Kitchen Appliances

Cooker Hood and Hob, and Built-in Oven

At the high end you have Miele, Die Ditrich and whatnot, in the medium range Brandt and Bosch  with Electrolux on the borderline, and on the more affordable end Ariston, Indesit and other brands you might find at neighbourhood shops.

I opted for either a Brandt or Bosch, and based on online feedback there were pros and cons to both. Both are also priced very similarly. I did look at Electrolux, which costs slightly less, however the look and feel of the Electrolux products especially the ovens was a little low-quality.

I got a Brandt oven, cooker hood and hob in the end based on a Harvey Norman promotion. Here’s a shout out too to the sales lady Zhen Zhen from HN Centre Point. A guy was initially helping me however the far more knowledgeable Zhen Zhen stepped in to help in the end. A little known fact about HN: You can negotiate on pricing some times. In this case Zhen Zhen, who looks to be from China but speaks English, proactively gave me added discounts on top of the advertised promotional pricing even!

For my cooker hood, I was talked into shelling out extra for the model where instead of push-button controls I have a touch-screen digital panel display. Pretty swish.

Cooker hood with digital control panel

For my cooker hob I chose a glass top 3-burner hob as it looked more modern and sleek than a steel top, and I also thought cleaning the glass surface would be easier. Unfortunately, a couple of weeks into using my new cooker hob and the glass top actually exploded while I was cooking on it! I was not overloading the stove at the time, and yes the flame was on “high” however there was no reason the glass top would not be able to handle the heat, plus the HN sales guy had assured me that a glass top was absolutely safe. 

I put it down to my bad luck that the glass must have had an inherent minute defect causing it to "burst", a one in a million chance. Fagor, the agent for Brandt replaced the stove however without any questions asked, which gives me the uncomfortable feeling that these incidents are not as uncommon as one would think. Not taking any chances I chose a steel cooker hob as a replacement.

Shattered! Good thing no one got hurt although glass fragments were even found in my dining room

Pretty professional looking cooking station!

Given my interest in all things healthy, I opted not to have a microwave oven and now reheat my foods on the stove top. The sales guy interestingly commented that microwave ovens are predominantly supplied by Japanese manufacturers – and yet microwave ovens are not common in Japan.  Go figure.