Home Appliance Hassles - Part 1

Malaysia - Chapter of the Cooker Hood

After a troublesome study and wandering around in the jungle of modern cooking appliances, shifting through pages of brochures and lepak not less than 5 major forums, finally settled down with Tellini cooker hood and looking forward for other stuffs.

Some critical decisive factors include:

1. Extraction Rate
Famous brands like Rinnai, Fujioh, Sakura doesn't offer the air extraction rate that's desired within our shrinking tiny budget. They usually only ranged from 700 m3/h to 900 m3/h and effectively useless for asian cooking styles.

2. Cooking Style
Again, famous western brands like Electrolux, Fagor and Teka are, in my opinions, not really suitable for our deep fry style of cooking. Oil will spill everywhere and your wife will starts complaining like no tomorrow when she's cleaning up the mess.

3. Brand
With branded cooker hoods, comes with hefty price tag. Fujioh is one expensive monster but darn effective workhorse. Rinnai is relatively expensive too but not effective when you get one of its midrange hoods. Other brands like Pacific, Futile, Tellini and Fagor are within my consideration.

4. Price
Hoo ha, midrange products prices ranged from RM800 to RM4000 depends on the other considerations I stated above and below. My budget is only RM1.5K to RM2K.

5. Maintenance
Mrs. Nerdy (Haha, I will start to salute her this way) starts her murmuring on some Auto-cleaning techie thingy after she heard some horror stories on never ending cleaning nightmare from her colleagues. Ok, scope creep happened in real life and this is a major scope creep as it will definitely add up to the cost. Commonly, there are 2 types of auto cleaning methods,

a.) Hot Cleaning
b.) Liquid based Cleaning

Hot cleaning will use heats to melt the collected grease and a turbine to direct the oil to the designated container. For liquid based, you will need to pour some cleaner into a storage tank and activate the cleaning function and it will wash the fan/etc and flush out the dirty water into designated container.

One of the most problematic dilemmas when finalizing the purchase was the issue of packaging. Distributors like to bundle their hob and hood together as some best buy deal. I dislike the idea when I start to think of buying the two things separately would require me to spend extra dollar. Darn, and I definitely prefer a best of the class solution, instead of getting something not really I want.

Examples include

1. Rinnai

RH970S Cooker Hood + RG2BSi Hob.

I admired the built and appearance of Rinnai's inner flame hob, which looks solid enough to last decades. But I don't really like the bundled cooker hood range since it is filter based and only got 700 extraction rates. Price tag at about RM2K.

2. Ika, Rubine, PeXXXX (I forgot the name), Ela

Fall below my budget of RM1.5K to RM2K and they comes... again with hob. One thing worrying me is the use of digital display panel. Haha, sometimes I just don't trust technology enough to acquire one of these. LOL

3. Fagor, Futile, Pacific, Tellini, Teka, Electrolux
Within my budget. Relatively popular. Meet most of my functional requirements.

At this point, it is obvious that one of the constraint is that I'm forcefully to get one of the "promotional" bundled package.

So, how's Tellini came into picture? Well, it's all started with the following flyer:



Wooo Hoooo, RM1.3K for a hood with 1500 m3/h suction power and auto cleaning feature. Eager me printed out the flyer and rushed to one of the shops selling this Tellini thingy.

I need to choose between Hot auto-wash or liquid based auto-wash. Both are roughly same price but the one with hot auto wash got 1500m3/h suction power and the other only 1250 m3/h.

Well, confirmed going with HSW-2me Turbo AutoWash model because Mrs. Nerdy believes that liquid based cleaning is cleaner. (No comment about this, :p) Emmm.. Ok, no fancy designer type chimney hood, that's for sure. I'm fine with that and so with Mrs. Nerdy.

Emmm... Not bad. It got the twin fans, 6 speed button control, auto cleaning and designed for asian style cooking.

Again (Yaks), the bundling of hood and hob made me sick. Let buying the hood alone is RM1248 and if you buy both the hoob and hob, it will cost you RM1248..... What the heck, this is like giving away the hob (Worth RM548) for free.

Anyway, the "free" hob doesn't have the auto gas cut off safety feature and the design is less efficient than the higher end peers. To upgrade to higher end, you need to pay extra RM600 for TGB-2ms model.

Fine. If they want to give out their hob for "free", how could I refuse it? :p

(Mrs. Nerdy at the other end already hinted me that she wants a Rinnai burner LOL)

RM1.38K for the Set C package, alum. ducting set and wall cap. RM132 for the ducting set and cap might be a bit expensive but they claimed giving us a thicker ducting exhaust hose. No installation included since I planned to get cheaper labor to do the job instead of paying extra RM300.

However, I can't really tell whether buying this Tellini hood actually worth the money since I wouldn't know until the day Mrs. Nerdy use it (and when she starts complaining). Life's moving on.