I had to go lookup what it was, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGA_cooker Apparently it’s a stove/range that is always on.

▲ Wistar 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

In the early 90s a friend bought a five or six chamber Aga. He had lived in a house in Europe that had had one and he loved it. It cost a fortune to acquire and to install as the house had to be structurally reinforced to accommodate the weight of the oven. I remember that it took at least a couple of days to come up to a stable temperature across the whole oven. Each of the cooking chambers had a different temperature.

I thought the whole thing was ridiculous.

▲ defrost 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

It would have been more ridiculous had his wife left him for one of the burly men fitting the unit in place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aga_saga

   a subgenre of the family saga genre of literature ... typically interpreted to refer to "a tale of illicit rumpy-pumpy in the countryside" ... it offers a "gingham-checked world" associated with "thatched English villages" and "ladies in floral dresses".

▲ nojs 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> I remember that it took at least a couple of days to come up to a stable temperature

Funny, the doc says 2-3 hours.

▲

styren 4 days ago | parent [-]

That would be with coke, the modern AGAs are electric and definitely took more than a day before they were at temperature

	▲	Wistar 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		My friend’s Aga was natural gas. I remember him saying it cost very little to run (early 1990s). I doubt that is still true today.

▲ mhh__ 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Still a class signifier amongst a certain type of Brit (particularly if it's been disposed of as a climate sacrifice)

▲ DaiPlusPlus 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> ...that is always on

with predictable results w.r.t. quality-of-living when your house already has central heating.

Agas used to be a very rural middle-class thing: it was how I imagine most countryside homes' heating and cooking worked, and it scaled from a modestly-sized cosy cottage to being in expansive stately homes. But postwar, and especially since the 1960s, Agas are just a status-symbol appliance to me.

Like, in North America, you know you've made it when you have a Wolf range and a Subzero fridge in your kitchen. In the UK, it's when you've got an Aga.

...probably because the only comfortable way to run the thing is by also having central air-conditioning installed and running full-blast while you use the thing.

▲

crinkly 4 days ago | parent [-]

Semi-related, but they aren’t the status symbol they used to be. I know a guy who did quite well out of removing Agas for a few years because they are so expensive to run. Apparently up to 20x the cost of more sensible equipment. They were sold for scrap metal value because people weren’t buying them any more. He charged them to remove it and got paid scrap value.

The worst one I heard was someone who paid £10k for their top end Aga, found it was costing £700 a month to run and it was scrap in under a year.

Dead technology.

▲

TheOtherHobbes 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

They'd be better off installing a small data centre.

But yes - AGAs are ridiculous Veblen goods, literally coal-fired technology repurposed for modern fuels, with modern fuel costs.

They stopped making the always-on models in 2022. The UK has ludicrously high energy prices because of regulatory capture by the fossil fuel lobby. So Agas remain a status symbol for a decreasingly small segment of minor aristocrats who don't care about running costs. But the bulk of the market used to be the aspirational middle classes, and they've mostly moved on.

For smaller cooking jobs an air fryer cooks faster and better, and costs a tiny fraction to buy and run.

▲

DaiPlusPlus 4 days ago | parent [-]

> The UK has ludicrously high energy prices because of regulatory capture by the fossil fuel lobby.

I can't really agree with that. It's true the UK's energy (surely "power"?)-mix is depressingly natural-gas heavy, but I don't believe that's not due to regulatory capture: it's because natural-gas plants are what get approval to be built because 15 years ago no-one in the Lib/Tory-pact wanted to sign-off on new nuclear.

	▲	DaiPlusPlus 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		*typo, should read "...but I don't believe that's due to regulatory capture". Unfortunately I'm past the edit time window, bah.

▲

OJFord 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Being less attainable makes it less of a status symbol?

£700pcm to run sounds like something's wrong anyway.

▲

cycomanic 4 days ago | parent [-]

You're right. Wikipedia says 425kWh per week which in the UK would cost 26 pounds for gas. That's the two oven model, maybe he had a bigger unit which let's say used double, which comes to about 200 pounds per month still far away from 70o euros, but also pretty expensive to just run your oven.

▲

justincormack 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Most country houses don’t have gas so use oil or electric ones, mostly oil I think.

	▲	OJFord 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		The electric ones are just regular ovens in the traditional aesthetic, not on all the time. They can be solid fuel, possibly oil too, but in recent decades mainly gas - not sure new solid fuel ones are even made, that would just be people who already have them or buying them second hand.

▲

pcrh 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Up until the late 20th century, British homes were very poorly served for heating during their long damp winters. No insulation, no central heating, etc.

Coal was the usual source of energy, and coal fires were usually continually burning, being "banked" at night. In this context, the "always on" AGA was not so unusual.

So the AGA stove served not only as a cooker, but also as a source of heat, similar to masonry heaters. Many were also connected to a hot water tank.

The sales manual above states that the cost of running an AGA stove in 1935 was £4 per year, or £247 (~US$330) per year today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonry_heater

▲ elygre 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And the inventor was blind! From the same article:

Dalén lost his sight in an explosion while developing his earlier invention, a porous substrate for storing gases, Agamassan. Forced to stay at home, Dalén discovered that his wife was exhausted by cooking. Although blind, he set out to develop a new stove that was capable of a range of culinary techniques and easy to use.

▲ stevenwoo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I would love to know how the blind guy who invented it did his day to day work of tinkering. The Wikipedia entry just says he made it but it seems like a big deal to do that when he did.