Day of Appliances

Today we tackled two suggested appliance stores.

University Electric in Santa Clara
To be helped by a salesperson, you have to sign in. Otherwise, they'll let you browse at your own leisure. The salesperson who helped us stayed with us for almost 2 hours since we had so many questions to ask. We looked at everything: cooktops, wall ovens, refrigerators, warming drawers, ranges, dishwashers, and washer/dryers. They had someone cooking in one of the display rooms so you can grab a snack while going through all their rooms. Cool thing is they don't work on commission in this store so they're not in a hurry to sell to you.

Standards of Excellence in San Jose
Very organized and spacious showroom. They also have a cooking area where they hold monthly cooking events so you can learn more about certain brands. You can also bring in your pots and pans to try cooking with induction. Since we had exhausted the previous salesperson at University Electric, we didn't have as many questions to as the salesperson here. Still, he was very informative.

From almost 4 hours of checking out appliances, here's what we've decided:

Cooktop versus range: Cooktops tend to be more powerful than ranges so we're definitely going with a separate cooktop and wall oven. The advantage of ranges is that they're less expensive than buying separate, and some ranges come with a warming drawer. With a separate wall oven, people tend to place them at a higher elevation than the ones in the range such that you don't have to bend down to check out the oven. Since we're still young, we don't have that issue but later on it's something we'll have to take into more serious consideration.

Induction: It's really cool to watch water boil in 2 minutes. It's 90+% efficient versus gas which is only about 50% efficient (lots of wasted heat). But you can only use stainless steel or cast iron pots and pans. You can test this at home with a magnet. If the magnet sticks to the bottom of your pan, you can use it for induction cooking. The two main pans we use for stir fry didn't cut it. Even though we have some other lesser used pans that will work, I think we're still going with gas.
Nice pros and cons of induction

Wall oven: Since we don't do much cooking in the oven, we don't need to go with top-of-the-line here. :)

Warming drawer: Great idea if you entertain frequently or have a need to keep cooked food warm (e.g., spouse comes home late for dinner often). We hope to do more entertaining in the future so we're definitely getting one of these puppies. Don't know any details though.

Refrigerator: Definitely a bottom freezer. And most likely French doors for the refrigerator part. Not sure of the brand - we'll have to look at our Consumer Reports for energy efficiency and usable space stats.

Dishwasher: Fisher & Paykel has a cool dishwasher with double drawers. The two drawers combined is the same size as a regular dishwasher. This way you can use one drawer if there aren't that many dirty dishes. Only downside is that you can't put chopsticks in, like most dishwashers. KitchenAid actually has a utensil rack where you can place chopsticks that we're also considering. On the green side of things, Miele is mainly made of metal so they're the most recyclable dishwasher on top of its energy efficiency.

Washer & Dryer: We'll probably go with a front-loading washer because they're more earth-friendly - uses less water. Purchasing the extra stands so we don't have to break our backs bending over to load and unload laundry.

Color: The main colors available for appliances are black, white, and stainless steel. Viking does offer other colors for their appliances. Neither of like white and the problem with black is that a black refrigerator is very oppressive in a regular kitchen. Black refrigerators are probably ok in gigantic kitchens. So to be safe, we're going with stainless steel. I was worried that stainless steel would become a dated color for kitchens but then I read on the web that professional kitchens are stainless steel - it'll never be out of style because it was never in style. yay! :)