First of all I am not the on who is spreading scare stories here. and rules every thing to be tossed. Neither do I. But then I don't accept the "do whatever you want, everything's fine" attitude either and I, for one, will take issue with it every time. Second: I said foaming occurs in pressure cooker(when cooking meats ..). But then immediately I added that this should not happen in Canner. So since this post isn't about cooking meats and there is no concerns with foaming it isn't relevant to the issue. Why post it? How does that help? When someone is trying to learn pressure canning and already worried the last thing they need is someone dragging their focus off on an unrelated tangent. Third: I was talking about the principles of weight system and manufacturing tolerances in general. I did not talk about the specifics as how EXACTLY they are machined. It is up to the manufacturer. And there could be variations from one to the next. Vent pipe diameters aren't relevant unless they are plugged...""" is absolutely incorrect. The combination of the hole diameter and the amount of weight determines the amount of pressure held inside the cooker/canner. So if the hole diameter also has a tolerance as well. And any deviation from the nominal can make a difference. Yes that's all well and good info for the mechanical engineer that designs the equipment and oversees its manufacturer. It has no relevance to the person using the canner at home. Milling to tolerances isn't our problem. We aren't going to dig out our calipers and mic the ID and OD of the steam vent and adjust it accordingly. So the info is of no practical use to us and only confuses the issues under discussion. Dave

The Gaggenau are also side swing opening but they do come with a hefty, hefty price tag. We got our Gagg combi steam oven off ebay half off. It was a 270 (previous model to the 400 series available now). It was new in box with a 5-year warranty. It works great and I love that it is plumbed. It's worth considering. Appliances stores will often sell off demo models too with warranty and I have seen items on craigslist. I use both my conventional oven and the combi oven for similar and different things. My conventional oven goes higher (to 500, the Gagg goes to 450) and my conventional oven has a broiler and it is bigger. The Gagg non-steam mode is convection so it also cooks faster/hotter and I'm still getting used to that (I've had it about 2 months). Sometimes I use the Gagg because I need two ovens, sometimes I use the Gagg as a steam oven or to jointly steam and roast. I love the flexibility. I do have a friend with the $300 cuisinart steam oven and she LOVES it, but she isn't doing a remodel right now and it lets her test run the combi steam oven idea. I'm pretty sure when she does update she'll get a combi steam oven. I'm not sure how it would look to have a drop down and side opening door. My initial thought is how well they match in terms of material is probably more important. Good luck.

I agree that it could be dangerous - I suppose an easy test regarding the pressure is to put something smokey like a cigarette next to an outside door or window, and crack them slightly and see which way the smoke goes. Somebody made the excellent point that a gas stove in a well-sealed house could be dangerous and they were wondering why/how the rules are so relaxed compared to furnaces and hw heaters....I would like to put a gas stove in when we remodel our kitchen, and it made me think. We dfinitely want a kitchen exhaust fan that goes outside instead of our useless recirculating one, but realise that exhaust fans, dryers etc can produce undesirable negative pressures too... A whole-house erv would be nice to have, but the ones I've seen for sale are huge and I don't know where I'd fit one....but in books I've seen smaller ones that might fit near my furnace, and I could conceivably put the cold air intake parallel with the intake for the furnace/cold air return (I have a duct that draws cold air from outside which runs directly into the upper part of the cold air returns where they join together.

We have a Breville mini smart oven, and I (and a bunch of young adults) love it. Ours broke after about five months and I had to set up our old one. Wow! A good toaster oven is a game changer -- we'd become spoiled by Breville. As an aside, even though ours broke after only about five months, I called Breville, spoke to a very professional (i.e. saying all the right things) representative, sent it back on Breville's dime and got a new one in a week. Good luck with your decision. Cathy in SWPA