AGA feels warmth over ‘low value claims’ – however I’d by no means give mine up

Why spend just a few hundred kilos on a normal oven when for greater than £12,000 you may spend money on a stable lump of half-tonne cast-iron cooker – with an AGA badge connected.

For the uninitiated, this heat-storage-range cooker appears a wierd selection.

Traditionally, the largest attraction has been that, not like different cookers, it at all times stays on. So when not cooking a Sunday roast it simply sits there like a large radiator heating the kitchen and warming the bones of the home.

As a style accent, logic flies out of the window with an AGA – together with ideas of the vitality payments that soar on its arrival. 

It is not only the fantastic iconic curves with, sometimes, three individually heated ovens – excellent for Mary Berry baking varieties – however the chrome sizzling plate tops.

Even property brokers resembling Savills go weak on the knees – believing the kerb attraction of this vary may be considered as an funding by including greater than its value of buy to a property worth – being considered as an aspirational center class trophy ‘on the coronary heart of the house’.

Yet unsurprisingly, AGA has struggled throughout the price of dwelling squeeze as gas costs have risen. Sales have been falling – and it reported a drop in turnover of £10million to £144million in 2022.

This is why it has just lately turned to a brand new technology of all-electric cookers the place you may management the oven and hobs individually with simply the press of a button to maintain the working prices down.

This led to AGA getting in sizzling water earlier this week with the Advertising Standards Authority for boasting it has the ‘lowest working value’ when in comparison with different electrical heat-storage cast-iron ranges in the marketplace.

AGA was advised to withdraw the advert on its web site for its ‘eR7’ and criticised for the best way it in contrast its personal £12,695 cooker with rivals, such because the £12,200 Everhot 110i, for being selective with the info used to make comparisons.

The Aga eR7 stored in ‘slumber’ mode used 0.347 kWh per hour – simply over £16 of electrical energy every week. This is when the cooker is hibernating on a fundamental low setting that required the press of a button to get it again as much as full warmth.

The Everhot 110i, in distinction, used 0.531 kWh per hour – so may cost a little about £25 every week to maintain it ticking over.

Yet when each cookers have been full on, the eR7 sizzling plate used 0.6 kWh (17p an hour) whereas the Everhot 110 used 0.22 kWh (6p).

If AGA stored the oven and hotplates turned on full blast for seven days it would drain 252kWh of electrical energy. Using the usual unit fee capped cost by the vitality watchdog Ofgem of 28.62p per kWh this provides as much as greater than £70 every week – or £300 a month.

This is much more than the full common family vitality value – at £168 a month, in response to information collector NimbleFins. Even the best house vitality customers (high 25 per cent) solely burn by means of a mean of about £233 a month.

However, writing as a proud AGA proprietor myself, I’m all too conscious of the cache – and pitfalls – of proudly owning one. It’s removed from being a cost-saving cooker. You are paying by means of the nostril for a luxurious model, the final word kitchen standing image for nation and metropolis folks alike.

The days when AGA ovens have been powered by wooden, coal or oil are long-gone and its total vary is now made up of electrical fashions, with traditional three-oven AGAs sometimes costing from £12,000. Most of the cookers have individually managed ovens and stoves.

My three-oven ‘Dual Control’ burns 142.8 kWh of electrical energy every week and is designed to be stored on – although the new plates are operated individually (these use 0.78kWh an hour of electrical energy with each plates on).

Leave the oven on 24 hours a day and we have added greater than £40 every week to our complete vitality invoice.

Yet the AGA additionally warms the home by heating the kitchen as a large radiator plus we handle with out central heating if ready to huddle round it.

It might deliver us collectively as a household however this good-looking beast gives awful worth for cash.

That’s why for a 3rd of the 12 months the AGA is switched off and our customary 2.5 kWh electrical oven is used as a substitute, which solely makes use of up about 70p per hour when on.

A spokesman for AGA says: ‘The want to cut back shoppers’ vitality prices prompted AGA greater than ten years in the past to develop new all-electric fashions that addressed vitality points. 

Today, for many shoppers it makes little sense to have a cooker that’s on on a regular basis. 

With the AGA eR7, for instance, every oven and hotplate may be managed independently, which means they’re on while you want them and off when you do not, for instance in a single day, while you’re out at work or while you’re on vacation. 

Hotplates warmth up in eight to 10 minutes and ovens in 40 to 60 minutes. This ensures you are by no means utilizing vitality unnecessarily.’

The Advertising Standards Authority says: ‘The Everhot was extra environment friendly in vitality use for the most popular oven perform. Because of that, we didn’t contemplate that the info demonstrated the AGA eR7 had the bottom working prices of any cast-iron heat-storage vary cooker.’

My AGA is constructed like a tank and going nowhere – so ought to final a lifetime and past. I exploit this to assist justify the eye-popping weekly £40 invoice for maintaining it on, as I lean in opposition to the ‘heather’ (posh pink color) brute with a glass of purple wine that has been gently warmed on the facet of the range.

Working on a purchase order worth of £12,000, over 50 years this provides as much as just a bit greater than £200 a 12 months. 

Gosh. I could not even purchase a normal cooker for that sort of cash. 

And if I flip it off in the summertime – a trick which means it should then not value a bean to run for a big a part of the 12 months – I persuade myself the AGA is value each penny.