[Stoves] News: Pico-hydro for electric cooking (Financial Times)

[Andrew Heggie]

On 19 April 2017 at 06:18, Nikhil Desai <ndesai at alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> Our grandparents had an Aga stove - very practically designed to heat the
> room, heat the stove and heat the water... sometimes the stove didn't heat
> well, so to make custard would take an hour... but somehow, the home baked
> bread - soda bread was always delicious.

I guess there is a lesson here for stoves in that the AGA is a high
mass range that doesn't do anything very well.

I do have recent experience of an oil fired AGA, which is a bit of a
status  symbol in middle class kitchens in UK, The oil flame is via a
wick which needs very clean kerosene as it clogs up and requires
frequent maintenance, the power is low but it runs constantly. Just
above the flame is a very heavy cast Iron hob which has fins at the
bottom, it takes hours to heat up and there is an insulated hinged lid
above it to retain the heat when not in use.

As it also heats water the water circuit steals heat from the hob and the oven.

I can understand a high mass device being necessary in house heating
where  fueling is intermittent but see no sense in it where the fuel
is flowable, like gas or oil.

The oil fired AGA makes the kitchen too hot when cooking in spring
summer and autumn and lacks power to heat the rest of the house in
winter.

Andrew