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

I'm not sure I followed the explanation you received from the GE rep. Or maybe the rep was giving you an engineer's explanation of "Pulse Width Modulation." PWM is a way of using power in bursts to effect energy transfer equivalent to turning a traditional electric or gas burner up or down. It is kind of like averaging. You cycle the power on and off slowly to simulate lower energy transfer. Cycle it faster and with longer pulses, you get more energy transfer and the effect of turning up the power or gas on a traditional hob. That's how most microwaves work, btw. What we're talking about is how much energy gets transmitted into the cooking vessel. The PWM is just a way of governing the amount of energy being applied to the pan. The net effect is the same as turning power or gas up and down. Maybe somebody else can better explain the theory of the what the rep suggested? On your question about cookware to buy, let me suggest try a new post with links to the cooking and cookware forums here where you can get more direct responses. Also, rather than have me give a cookware 101 lecture (pontificate?), I suggest you try a site like Serious Eats which already has a pretty good discussion of "essential cookware." (Click on the highlght to go to the article.) I think Cook's Illustrated also may have one if you have access to their site. My responses to your specific cookware questions are: 1. I certainly would and do mix pan from different brands and lines. Most folks here would advise you to do so. Nothing necessarily wrong with buying sets, of course, but you may do better by picking and choosing. 2. I have only two Demeyere pans, both labeled as "Demeyere 7 TripleInduc.." Bought them on clearance from the Zwilling website you noted above for the plancha. One of my pans is a ten-inch frying pan. The other is the 21"x13" big brother of the plancha/teppanyaki/griddle you linked above. 3. I have both a roasting pan and a dutch oven. Frankly, if I had neither one, I'd look at the recommendations on Cook's Illustrated and Serious eats for decent dutch ovens and then I would also get a good , sturdy half sheet pan (it is a baking sheet with a short raised rim around the outside.) I'd use the baking sheet to impersonate a roasting pan by plonking in a cooling rack and setting the food on that. Also, if you get that plancha/griddle/teppanyaki, it can do a bang-up job as a shallow roasting pan, too. These days, I use my big roasting pan mainly for very big and juicy birds. YMMV. 4. Re "straight-sided" versus slope-side skillets, there is no "must" for induction. Get the slope-sided pan that you think you will like using better.

Just an FYI for those buying induction for the first time: you may need new cookware. I’ve only ever had induction once and everything took FOREVER to cook/boil when we first started using it. It was so frustrating I did a bunch of research and learned that induction only works well if your cookware has a perfectly flat bottom so the full pan bottom is in contact with the burner. Went to bed bath and beyond and started taking pans out of all the boxes and placing them on the floor to see if they fully made contact. It was surprising how few did! Finally bought the flattest bottomed pans I could find. Problem solved after that. Note this was in 2009-2010 so maybe newer models have resolved this issue. But I have no interested in trying again - gas for me all the way. Hated cleaning it (thought it would so easy but mine wasn’t) and even though I figured out the pan issue I always felt it wasn’t as good as gas.

Hello all, No I did not end up with the GE Cafe fridge. If you all have read reviews, NO refrigerators have good reviews as far as reliability. I ended up with the Samsung 4-door, French Door, Food Showcase (which is the door-in-door feature). I had time to watch prices since we were in renovation and the Samsung was $1,100 cheaper than the GE Cafe for the same amount of space and I got a couple extra features like the water bottle that is in the left door and refills itself automatically. I thought that was a dumb feature, but now that I have it, I see I use it a lot! It's much faster to pour the water from the pitcher if you are filling up a larger bottle or pitcher, than to wait for the little water filler on the outside of the door. And it was my hubby who wanted that 4th door---which is the drawer right above the freezer. I wasn't sure but I love, love, love that! It holds all our cheese, yogurts a few cans of pop or water, and if I have a half a lemon or something like that, which would normally get lost in the fruit or veggie bin, I just pop it right there in the front so it is not forgotten about! The only complaint I have is that the ice maker takes up room in the top left side of the fridge. You don't have this with the GE. But we got the big 28.7 cu. ft. one and we keep a lot of food and have had no issues with space. As far as reliability, since ALL brands seem to have bad reviews, I figured the best thing I could do is get the most extended warranty possible. So I got the Citi Visa which adds 2 years to any warranty (yes---that's a feature of the card!) as long as the total warranty period is not longer than 7 years. Bought it at Home Depot along with the 5 year extended warranty which was around $295 I think, and then Citi will extend the warranty out two more years to SEVEN years! If a fridge is going to be problematic, I figure it will do it in the first seven years. And they will repair but will replace if they have to come out more than 3 times. So I figure I saved about $1300 including taxes by choosing the Samsung over the GE Cafe. As far as my GE Cafe range and microwave, yes I have loved them both so far! Had the range about 6 months and the microwave about 4 months. I got them both in stainless. Someone asked how far it sticks out from the cabinets. I can see about 3/4" of the black side of the oven sticking out beyond the cabinets and then of course the entire oven door sticks out beyond that. I don't mind the handles sticking out beyond that. It seems normal to me. I love having the double oven and the convection feature, although for 95% of the things we do, we can use the upper oven. There is planty of space fo almost everything including a cake or a deep casserole dish. I use a lot of cast iron so that is good, but I had some old Revere Ware stainless that I thought I could use. They are all good except the ones that have copper bottoms and they won't work on this stove. The microwave is a microwave! Haven't used the convection feature on it yet. Anyway, I would recommend both appliances although they are a bit pricey. They do look great in the kitchen!