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Ranges Reviews
Updated December 2007
Consumer Reports gets top billing in our All The Reviews Reviewed chart as having the best, most credible review of ranges. Editors test about 80 gas, electric and dual-fuel ranges over the course of several months by boiling water, simmering sauces, baking cookies and broiling burgers. Each range's self-cleaning feature is tested with a baked-on mixture of eggs, tapioca, lard, cheese, cherry pie and tomato puree. Frankly, no other reviewer comes close to Consumer Reports in terms of thoroughness of testing ranges. Good Housekeeping hasn't tested them at all in over four years. Somewhat helpful is the J.D. Power and Associates Major Home Appliance Study. For this survey, 22,000 respondents rated brand reliability. The survey points to Maytag as the best brand when it comes to freestanding ranges. Consumer Reports also publishes the results of its reliability survey of over 60,000 readers. This survey is a bit more helpful, because ratings are more specific, with separate survey results for gas and electric ranges. Unfortunately, the results between the surveys don't line up very neatly. Reviews say that most ranges, regardless of price, do a pretty good job with the basics, including boiling, simmering, baking and broiling. Larger differences are found in ease of use and ease of cleaning. Convenience features can add flexibility. Many owners are fond of features such as warming drawers, a bridge element and dual elements. Convection ovens, which use a fan to circulate hot air through the oven for better browning, are becoming more common, but they still add $300 or more to the price. You'll also pay more for a stainless steel finish and for models with a commercial look. Reliability differentiates some brands from one another. Obviously,
with an appliance you use every day, downtime can be a huge inconvenience.
Gas and dual-fuel ranges tend to have higher repair rates than electric ranges
overall. In particular, Viking gas ranges are notably trouble-prone, with
owners reporting that about one in three Viking gas ranges requires major
repair within a span of about six years. By comparison, Hotpoint, GE and Frigidaire
gas ranges had an average repair rate of about nine percent (just under one
in ten). Manufacturers are trying to distinguish their ranges with extra convenience features, but according to reviews, some of these new extras are hit or miss. For example, while almost all ovens include self-clean (which heats the oven to a hot enough temperature to incinerate baked-on spills), Whirlpool is including a new type of self-cleaning feature on some of its ranges. The Whirlpool Gold GR773LXSQ (*est. $1,150) electric smoothtop range has a convection oven and Whirlpool's PreciseClean Cleaning System -- a self-cleaning feature that's supposed to heat the oven only as long as it takes to burn off caked-on food. In tests, however, the PreciseClean feature didn't work as well as advertised, and many ovens with a standard self-cleaning cycle actually worked better. In tests, the LG LRE30755 (*est. $1,200) is another electric smoothtop that gets lower scores for self-cleaning. Otherwise, this is a very good range with many useful features, but there is little repair history for the LG brand, which hasn't been making kitchen appliances very long. ... Continued
Our Consensus Report shows how many times products are top-ranked by reviewers included in our
Hotpoint ranges get good scores among budget brands, but they don't have many extra features. Kenmore electric ranges and GE gas ranges both get high ratings and have a historically lower rate of repair than Maytag, KitchenAid, Amana or Viking ranges. Frigidaire sits somewhere in the middle, with especially good scores for mid-range models with mainly basic features, plus one or two extras. Advertisement
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* Pricing information is approximate as of the time this report was written and is based on observed market selling prices and/or list prices. Actual selling prices may differ.
