Summer Appliance Revolt

First we had to replace our fridge (with pretty much the same fridge, just newer) back in May.  That fridge has been keeping everything frozen in the freezer, and cold in the fridge, so that is good and expected, lol.  But the ice maker has been like an ice maker on steroids!  It furiously pumped out ice in these very sturdy lines of 8.  They never broke into individual pieces when they dumped in--I would have to take one line out and whack it on the side of the counter to get the cubes to break apart because they were so thickly attached together.  But hey, we had ice, right??  I was happy!

But then the excess of huge lines of ice actually broke the ice holder under the ice maker!  Well, we had kept our old drawers and shelves, so we had the container from our old fridge, which fit just fine.  So we switched them out and didn't think much more of it.  But then the ice maker really slowed down.  Eventually, it wasn't making ice any more, but it had clearly been releasing tons of water into our ice holder, because there were big frozen slabs of ice (I know--redundant, lol) on the bottom of it.  Alright, with no more ice forthcoming, it was clearly time to figure out how to call the repairman.  We just bought this crazy thing!

The repairman came on Tuesday, after 2 weeks of making ice in a single (broken) ice cube tray we dug out of the back of the cabinet that I used to freeze homemade baby food in.  To say I was glad to see the man would be a huge understatement.  I am not European--I love my ice cold water!  I told the guy about our icemaker on steroids, and he promptly replaced the icemaker.  Five minutes later, he was gone!  And I am happy to report that we are back in the ice business, hopefully for many more years this time . . .

In July our cook top decided to join in the rebellion.  When we moved into this house, there was a horrid JennAir cooktop (with big electric eyes, and a huge fan in the middle) that was original to the house.  By 2008, only 2 burners worked, so things were becoming desperate.  Sometime in the summer of 2008 we got a new flat cooktop, and I was soooo happy.  We had trouble once summer of 2012 while Siri and her family were staying with us.  The burners were coming on and not going back off again.  Bob was able to fix whatever was wrong, and we didn't have any more issues.

Until July 12.  I had spent a (hot, humid, but very fun) afternoon at Mt. Vernon with 2 of my high school friends.  I rushed home so I could take the kids to their swim meet, while Caleb heated some left-over spaghetti sauce and made some more noodles.  When I got home and walked past the cooktop, I could feel heat emanating from it, even though it was off, so I jiggled the knob to see if maybe it really hadn't turned all the way or something.  Well!  The burner started glowing bright red, and it was throwing sparks!  Ack!!  Caleb ran over to watch it while I ran downstairs to flip the circuit breaker.  Amazingly I was able to find the right switch right away, because the previous owners labelled the circuits fairly well.  Whew!

When Bob got home, he took off the knob, and we could see gray ash down under it.  He saw something that was lose, so he tightened it, and we threw the switch again, but it just started sparking again.  So--clearly a new cooktop was in order.

We spent a long time looking on the Lowes and Home Depot websites, comparing burners of all sizes.  Obviously we need big burners for our huge pots, but we were constrained by our counter cut-out.  Eventually we found one we could live with, and we ordered it--but it wasn't delivered until the end of July.  So we had to make do with my electric skillet and a really weenie plug-in electric burner we have for some reason (times like this, I suppose, but I don't remember ever buying it, lol).

Eventually the cooktop arrived.  Yay!  We got it out of the box--and discovered that there was an extra lip on the bottom that made it not fit in our counter cut-out, even though it was the same size on top.  Whoops!  We hadn't even looked at "counter cut-out size"!  Grrrrr . . . .

We talked about cutting the counter, but that seemed risky.  Then Bob did more reading and found out that this cooktop actually needed a 40 amp circuit instead of the 30 amp one we had.  Sigh.  Obviously this was not the cooktop for us, so we sent it back.

We went back to the websites.  We spent much time examining cut-out sizes as well as burner configurations.  This time we were even less excited because we already knew that we couldn't get ideal big burners in our size, and now with our electric constraints.  Our old cooktop had one big burner, one slightly smaller but still big, and 2 small ones.  We eventually settled on one that has 1 big burner and 3 small burners that are too close together to use for big pots.  The 2 burners on the left can work together, which would be great if I had any oblong pots.

Really the only saving grace for this cooktop is that it doesn't have knobs.  Normally I don't like more computer controls, but I am glad to not have bulky knobs taking up so much of the space.  But for some reason, not having knobs makes for a lot of wasted space, such that it is very hard to fit more than one big pot on at one time.  So that will be tricky to deal with, long-term. And the buttons will probably break easily . . . just like all other appliances seem to do now.

When we went to install this one, our counter hole was almost too big.  It turns out the "counter inset size" measurement on the website was off by 1/4 inch.  There is only a little bit of the cooktop that is on the edge all around, which is not ideal.  So honestly, who knows what to believe when ordering these things.

I am very ready to get a commercial kitchen!  At least the kitchenaid dishwasher is still going strong after several years.  If that had given up the ghost this summer as well, I think we would have been eating cereal and sandwiches permanently-- and on paper bowls and plates too!