(Cross-posted in other Miele Steam Oven threads) We bought a Miele DGC 6800 XL Combination Steam Oven (non-plumbed) and a few months later on a whim descaled the unit. Right after the descaling process, my Miele steam oven gives me a 'Fault 20' whenever I try to do steam cooking. The regular convection cooking works fine. Expected more from Miele. I wish I had bought something else! It's out of warranty even though we probably used it about 20 times. Now Miele is asking for $150 for a technician to come out and pay an additional $90/hr for labor + $ for parts!

Considering the excellent performance and longevity of the Gaggenau appliances that I have owned, it should be a no brainer to continue to buy them. However, since I last purchased a Gaggenau appliance in 1989, the company has been acquired by BSH Home Appliance Corporation, which also manufactures Bosch & Thermador appliances, so there is no guarantee that a current model will perform the same as my old Gaggenau appliances. Since I have had such a bad experience with Thermador appliances and after reading so many negative reviews on the web concerning the failure of many different oven brands, I am convinced that appliances are not being manufactured with the same level of quality as in the past. Thus, regardless of cost, it is doubtful that any oven purchased today will have as long a service life as an oven made years ago. Miele has an edge for continuity, as it is still a small family-owned company. I purchased a Gaggenau convection wall oven, low profile ventilation hood, two burner ceran hob and a four burner gas cooktop in 1989. After 26 years, the hood still works great as does my ceran cooktop, which I moved to my basement kitchen three years ago when I replaced it and my Gaggenau four burner gas cooktop with a Thermador five burner gas cooktop. When we had to replace our kitchen counters three years ago, I decided to also replace my Gaggenau cooktop because the grates were not made very sturdy back then, so they would move if you tried to slide a pot from one burner to another. A royal pain when you are cooking several items for a dinner party! I was unable to consider another Gaggenau cooktop because the BTU output of the burners had increased in the ensuing years and the configuration of the burners put the strongest burner too near my existing wood cabinets to meet code. The Thermador gas cooktop met my city's code because the highest BTU burner was at the center of the cooktop, so it was directly under the hood and not near any of my cabinets. Although my Gaggenau gas cooktop was then 23 years old, it worked perfectly and the stainless steel top and grates, despite heavy use, were in mint condition, so I was able to donate it to Habitat for Humanity. In contrast, my three year old Thermador stainless steel cooktop is very difficult to keep clean, especially between the star burners. The quality of the stainless steel and the grates seems to be of a lower quality than my previous Gaggenau had, so anything splashed or spilled on it adheres to the surface and bakes on. It takes a lot of elbow grease to clean the stainless steel surface or the grates, regardless of what type of cleaning product is employed. Thus, my three year old Thermador cooktop looks older than the 23 year old Gaggenau that it replaced! Another push toward buying a Miele oven. As far as my Gaggenau convection wall oven, which finally died on Christmas Eve after 26 years of flawless performance, the only service call that it ever required was two years ago to replace the bulb that illuminated the temperature display. (It is impossible to access without service help.) My Gaggenau oven outperformed and outlasted a GE convection wall oven that quit after 7 years and a Thermador convection wall oven that I have had for only 6 years. My Thermador oven, which began reporting fault codes almost immediately after installation that prompted numerous service calls, now requires an estimated $1000.00 worth of repairs with no guarantee that those repairs will correct the problem. In fact, the service technicians, after consultation with Thermador's tech support, advised me to purchase a new oven! Apparently, Thermador ovens have issues with their door hinges, so although the oven door appears to be closed, it is not closed sufficiently to prevent heat from adversely affecting its various smart boards. Currently, the repair people and Thermador's tech support advise that I can replace the EOC board in my oven, replace the hinges, and replace the gasket around the door that has been singed because of exposure to the heat from the door not closing properly, but they cannot guarantee that doing so will prevent the oven from tripping fault codes! Per Thermador's instructions, each time that my oven trips a fault code and shuts off, I have to go down the basement to shut off the circuit breaker, wait five minutes and then turn the circuit breaker back on and hope that the process has cleared the fault code. Try having your cakes turn out properly with an oven that works like that! A vote for my old Gaggenau in the longevity department, but a minus because they are now made by the same company as Thermador. Another edge toward the Miele. A further complication that I have encountered in trying to replace my two broken ovens is that most companies have discontinued their 27" replacement models, so I must reconfigure my kitchen to accommodate the installation of two 30" ovens. Thus, aside from the fact that I am a gourmet cook who needs reliable and accurate ovens, replacing my ovens is going to require a sizeable expense for the ovens and the construction that will be necessary to accommodate them. Thus, I appreciate hearing about your experiences with either Gaggenau, Miele or Blue Star convection ovens. I have not considered a Wolf or Viking because they were rated lower in baking quality by a leading consumer magazine and there are a ton of negative consumer comments about them on the web. My kitchen cannot accommodate a free standing or slide in range with ovens. Thank you for whatever help you can provide toward helping me to make a wise oven choice. This post was edited by perovskia6 on Tue, Jan 20, 15 at 12:29

CBinCT: "I can tell you that an oversize pan does damage the element because I had my Le Creuset going and was boiling water on the other element when the element popped. The first thing the repair person asked was "were you using and oversize pot?". The requirement to stay within 1/2 inch of the element size is in the manual." On our first induction cooktop, one element popped when we were frying with a pan that was exactly the diameter of the element. When the repair person came, the first thing he said was that the element had gone out because I did not have water in the frying pan; he had misinterpreted the set-up instructions that directed the installer to test whether the unit was working by heating a pot of water on it to mean that an induction unit needs water in the pot to work at all. You should not put much too much store in what a repair person has to say. As for manuals: the instruction manual for our LG induction cooktop emphasizes that pots used on it must be perfectly flat and has an illustration of how to use a ruler laid on the bottom of an inverted pot to test for flatness. Of course, induction cooktops work very well with ordinary pots that have non-flat bottoms, as most of our pots do, and they have worked well on induction -- including this LG -- for the dozen years that we have been cooking with induction. The LG manual is plain flat-out wrong; the text was probably lifted from some other manual for a thermal glass-top cooktop, where intimate surface-to-surface contact is important for heat conduction. "The largest element on the 30" is 8" so that limits me to a nine inch pan. I had just bought an All Clad set with 10" pans. I use them and sometimes get error codes where I have to flip the breaker to reset the cooktop." I am not sure what you mean by "flip the breaker." No properly functioning cooktop of any brand, hard-wired to adequate capacity house circuits, should ever cause a circuit breaker to trip. If your cooktop is tripping the breaker, either your house's wiring is at fault or the cooktop is defective. Breaker tripping is not normal behavior for a UL-certified wired-in appliance. "Error codes are a common occurance when I have several pans going." Again, if you have several pans going, the circuitry may limit the current that it allows to go to individual burners, so you would not get all the power at one or more burners that you would get if only one or two burners were running, but no cooktop that I am aware of throws an error code in such circumstances; this is a further hint that you may have a defective unit. If yours is still under warranty, you may want to initiate a claim before the warranty expires. (FYI, the largest burner on the LG induction cooktop is 10.5" in diameter, should you decide to replace the Electrolux with another cooktop.) "When I deglaze I slide the pan around which is something else I was told you should not do on a cermaic top. Ceramic is easy to clean but you should not slide pans around on a ceramic top." Schott Ceran is very hard, and does not scratch easily, but hard rough surfaces such as cast iron are capable pf scratching it. The easy solution, if you want to slide the pan, is to put a layer of parchment paper or a silicone baking pan liner between the pot and the cooktop; neither parchment paper nor silicone is hard enough to scratch Ceran.

Hi ollie, I'd reported on that but in my other thread. The short answer is the tech came out, diagnosed it and it looks repairable. It may cost around $1000. Parts needed to be ordered. It may be repairable, but since I'm vertically challenged I'm also still considering getting a side opening oven. The long answer is: The tech came last Thursday and found that the convection element had failed shorted. (They usually fail open.) The bad element was removed, but he had to order the replacement which may take a week to arrive. On my request, he did some testing and the fan and other heating elements in the upper oven cycle on briefly and then off for a while. He thinks the convection element took out the power control board that is behind the oven when it went. We won't know for sure until he pulls the oven out when he comes back. With the bad element out, the bottom oven runs. It did something strange when I used it Friday. It had been used by my DH earlier and worked fine. I turned it on to preheat for baking a loaf of sourdough. Came back later and put the sour dough in. Came back in 20 minutes to see how the loaf was doing and found that the oven said preheating and was up to about 325 (when set for 475 and on for close to an hour). I hadn't looked at the control panel when I put the bread in so I don't know if it was up to temp then. I ran the bottom oven twice over the weekend at 475 for an hour monitoring it with a temperature probe all the time to see if the problem repeated. It worked fine both times - the problem didn't repeat. I checked the diagnostic mode and no fault had been recorded so I've no idea what when on. So it is probably repairable and we are likely to repair it but I've also decided that I'd like to switch to a side opening oven at some point. Since the Bosch side opening model is so new but so much less expensive than the Gagg, we may repair the Miele and then wait a few years to see reports on the Bosch.