Short version: buying a 'prosumer' gas oven these days is a gamble. Can we please start a new forum category and report on our pros and cons of our gas ovens? (Ditto electric, separate category).
TL;DR:
I bought a new all gas oven, a Fulgor Milano, 36". My old FiveStar was not sparking anymore. I had replaced the spark generator once but after awhile the spark plugs began to wear out and they were obsolete parts and I tried and tried but could not fabricate them so that they would work properly. I live in an old house and did not want to invest in the cost of running a 240 volt line into the kitchen, so I stayed with gas. Doing due diligence on the web did not come up with bad reviews so I bought it.
I have to say that the six burners are beautiful: easily adjustable for their entire wide range, unbelieveably hot but able to control a precise simmer, as well. However the standard bake setting is hell. Uneven from side-to-side and crazy up and down excursions of temperature during the bake.
I am looking now for a replacement and really closely scouring the web for reviews of all sorts. Of course trouble spurs people to post while normally operating equipment is not such a spur...but negative reviews seem to be universal for every range on the market, be it Monogram, Viking, Thermador, Wolf (my neighbor hates his), Signature, LG, Zline, KitchenAid. I do not want to spend $10,000 on a range but I want a reliable oven for baking.
I would love it if the moderators would create divisions on the forum where we could discuss our ovens, gas and electric separately. And limit it to ovens that are more recent, since models change in quality so commonly. (Not so helpful raving about my 15 year old FiveStar) We have a division for niche ovens like earth and brick, and it is very interesting but most of us use appliances and we will have to replace them some day. In looking through the www there is no one place that can be a good forum for oven appliances but The Fresh Loaf is perfect: in one respect we are our ovens. Oven spoken here.
How about it?
Start one - there is such a place. Enjoy!
On the surface, it would seem like the right thing to do. But practically, it would be wading through hundreds of mixers, proofing shelves, etc. to find a mention of an oven. And then there is a directed search; what term do we use? Oven? Range? Stove? No, that is a time intensive, nonspecific undertaking and would not improve things the way things are now. Somewhere there should be a grassroots clearing house for oven qualities.
It's called the Baking Equipment forum.
...and I cannot make a forum subsection; only a mod can do that. And the chances are good that the mods will not do it unless the idea of an oven focused baker review thread catches on.
Yes, it can be challenging to search for specific answers, but there isn't a team of programmers like might be found at Google to create a better search experience. You may not realize that there is only one moderator who may not have time to make the modifications you desire.
I can usually find what I'm looking for in past posts. You can also search the site from Google and that often yields quicker answers. I believe if you pose a specific question you can get an answer if someone has the information.
Most of the traffic here on the site are questions about software (aka recipes) and not hardware, except for maybe mixers. Ovens are purchased so infrequently (often measured in decades) that there would probably be limited info. My oven is 25+ years old, so any info I might have would be irrelevant.
It would not be worth the time to prove this but I suspect that taking time to do the searches would yield posts from bakers with ovens of age like yours unless we tried to provide a room for searchers and purchasers of late model ovens. . It is a catch-22: people would need to participate in order for the subforum to become useful and vice versa.
No, I didn't know about having only one mod; thank you for that.
I sent up a trial balloon and so far there is no support for the idea. Therefore we are stuck with the likes of Wirecutter and Consumer Reports, both of which are useless. We need that grassroots "goinformaboutgasovensme" self-sustaining service but you are right, people reading this thread could care less about supporting a gas oven knowledge base - until they tried to do online research prior to purchasing one - which might only happen a few times in their lives.
Might not my place to say it, eventhough I believe it's wiser to let the 'old guards' do the talk, I have a thing or two to say
It's a non-profit public space with the size of visible active members a lot smaller than once it was. If you have a question, just asked in a thread, knowledgeable members will answer, or reach out to Floyd and see whether you have something to contribute, instead of just demanding this and that, even worse, complaining.
You can put certain syntax in google search to search something deeper. put inurl:"thefreshloaf" after your keywords. Easy as that.
Or start a new site specializing in ovens :D
Jay