Ikea cookers

[BertieBotts]

Sorry for the very boring question!

We are currently moving into an apartment which has a cooker already there, electric, oven and hob. It doesn't work properly and you have to switch it off at the fuse box to stop it from continuously giving out a low level of heat. Obviously, this isn't ideal. We've only actually used it once and found it slow to heat up and I'm not sure that it really got to the proper temperature (I've put an oven thermometer in our amazon basket, but don't have anything to check currently.)

In our current house, we have an ikea oven which was given by a friend when they upgraded theirs. We're taking the ikea oven with us, but will probably store it for now, as it doesn't look like it's compatible with the hobs which are already in place in the new house. But having used that new-house oven once, I'm NOT enthusiastic about the concept of, say, cooking Christmas dinner there. To store it means putting it in a basement cupboard whereas we live on the second floor. DH and I can't carry it between us, it took three people to get it up last time. They're moving it today, so if I want to argue for replacing it/leaving it in the kitchen immediately, then I need to be quick!

I'm looking at prices of ikea hobs with a view to just replacing the entire unit which is there at the moment (apparently fixing it will cost around €400, which is silly, especially when it's - best guess - about 22 years old.) but I can't get my head around how it works buying a separate hob and oven and somehow sticking them together. The oven we have is a built in one, but we've just been using it freestanding. I think that the one in the house already is freestanding, it's certainly a joined unit rather than separate, the controls are all on one panel. The oven we have already works great, so I don't want to replace that.

Would we have to buy a cupboard unit to stick the two ikea things into?

Hi. You've not given a lot of information about what you have. Any chance of a photo of your new house set up - and of the ikea oven? Might help us to make sense of it a bit better?

If you have a built in oven, you'd need to buy a cupboard unit and the worksurface to go on top. A hole would be cut out of the worksurface to hold the hob and the oven would fit in the cupboard bit. I've never seen anyone do this as a freestanding bit of furniture, I'm not sure it would even be possible unless the hob is really narrow because there wouldn't be enough worksurface on either side of the hob to support it properly. Usually a hob would be built into one long bit of worksurface.

If the kitchen currently has a freestanding oven then you'd be best off replacing the whole thing. A picture of the new kitchen would certainly help!

If the current cooker is free-standing job (I think that's what you are describing - a picture would help) then yes you will need to buy a cabinet to slot in the Ikea oven and the new hob will sit in the top of the cabinet. Most oven cabinets/built-in ovens/built in hobs are a standard size fit (although still wise to measure), so you don't necessarily need to buy everything from Ikea.

Have you got someone to install it if you do get rid of the old cooker? Fitting a built in electric oven/hob is a job most capable DIYers can do, but in an old house you might have to do some wiring. And the electrics sound a bit dodgy if the oven is constantly giving out heat unless isolated at the fuse box. I would definitely want someone who knew what they were doing to look at that before messing around with it. Can you arrange that before Christmas?