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How I Went Appliance Shopping

We’re building our dream kitchen but that doesn’t mean we wanted to pay nightmare prices for our new appliances.  I had spent months doing the research on which appliances I wanted, why wouldn’t I do a little work to get the best price?

There are many appliance stores in the Seattle area and I quickly narrowed down to three that would work for me, but let’s go through all of the options (that I know of):

Appliance Stores

Nationwide Sellers:

These are the big brands we’re all used to seeing, they’re the big box stores.  They don’t carry the high end brands but you can still get nice brands here.  Home Depot just started carrying Electrolux and the Kenmore brand is pretty good.

Sears: Believe me, I’m as shocked as you are that they’re still in business.  At one point Sears was the largest appliance retailer in the US, they’re also have their own in house brand Kenmore.  Kenmore is the most popular appliance brand in the US.  It’s also not a real brand, Kenmore appliances are rebranded appliances from other companies, often at a lower price.  The trick to Kenmore is finding out who makes the actual appliance.  In my case, I wasn’t interested in the Kenmore brand.  For other appliances, think of Sears as your baseline.  Sears is the most you’ll ever pay for an appliance.  The local stores understand that Sears is the most popular seller and they’re not stupid, they’ll stay competitive.  Of the national stores, I definitely think Sears has the most knowledgeable sales people but it’s been hit or miss for me.

Best Buy: I didn’t even look at Best Buy, they’re prices are normal, there selection is slim compared to the other stores and I’ve never had a good customer service experience at Best Buy.

Home Depot/Lowes: These guys sell a lot of appliances and are usually running some sort of special like free shipping or some other discount.  I didn’t spend too much time here because the selection is slim and they don’t carry any of the appliances I want.

Local Sellers:

The local sellers run a wider range of brand than the big box stores, don’t be intimidated by the show rooms, while they tend to focus on the higher end brands, they can all order the lower priced brands as well.  Usually at a better price than the big box stores.

Albert Lee: Albert Lee is the largest of the local sellers with five stores.  You’ll get your best price with them during the November warehouse sale, usually the first weekend in November.  Albert Lee carries BlueStar, not Capital.


Almvigs: Located above the Whole Foods at 65th and Roosevelt, the store is small but packed full of good brands.  The staff knows what they’re doing and the owner is usually there too.  Almvigs has lots on display and they’re willing to order from companies they don’t normally do business with.  Almvigs carries Capital.

Basco: Basco isn’t really local, they’re a Portland based seller with a Seattle warehouse.  Their Portland sales floor is gorgeous.  They can sell to Seattle but they don’t do delivery.

Metropolitan Appliances: Metropolitan Appliances is in SODO, they used to be called “Direct Buying Services”, they changed their name to disassociate with the “Direct Buy” scam.  Metropolitan has a lot of good stuff on display, and they’re able to get a lot more.  MA carries Capital.

Seattle Home Appliances: I didn’t spend much time in here, they don’t carry as many of the high end brands and didn’t carry Blue Star or Capital and when I asked, they were pretty indifferent about it.  They described Blue Star as ok, and didn’t understand why people like Capital.  They seemed pretty defensive aobut the gap.

Online:

I looked at a few online websites, but decided I didn’t want to go there.  The pricing is better, but if something goes wrong, you’re pretty much on your own.

How I bought my appliances

I limited myself to Albert Lee, Almvigs, and Metropolitan.  They carried the brands I was interested in (BlueStar and Capital).  I had been to each store a few times and had been working with a saleman at each place.  I gave each salesman my list of appliances and asked them to e-mail me their best prices.
Albert Lee gave me good pricing, but said their best prices come during their warehouse sale and I should wait for that if I can.  The problem with this is that they don’t know what’s going to be on sale during the warehouse sale and I thought i twas unlikely that the specific range I wanted would be on sale (not many people order ranges with a grill).  I wasn’t willing to wait until the beginning of November when my delivery needed to be at the end of November.  Finally, Albert Lee was unwilling to order the Modern Aire hood that I wanted.  I didn’t want to have to buy the hood separately, I wanted a single point of contact for dealing with problems.
Almvigs was definitely the most pleasant experience, when I asked them about the right time to buy the salesman said “I have to give my best price every day”, and then followed up with it.  Almvigs pricing was the best of the three, by quite a bit.  They were even willing to store my appliances until I was ready for them (three months later).
Metropolitan Appliances is where I spent most of my time looking at the options because they had so much Capital equipment on display.  They were also willing to order the hood but their pricing was the worst of the three.  They were off by several thousand dollars from the other two.  I was really surprised at how bad the pricing was, but since I had been working with the rep for a few month, I decided to give him another chance.  I let him know that he wasn’t competitive in his pricing and the response was less than optimal.  Metropolitan wanted me to give them the other companies bid so that they would beat it by 10%.  They wanted to make sure it was a real apples to apples comparison.  When I asked for clarification, he said he wanted to make sure that I wasn’t getting a floor model or open box.  I thought that was insulting, as if I didn’t know what I was buying, but it doesn’t matter, business is business.  I responded that I wanted him to give me his best price and that I didn’t want to give him the other bid.  Why should I do their work for them?  Best case, I get a bid that’s better than 10% off, worst case, I get the already very good bid from Almvigs.  MA responded with a competitive bid but it was still $500 more than Almvigs.

How much did I save?

I think I did pretty well, the chart below compares what I paid to the list price as well as what I could have paid if I had bought online.  The online prices are the lowest price for each item on Google Shopping from a 5 star seller.  The chart below is the percentage difference of what I paid from list, online, and online after I factor tax into the local sale.  When the percentage is negative, I paid less, when it’s positive, I paid more.  In the end, I saved nearly 14% off of list price overall and paid 5% less than online.  Of course, the third column assumes you don’t pay the “use tax” after buying online.  If you’re not worried about the use tax, then I would have saved 4% buying online.  Items are listed in terms of most expensive to least expensive, and while I realize anyone could reverse engineer my actual prices off of this chart, I’d rather not publish that.  The 4.18% difference is well less than $1,000, I think that’s a worthwhile fee to pay for shopping locally and having a local company responsible for everything going right.

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This sucks! Kitchen Ventilation

My new range is a 36″ beast with four high power burners and an indoor grill.  To get the most out of this range without setting off the smoke alarms required careful planning around how I’m going to vent.  Making this harder is that I’m putting the range on an island.  This means I lose the advantage of having a back wall to keep the smoke from drifting too far.

On top of this, I really don’t like range hoods, I’m not sure anybody does.  They’re very noisy, they tend not to work (how many times have you triggered your smoke alarm when cooking?), and they block the view and interrupt the openness of my new kitchen/dining area.

This leads to a collection of design goals that feel like they’re at odds with each other:

  1. Quiet
  2. Powerful
  3. Effective
  4. Aesthetic
Quiet
To get quietness, I moved the blower to the outside of the house.  Now, I won’t have to deal with the sound of the motor inside the house.  Unfortunately, the motor only accounts for some of the noise.  The air movement is also a noise generator.  I have a couple of options there.  I can move less air, which contradicts goals three and four, or I can quiet the air movement.  
The Abakka external blower
Plan  B sounds better, to quiet the sound of the air movement, I’m doing to things: Using a big duct and adding a silencer.  My new hood will have a 10″ round duct, a standard home range usually has a 6″ duct.  I’m going from 25 square inches of space to 78 square inches, a 2.7x increase in space.  I’m also adding a Fantech silencer.  The silencer is a muffler that also further reduces the sound the air makes as it travels.
Ignore everything but the “LD Silencer”

Powerful:
This one is easy, because I moved the blower to the outside of the house, I can install the most powerful one I can find.  In this case, that’s a 1400 CFM (cubic feet per minute) blower.  This blower has the power to clear all of the air from my house every 18.3 minutes.  To put this in perspective, the standard microwave hood is closer to 200 CFM.  The downside to a 1400 CFM motor is that building code requires me to add Make-Up Air (MUA) to my kitchen.  MUA is a mechanism for replacing the air that is removed from the kitchen by the vent.  I’ll write about this in detail once I’ve finalized on a solution.

Effective:
All of that air sucking wouldn’t do me any good if it didn’t actually capture the effluent coming off of the stove.  To make that easier, I’m over-sizing my capture area.  Think of the capture area as the overhang of the hood.  If smoke gets into the capture area, then the blower can suck it out of the house.  My range is 36″ wide by 24″ deep.  My range hood is 42″ wide by 30″ deep, an extra 3″ on each side.  This, combined with the powerful blower should provide an effective air removal system.

To further enhance the effectiveness, I want a hood that uses baffles instead of a mesh filter.  The filter is responsible for keeping the grease from clogging up the ventilation duct.  The two types of common filters are baffles and a mesh.  Mesh filters are usually made out of steel or aluminum and work by forcing the effluent to go through small holes in the mesh, the grease gets trapped in the metal.  Baffles work by forcing the air to turn and bend around the metal, when the air bends it accelerates and the grease spins off.  Both types of filters are cleaned in the dishwasher, but over time the mesh filters lose their effectiveness because they can’t be cleaned as thoroughly (certainly not as easily).

Aesthetic:
In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have a hood at all.  I think they’re generally ugly and putting one on my island means I am interrupting the openness of my living space.  I can’t get away from the fact that I’m going to have a large hood, it will have a 10″ wide duct and will be 42″ wide at it’s widest point.  Instead, I went with a hood that tries to be as simple and smooth lined as possible.
In the end, I chose the Modernaire PSI-16
The PSI-16 is custom built when ordered in California by Modernaire.  It meets all of my requirements and has a small horizontal profile so hopefully it won’t be too overbearing.  It also has some other features I really like.  The lights and the blower are on infinite knobs so you can very their settings precisely.  With a 1400 CFM blower, I want a lot of control so I only suck as much as I have to.
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My new range: Capital Culinarian 36″ with Grill

We ordered the new appliances for our kitchen last weekend.  I’ll make a general post on how I bought the appliances, and I’ll also put up another post describing my other appliances but I thought the range deserved its own post.

 

In a previous post, I talked about why I chose a gas range over an induction range.  Gas ranges come with two different type of burners: open burners and sealed burners.
Image of a sealed burner.
Sealed burners are designed to prevent spills from entering the internals of the oven.  Fans claim they’re easier to clean but they have three attributes I don’t like.
  1. Flame Pattern
  2. Power
  3. Cleaning
Flame Pattern: Because the burners are sealed, the flame doesn’t shoot straight up but instead comes out of the sides of the burner.  This creates a heat “donut” on the pan, rather than the more even heat of an open burner.
The fine folks at Eurostoves made a video demonstrating the difference in heat pattern between the open burner Capital Culinarian and sealed burner ranges:

 

Power: For reasons I don’t understand, open burner ranges are available with more power than a closed burner.  We do a lot of searing in our house and I wanted a burner that would get really hot.  I also hate waiting for water to boil.  Further, I’ve never heard anyone complain that their range was too powerful.
Cleaning: In my previous house, I had a sealed burner range, whenever anything spilled over, it meant scrubbing and scrubbing to get the junk off and I always struggled getting the very edge where the burner sits on the range clean.  With an open burner, spillover will fall into a catch tray which can be covered with aluminum foil.  Cleaning that seems easier but I’ll put up an update when I actually have the range and have to clean it.
Given my desire for an open burner, I had three companies to choose from: Blue Star, Capital, and American Range.
I quickly dismissed the American Range, when I saw it in person I found it clunky and I wasn’t happy with the build quality.  I also didn’t like how poor the information on their website was, there were typos and inconsistencies between what the website said and what the vendors said.  The American Range Performer (American Range’s open burner range) is also relatively new and hasn’t been on the market too long so it was hard to find actual reviews of it.
The competition came down to Blue Star versus Capital and I hate to say it, but I don’t have a good reason for choosing one over the other.  They’re extremely competitive ranges with marginal differences between them.  The Blue Star has two high power 22,000 BTU burners, a simmer burner and a 15,000 BTU standard burner.  The Capital has four 23,000 BTU burners and claims that they can all simmer.  Reviews online make me believe the Blue Star wins when it comes to simmering but that’s not a very common use case and I’m convinced I can get a good simmer on the Capital as well.  Both ranges offered a grill and both have infrared broilers.
The infrared broiler is a feature I’m really excited to try.  The infrared broiler produces 1800° F heat.  A traditional broiler is closer to 550°-600° F.  I want an 1800° F broiler to be able to cook steaks the way Ruth’s Chris does.  Ruth’s Chris has custom designed broilers that cook both sides at 1800° at the same time.  Mine at home won’t be quite the same, but I’m hoping to get close.
This decision took months, In the end, I chose the Capital Culinarian for a couple of reasons: I liked the fit and finish more and I also liked the flexibility of having all four burners be the same.
Here’s a stock photo of my new range.  I’m looking forward to having a grill inside the house!  Grilling indoors adds a lot of complication, you need to plan your ventilation solution around the extra smoke that grilling will produce.  I won’t be able to do super messy grilling like you would with an outdoor grill because the cleanup will be more work, no sugary marinades or very greasy meats.  What I will be able to do is easily mix grilled foods with other foods when cooking.  I think the first meal will be steaks cooked with the infrared broiler, grilled asparagus, and sauteed mushrooms.
If you’re curious about how I’m venting this range, see my ventilation post.
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I love my heat pump.

When my wife and I first moved into this house, we wanted to add an air conditioner.  Seattle is full of people who tell you that “you don’t need an air conditioner”.  They’re in deep denial.  The beauty of air conditioning in Seattle is that the cost of running an air conditioner is proportional to how hard it has to work.  Since Seattle has generally very mild weather, it doesn’t cost much to run the air conditioner but on the other hand, it means my house is a happy 68 degrees* all year round.

Instead of adding an air conditioner, what we really did was install a heat pump.   Simply put, a heat pump uses a little bit of energy to move heat from one location to another.  In the summer, we use it to move heat from the inside of the house to the outside, in the winter, we move heat from the outside to the inside.  If you want to know more about how they work, How Stuff Works has a very detailed explanation.

In addition to being able to cool in the summer, the heat pump has some other great properties:  It’s inexpensive to run, it produces a nice mild heat in the winter as opposed to “bursting” high heat the way a furnace does, and, it’s “greener” than a conventional gas furnace.

Because they heat in the winter by pulling heat from the outside, they stop being efficient once the temperature outside gets too cold, you still need to pair it with a supplemental heat source.  In my house we use the existing gas furnace, if you didn’t already have a gas furnace, you can add electric heat elements to the heat pump.  The downside to the electric heat elements, is that you lose the efficiency when they turn on.

In my house the gas heat is set to turn on around 35 degrees.  The good news is, that doesn’t happen all that often around here:

weather.com

As you can see, the average low in this city never drops below 37.  It’s only on the occasional cold nights that my furnace turns on.  In the summer, we’re never really cooling all that much, relative to the outside temp so it runs pretty efficiently too.  On the really hot days, we love having it!

A lot of people ask how much it costs to run, this is really hard to say since it isn’t separated on my electric bill.  My entire electric bill for my house is around $80-$120 per month depending on whether or not I’m on winter rates, summer rates, and what time of the year it is (Fall and Spring are best for me).  Of course, this covers a whole lot more than jut the heat pump, computers, lights, etc… on roughly 3200 sq. ft. of home.

So, we love our heat pump, the AC is great in the summer, we love how it heats in the winter, but is it worth the cost?  It depends…  In our case, we had a perfectly working furnace and while I believe AC is important, it’s definitely not necessary.  Further, the heat pump isn’t so efficient that it’ll pay for itself over it’s lifetime when compared to keeping my gas furnace.  However, if you’re already set on buying an air conditioner, buying a heat pump instead is only about $1,000 more and you will make up that cost over it’s lifetime.  Definitely, if I were doing new construction, I would install a heat pump over any other source.

In addition to whole house heat pumps, there’s another type on the market: Ductless Heat Pumps.  Ductless heat pumps have been around for over 40 years are very popular in Europe and Asia.  These things are very efficient and work on a room by room basis.  Seattle is tripping over itself to give people money to install them (http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/light/Conserve/dhp/).

* A note on the house temp.  I like the house cold, my wife doesn’t.  For some reason this is the only argument I’ve ever been able to win.  It also means that she wears a hoodie in August when we’re in our basement.