I'll trade ya. You can have my electric smoothtop and I'll gladly take your gas range off your hands! LOL

Seriously (well, I was serious above as well...) I hope you can change up to a range you'll love.

Linda

Gina, you sure make me glad I'm not a clean freak, LOL.

Elery has a gas stove with a glass top. It's the d*mnedest thing to keep clean, I just hate it.

So, you're in California. Just grill outside!

I'm glad to see you again, BTW...

Annie

Gina, hope you are enjoying that new home, even if the gas cooking isn't working out.
I'm redoing my kitchen and after years of thinking I wanted a high powered gas stove, I've decided to go induction. The glass surface doesn't even heat up...snap!... and it's clean!!

Nancy

I've reached the same conclusion. I always preferred gas, until I didn't have that option in the last house and we bought an electric smoothtop. Clean up was a breeze. Granted the gas stove in this house is older and nowhere near being a "gourmet" brands, but I thought "Hey, it's gas! How bad can it be." Verdict: I'd take my smoothtop back in a heartbeat! It was not only easier to clean, but more responsive.

Gina, good to "see" you! Except for the range, I hope you're enjoying the new house.

I've got one of those Gas-on-Glass ranges. It is daunting to keep clean...smears on the glass plus the residue from the gas. I'm a slow, methodical type of cook but DH (who's doing 99% of the cooking now) is a "Toss & Hope It Hits The Pan" type of cook. I've had to just resign myself that he's not going to spend the 30 minutes I did every day keeping it spotless. :(

Don't *think* I'm ready to give up gas yet though...also, gas is so inexpensive. Our propane bill is under $12/quarter. (The range is dual fuel...electric oven.)

If it's driving you nuts, Gina, replace it! Life's too short to spend your time at an aggravating task.

/tricia

Thanks, Gina :)

I love electric ranges, have cooked on one for over 38 years, and currently have a black glass smooth top range that was here when we bought the house. I have seriously considered taking a sledge hammer to the thing! Every fleck, every tiny smear, every bit of dropped anything shows. I can't tell where the burners are until they heat up, so half the time the pot isn't centered properly to start out with. GAAAAHHHH!
As soon as I can finagle it I'm going to get a range. A real electric stove with burners on top that have those stainless steel pans underneath to catch spills, and an oven.
Don't ask about the two wall ovens that came with the house.

I have a glass top but would prefer gas. I grew up with gas and it responds better for me. Cleaning is easy with glass but not horrible with gas. Grandma's new gas stove that replaced the one she bought 50 years ago looks pretty nice. I like the electric "pilot lights". It still lights with a match if the power goes out. Most people around here lose power at some time in the winter for a few hours so that is a regionally sensitive feature... the stove still cooks and functions as a heat source.

Much as I'd like gas I'm not going to get rid of the glass top my x-gf wanted. Propane runs me $2400 this year because I use it to heat with... that needs fixing first.

Off to fry some pork chops because I'm to lazy to start the charcoal grill.

: )
lyra

For the last thirty years we have had two electric Jenn-Air cooktops, the first a standard coil top with drip pans that were a PITA to keep clean and the second a glass top. The glass top was easy to keep clean except for the edge between the glass and the metal frame around it. That cooktop had removable modules so that you could have four burners or two burners and a grill. It had halogen burners so it heated quickly but like the coil cooktop it cooled down slowly so making heat adjustments was not instant.

This weekend we replaced it with a GE smooth surface induction cooktop. It has no glass frame and so is even easier to clean, the controls are printed on the top so no crevices to clean there either, and you can use a pan that is slightly over the edge if you need too. I bought a single induction hotplate three years ago to see if I really wanted to make the change. It was always the first burner I used (I had it plugged in right next to the JennAir). It was so much faster to heat the pan up, instantly responsive to raising or lowering the temperature, and the surface around the pan doesn't heat up so extra heat isn't going into the kitchen and you don't have to wait for it to cool before you wipe up a spill (you can't ignite a paper or a cloth towel with an induction burner). I knew very quickly that I wanted to replace the JennAir with induction. I did have to give away most of my pots and pans but they have found good homes and over the time that I had the single burner I bought several induction compatible pots and skillets (well more than several if you count the three pan pressure cooker set that works on all kinds of heat sources). If I hadn't had the medical problems that I did last year we would have replaced the JennAir much earlier.

This cooktop came with strong cautions to use only smooth cooktop cream cleaners, which I am not fond of - they do the job but then you have to buff the residue away. It specifically admonished against Windex which was my go to cleaner for the JennAir smoothtop. However, this cooktop cleans quickly and easily with a damp portion of a microfiber cloth and then a quick wipe with the dry part.

Several companies now make free standing induction top ranges if that is what you need. If you explore induction, I would suggest that you not consider the combination cooktops where half the burners are regular electric and half are induction. It sounds good in theory but in practice you are far more likely to use only the induction burners and grumble when you need a third or fourth burner.

Bottom line, if you are unhappy with what you have, change it!

Lee

I love a gas range. I would be very sad to give it up. My mother has electric burners and she is used to them but I prefer the heat to be on when it's on or off when it's off, not getting warm or cooling off. I also like that I can micromanage the heat by adjusting the flame.

My black range is a PITA to keep clean, though. It's not hard to clean it, but it needs to be cleaned constantly. I wish I had gotten stainless steel rather than black.

Hey Gina! If that grill is on a gas line I can see why you are loving it. I think AnnT had one at one of her former homes. Changing out those tanks and keeping a full one in reserve can be a challenge.

I've cooked on electric most of my life so I'm cool with it. My place has the Jenn-Air cook top that Lee mentioned. I'd like to get a grill insert and see how it works but haven't done that yet. Cleaning it is a breeze for sure. In a perfect world I'd have both but would still want an electric oven.

Hope Odo is getting use to that big deck. Does he have a new playmate yet? Love to see the view y'all have.

Good to hear from ya!!

David

OK, so that's the issue with Elery's. It's got a black glass top but gas burners. The darned thing looks dirty all the time. One splash, one sprinkle of salt that doesn't make it into the pan, one finger print and it needs to be cleaned.

I'll be sure I don't get black when we get appliances for the new place, that's for sure.

Amanda did just replace her stove too, she had to because the old one quit working, LOL. She got a Whirlpool, gas range, five burners. With a black glass top, I'm betting she's gonna hate THAT, she's kind of a clean freak too...

I told her that sometimes life just wasn't fair, she has a better stove than I do!

Annie

Annie, my range has gas burners on top of white glass & it's still difficult to keep clean. Gas is a dirty fuel. It leaves that gummy residue on the glass. When it's clean though the white sure is pretty, at least IMO.

/t

OK, so it's time to start looking at stainless steel...

Actually, I'm not a clean freak, but I can't imagine black appliances in my kitchen anyway. I like white and windows and light wood, very much color at all makes me uneasy and I don't like dark at all.

So, stainless, that might be my answer.

Annie

I have 2 glass cooktop electric ranges and I love them! Wouldn't change them for anything! Also love my gas grill but I use them different ways.

Which reminds me of a little bit of a b!tchy story...that would me being b!tchy.

I have a GF who has the best of everything. She is down to earth and not at all snooty but she can afford the best and she buys the best.

When I was redoing the cottage she tried everything in her power to get to buy me a "fancy dancy" gas range for a ton of bucks. She said I was a good cook I deserved the best (gotta love her for that! LOL)

I told her that I didn't believe for a minute that a fancy dancy range was going to make my food that much better it ...and I don't. Now do they look great...you betcha!

chase,

I'm inclined to agree with you. My Mom cooked for us on a cast iron, coal-fired stove & she was a wonderful cook & baker. The only hot water we had in that Ely, Nevada house was the tub that hung off the side of the stove.

OTOH, I am a much better cook than I was with my El Cheapo electric coil stove that was in this house before we redid the kitchen. I hated that thing. Either not hot enough or burnt. Would a fancy Wolf make me a better cook? I really don't know. If it was so nice to use that I cooked more frequently then it, probably, would improve my skills.

Again, OTOH, my DSIL has that fancy Wolf & she doesn't cook anything but their personal chef enjoys the range. So, the Wolf hasn't made her a better cook.

I think one can be a good cook no matter the range but it's easier learning on a better appliance. Just like any tools...better quality equals easier (if not better) results.

/tricia

Since I frequently use a wok, I would be very unhappy with an electric range, and especially an induction range. When we grill, we use charcoal - not gas, and we had charcoal roasted chicken this evening. It's that time of year when we have plenty of time to cook outside. BTW, I am nothing of a clean freak and am less concerned with how a range looks than how it performs. I just didn't inherit the obsessive cleaning genes, although I do clean regularly - just not obsessively.

Lars

Lars, my dear, you could charcoal me a chicken any old time and I'd clean up!

I agree, a fancy stove or oven won't make you a better cook. Larry Engelhardt once told me that it's one of the things he really liked about me, I could make the same things with a cheap stove and a wooden spoon that other people made using thousands of dollars worth of equipment. (grin) It wasn't as easy, though, to beat that Italian bread dough with a wooden spoon as it is with that big KitchenAid that Nancy gifted me with!

It can be done, but there are some things that just aren't worth the effort, so I make things that I wouldn't otherwise make but I don't think I'm any better a cook than I was when I was just divorced and completely broke and didn't have any equipment at all to speak of.

Annie

My DW wanted the electric glass top stove....so we had it for about a dozen years. When my dad and sister moved in together the gas stove became available. I grabbed it. Love the gas stove.....electric is okay....obviously I lived with it for more than a decade....but it is so much easier to deal with lower temps with the gas stove IMHO. Clean-up is a bit more problematic....but not that bad....just different.

Duane