AGA Lout

The AGA is one of those wonderful devices that really cannot be beaten.  Ours is a really ancient item maybe even as old as 1930. Imagine how many normal cookers would have come through the house in that period of time.



Every thing though does have a life span and our old AGA has seen it's best days.



Originally AGAs were solid fuel stoves and pretty efficient ones at that, these days they are often run on oil or gas. Ours was converted to oil a long while back and the conversion is perhaps not one of the best.

They are fantastic things when they are working properly, long time readers will have spotted the crucial words in that sentence. Today has been quite a day...



In truth they do  need servicing every year or so. We just ran ours till the tank was empty and so having invested nearly 1000 pounds in oil there was no point even thinking of just sticking a match in the hole, everything needed to come apart.


That is not quite as easy as it sounds. The main internal bit of an AGA is a dirty great casting called a bell. This weighs about 50 kilos and has to be lifted vertically through about a metre to get it out.



The only way to grip is is via a hole in the middle which is just about big enough to get your hands into.





Having heaved the thing out you can get in and at the burner. This is a pretty simple affair which has to be cleaned.


This might be a good time to mention soot. Heating oil soot is a really special material. It has greater adherance than any known glue and can pass through solid materials where there are no gaps.





This is only really produced in any quantity when something is not working right as in, say, when you run out of oil..   

When an aga burner is working well the paraffin evaporates and burns, over time though a heavier residue builds up in the bottom of the burner and it's supply pipe. This is not a problem as the areas are very hot, the gel stays liquid and the paraffin passes through it.  Stop the heat though and the stuff turns to a solid blob of carbon which requires drilling out.

So much stripping and drilling took place but each time the flow really wasn't right.

Several hours profanity and repeated strip downs I realised that something I thought was metal was actually a big lump of carbon blocking the the pipe.

The inside of the machine also contained a formidable amount of ash some of which went over the top, some on the floor but most attached itself to the nearest warm moving object - me.

Which in turn meant that one those occasions when I went for a break, management could trace my progress footstep by footstep and even identify exactly where it was I decided  to sit.
 
Perhaps it might also  help if I explained how you  set an AGA burner.

The burner itself needs to be level, now,. I am not refering to level as in a wall or kitchen unit. This is a sort of "level" that is beyond the average spirit level in terms of accuracy.

So, you have got that far and you reassemble the burner with 2 very large round wicks and 4 steel burner frames taking extreme care lest any slight nudge or knock push it off true.

Then of course there are the connections to the fuel pipes. Paraffin is a very light fuel and it likes to escape, so all the joints have to be properly secure because paraffin would far rather escape and be a puddle on your kitchen floor than do anything usefull like burn and go up the flue.

I am not saying these joints need to be sealed, but there are airlocks on the space shuttle that are more porous than the connections on our AGA.

So of course I did this all 3 times today.

Then I put the bell back in and the thing would not light, and of course  we were  running out of matches 

 Persuaded it to light and it  started  running backwards, lots of black soot was going into the kitchen.

This did nothing to enhance  the managements serene calm.

Coming on top of the previous events I began to suspect she was getting very slightly annoyed.

So anyway we turned the stove off and I removed the bell again, but of course with the burner having been on the bell was a little bit warm.

Rodded and vaccumed the top flues which produced a seriously impressive extra load of ash which duly went to places other ashes cannot reach.

So at the current state of play AGA is off

Getting the AGAologist in would have cost 80 quid, she is starting to say it would have been cheaper.

R