Well, reviewed.com's NXR review certainly was shallow. As are most of their stove reviews. Kind of like the product reviews we used to get on the inflight magazines or from Fine Cooking, back when they did stove reviews.

That said, reviewed.com's NXR appraisal struck me as pretty much in line with the experience of most NXR buyers. However, I do have a point of order,: there really haven't been "many sad stories" about the NXR here. It's just that when an NXR story is sad, it is very sad. The warranty support can be abysmal, as imp.capensis says. This has been a problem for most small market-share stove makers. (That is not said in defense of Duro, btw; I'm only pointing out that the reality that buying a small-manufacturer "pro-style" product carries risks). Imp.capensis's perception of "many' points to a fundamental perceptual problem for every small stove maker: "any" is "too many."

As for other sites "that make an effort to evaluate kitchen appliances in a systematic way," I'm not sure that there are any for stoves other than Consumer Reports. CR has dumbed down their presentations to the point of triviality, so it is getting harder to get detailed information and comparisons. Beyond that, CR's annual membership surveys yield about the only source of hard information on product reliability trends.

For refrigerators, oddly enough, the reviewed.com sub-site of www.refrigeratorinfo.com has been a model of what I think is well-developed, systematic testing with very informative presentations . I think CR would do well to emulate their presentations (except, of course, for the intrusive, near consant pop-up ads that circumvent some browser's pop-up blockers.) . Unfortunately, refrigeratorinfo.com actually tests a very few models, so its coverage is very limited..

Beyond that, and apart from here and chowhound, I dunno. What I find so valuable about the discussions here and at chowhound is that they may (not always, but often) produce the kind of nuanced, extended conversations that, for me, were ultimately more useful than a one-off magazine style review.

This post was edited by JWVideo on Thu, Apr 17, 14 at 1:38