AGA Cleaning and Stanley Cooker Cleaning Review

Image by Ivydale via Flickr

This week we have cleaned a Stanley cooker. We don't do many of these, I'm not really sure if it's because not many people have them in the South West or because they don't need cleaning.

The one we cleaned was quite new and had lovely chrome lids and was black. We spent a couple of hours cleaning it and found it a lot easier to clean than an AGA. For instance it didn't have any aluminium strips, or door panels to clean. The inside of the doors on the Stanley Cooker were enamel and cleaned up quickly and easily, unlike the AGA where you need to really scrub them for a while to get them shining like new. The only downside to the clean was that we discovered that the handles on the lids had plastic support brackets, unlike the AGA where they are enamelled cast iron. Also we found a badge on the Stanley that on first look looked like chrome but later on closer inspection we saw that it was in fact just a bit of stuck on plastic. Also the door handles were plastic whereas the doors on the AGA are all cast iron and I also noticed this week that on the Rayburn cooker the handles are a better quality plastic that looks very much like the old plastic that you used to see. Also on the Stanley we noticed some very small springs on the door handles which didn't really look up to the part of an expensive cooker. The central heating panel really looked the business though really high tech with a digital display which gave away the real Stanley advantage: a cooker that looks like an AGA cooker but a cooker that also has the central heating boiler contained with its compact form.

We cleaned the whole of the Stanley cooker including inside the two ovens. We also cleaned the detail on it with a toothbrush and with our special gleaming cloth it came up looking like one in a showroom, a beautiful gleaming Stanley cooker.

So overall I know that the Stanley orginates from Waterford in Ireland but the company is now owned by the AGA group and AGA have built it to compete at a price and in doing so have put on some poor quality bits on what otherwise is a quality cooker.

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