March 14, 2011 | Kitchen Appliances Repair, Help & Advice | 6 comments
We got a fantastic email toward the end of last week from one Dave Reeves, DipEE, MIET. Dave’s a customer of ours, coming to his son’s rescue when his fridge wasn’t cooling. I’ll leave you with his thorough, detailed and particularly helpful walk through on repairing the fridge.
March 10, 2011 | Kitchen Appliances Repair, Help & Advice | No comments
Check out this video, friends. You’ll see that even if your cooker loks worn out, it doesn’t mean it has to be destined for the scrapheap. All it can take is a couple of fix-its, and you can have your oven looking like new again.
March 4, 2011 | Kitchen Appliances Repair, Help & Advice | 1 comment
I’ve seen the future, and it’s malleable and amorphous. Electrolux, the Swedish proprietors of all things appliance, run a ‘Design Lab’ every year, with the brief “to specifically seek solutions that address how people prepare food, clean and do dishes both within the home and beyond”.
March 2, 2011 | Kitchen Appliances Repair, Help & Advice | 1 comment
Think that just because your oven isn’t looking so good any more, you need to get rid of it? Trade her in for a newer model? Discard it like a used tissue? Not so, my hasty friends. There’s no reason why you can’t get an eyesore of an oven looking beautiful again. Exhibit A: this video.
Look at that. It’s that easy to replace the door on your oven, thereby restoring it to it’s rightful place as pride of the kitchen. Beautiful.
February 28, 2011 | General Appliance Care | Kitchen Appliances Repair, Help & Advice | No comments
It’s cold. It’s wet. It’s grey. Got that Monday feeling? I have the perfect tonic. It’s a few years old now, but it’s a beaut. Karl Pilkington, of An Idiot Abroad and Ricky Gervais podcast fame, has a voice which seems to ooze Monday morning. In this video the subject of his ire is the fridge repair man. Alas, if only Karl had got on to his computer and done a quick Google search, we might’ve been able to help. It wasn’t to be, but at least we got this video.
February 21, 2011 | General Appliance Care & Advice | Kitchen Appliances Repair, Help & Advice | 2 comments
As you’ve no doubt seen, we make videos so that the people we supply parts to have a helping hand when fitting them. Sometimes the people we supply parts to make the videos themselves. We like it when this happens.
February 21, 2011 | General Appliance Care | Kitchen Appliances Repair, Help & Advice | 2 comments
As you’ve no doubt seen, we make videos so that the people we supply parts to have a helping hand when fitting them. Sometimes the people we supply parts to make the videos themselves. We like it when this happens.
December 7, 2010 | Kitchen Appliances Repair, Help & Advice | No comments
Among the slightly less obvious types of appliance we sell spares and accessories for is the coffee maker. We here at eSpares take our coffee very seriously – and need the highest quality Java to keep us fuelled throughout the day. With these credentials, we can all recommend this product: the pack of 10 Bosch coffee machine cleaning tablets.
Check them out in action…
November 23, 2010 | Kitchen Appliances Repair, Help & Advice | 1 comment
The oven. Along with the hob, the most important and most regularly used appliance in the kitchen. It’s not inconceivable that you use it two or three times every day. Without it, you couldn’t make lasagne; enough said. For this reason, replacing your oven has got to be a measured decision. And the first thing you have to decide? Well that would be whether to go for gas or electric. Both energy sources have pros, both have cons. So which is more suitable for you?
How Good Is It At Actually Cooking?
While we need to remember that ovens are ovens – and that no matter what the source of its heat is, it will cook your food. If it doesn’t, it’s just broken. I think the decisive factor here is the time it takes to preheat. And this is where the electric oven just can’t compete with its gas counterpart. When you turn on the electric oven, the electricity flowing through the element takes minutes to get the oven to a level of heat that you’d consider worthy of roasting a potato. But with gas ovens, the gas is ignited and the flame is immediately hot enough to cook with, and therefore the air in the oven will get hotter quicker.
Which Is More Reliable?
When you’re oven cooking, you want to be confident that the food in the oven will cook at the temperature you’ve set for the time you’ve allotted. No one likes chips that are burnt to a crisp or lasagne that’s brown on the outside but positively tepid under the first couple of layers. Fan assisted ovens evenly distribute heat throughout the oven. You can get fan assisted gas and electric ovens, but the gas versions tend to be a little more expensive.
How Much Are They Gonna Cost Me?
This is where the electric oven comes in to its own. You can pick up a basic electric oven for less than £200, but you’d be extremely hard pushed to find an entry level gas model for less than £300. No contest on this front.
Maintenance
There’s a Gas Safe Register for a reason; you must be registered as an engineer with these guys if you want to carry out any repairs to things like ignition switches or gas jets on your oven. If you don’t have the official accreditation, trying these repairs yourself could end in tragic and lethal circumstances. Don’t try these fix-its yourself. And while electricity must be treated with respect too, it’s ok for you to try and fit a grill element yourself. In fact, we encourage you to – just check out this video. Basically, something going wrong with your electric oven is easier (and cheaper) to fix yourself.
So it looks as though the electric oven may have just edged it; it certainly does if initial cost and potential fix-it problems are your main concerns. What do you think? Any gas users who want to argue their side’s case?
November 2, 2010 | Kitchen Appliances Repair, Help & Advice | No comments
Cooking can generate all kinds of smells – some delicious, some not so delicious. However, one thing is constant. When your delicious beef bourgignon or sausage casserole has been consumed, the last thing you want is its scent to linger.
And that’s where our trusty friend the cooker hood comes in. Now a staple in the majority of kitchens, the units are usually a sleek stainless steel or more rustic shade, depending on what you’re going for. There’s a hob-facing cooker hood lamp in them too – handy, functional, and good lookin’.
A decent hood can extract all kinds of odours and get them out of your kitchen and with multiple speeds and settings they are very often capable of doing this quickly and efficiently. One area where they are particularly useful is in small flats or homes where the kitchen backs on to the living area – after all who wants to sit in front of the TV with the smell of last night’s curry in the air.
However, when the the odours appear to be going nowhere and smells seem to linger even when the hood is cranked up to its highest setting, the time may have come to replace the filter on the unit.
We stock hundreds of cooker hood filters. You can get universal filters, which can be cut to size to fit your hood, and you can get genuine replacements, which are manufactured to specifically fit your model.
It’s always recommended that you get the genuine replacement, if there is one for your model. They’re generally a little more expensive than the universal filters, but the fact that they’re made specifically for your hood means they’ll generally do a better job of filtering the smells and grease effectively.
