GE stainless steel trim kit. I posted a pic of it in this thread back on Aug 5 , 2018. It's getting close to 2 years since I installed mine and still loving it....See MoreAre GE Cafe appliances worth it?
Comments (53)We had a bad experience. Our dishwasher was broken on arrival. It didn't work right out of the box. It smelled like mold. Repairing it was a nightmare. It took over a month. Here are some warnings/things I wish I had known based on our experience: 1. You may not be able to return your dishwasher due to it being defective or non-operational. If your dishwasher is—like ours was—defective right out of the box, the procedure for resolving that issue is for GE to send out technicians to repair it, often using parts that themselves are not new and may require weeks to arrive. You can only return your faulty dishwasher AFTER the technician declares it unserviceable. How many months of hand-washing your dishes will that take? 2. Cafe’s return policy ONLY applies to dishwashers purchased directly on their website. If you buy it through a designer for a discount, you may be (like we were) completely ineligible for a return. If you do buy it from the website, you are given a 7-day return policy (in which you need to pay for return shipping) or 30 days in which you can return it for store credit minus a 25% restocking and pickup fee. And after 30 days, your dishwasher is unreturnable and unreplaceable. In the event your dishwasher is defective, it could take you (as it took us) 2-4 WEEKS to get a technician to even look at your dishwasher. This means that, BY THE TIME A TECHNICIAN ARRIVES TO TELL YOU YOUR DISHWASHER IS DEFECTIVE, IT MAY ALREADY BE TOO LATE TO RETURN IT. Catch-22. 3. Service quality is disappointing. Cafe uses subcontractors to deal with service calls. If your dishwasher breaks down or is defective, this means that you may be dealing with a company that is slow, unreliable in showing up for appointments, and may have technicians who are not knowledgeable. As was the case with our technician (from RR appliance in Miami), they may have NEVER EVEN SEEN a Cafe dishwasher before. And these are technicians who were scheduled through Cafe’s own customer service department. 4. Cafe ONLY stands by its product for 1 year after purchase. After that, your warranty expires. Given that there seems to be quality control issues, if you aspire to have a working dishwasher for, say 6 years, you will probably want to price into your purchase the cost of an extended warranty. At the time of this review, the cost for a 5-year warranty from Assurant (…it starts after your factory warranty expires) is $457.75. 5. And…while we are on the topic of extra costs, it may be helpful to price in the cost to you of a dishwasher that is non-operational because you are waiting for a technician to arrive or for parts to get shipped in. In our case, we had to hand wash dishes for over a month before we were able to successfully run a single load in our brand-new, right-out-of-the-box dishwasher. That is 1/12 OF THE ENTIRE WARRANTEE LIFE of the product that we spent hand washing dishes because Cafe/GE doesn’t have the infrastructure it needs to provide fast, efficient service for its products. On the plus side, it is a beautiful-looking dishwasher. And if you (like we did) got it with the matching fridge, range, and microwave, you are pretty much stuck with it....See Morehvtech42
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