I had to go lookup what it was, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGA_cooker Apparently it’s a stove/range that is always on.
I thought the whole thing was ridiculous.
a subgenre of the family saga genre of literature ... typically interpreted to refer to "a tale of illicit rumpy-pumpy in the countryside" ... it offers a "gingham-checked world" associated with "thatched English villages" and "ladies in floral dresses".Funny, the doc says 2-3 hours.
with predictable results w.r.t. quality-of-living when your house already has central heating.
Agas used to be a very rural middle-class thing: it was how I imagine most countryside homes' heating and cooking worked, and it scaled from a modestly-sized cosy cottage to being in expansive stately homes. But postwar, and especially since the 1960s, Agas are just a status-symbol appliance to me.
Like, in North America, you know you've made it when you have a Wolf range and a Subzero fridge in your kitchen. In the UK, it's when you've got an Aga.
...probably because the only comfortable way to run the thing is by also having central air-conditioning installed and running full-blast while you use the thing.
The worst one I heard was someone who paid £10k for their top end Aga, found it was costing £700 a month to run and it was scrap in under a year.
Dead technology.
£700pcm to run sounds like something's wrong anyway.
They can be solid fuel, possibly oil too, but in recent decades mainly gas - not sure new solid fuel ones are even made, that would just be people who already have them or buying them second hand.
Coal was the usual source of energy, and coal fires were usually continually burning, being "banked" at night. In this context, the "always on" AGA was not so unusual.
So the AGA stove served not only as a cooker, but also as a source of heat, similar to masonry heaters. Many were also connected to a hot water tank.
The sales manual above states that the cost of running an AGA stove in 1935 was £4 per year, or £247 (~US$330) per year today.
But yes - AGAs are ridiculous Veblen goods, literally coal-fired technology repurposed for modern fuels, with modern fuel costs.
They stopped making the always-on models in 2022. The UK has ludicrously high energy prices because of regulatory capture by the fossil fuel lobby. So Agas remain a status symbol for a decreasingly small segment of minor aristocrats who don't care about running costs. But the bulk of the market used to be the aspirational middle classes, and they've mostly moved on.
For smaller cooking jobs an air fryer cooks faster and better, and costs a tiny fraction to buy and run.
I can't really agree with that. It's true the UK's energy (surely "power"?)-mix is depressingly natural-gas heavy, but I don't believe that's not due to regulatory capture: it's because natural-gas plants are what get approval to be built because 15 years ago no-one in the Lib/Tory-pact wanted to sign-off on new nuclear.
Unfortunately I'm past the edit time window, bah.
Dalén lost his sight in an explosion while developing his earlier invention, a porous substrate for storing gases, Agamassan. Forced to stay at home, Dalén discovered that his wife was exhausted by cooking. Although blind, he set out to develop a new stove that was capable of a range of culinary techniques and easy to use.