ryder72

I never recommend using glass hobs without trims around them. Seen this far too often. Please be careful when you use the hob and avoid taking the ring closest to this chip to very high temperature for long durations as the stresses in the ceramic might cause it to crack. You may get a good few months or more out of it if you are careful but in generally its a new glass top. If its Miele its going to hurt. What is the model number?

Miele in general are too arrogant to care. Their wet products are good. Others are better than average but not by much. Good luck getting a resolution on this. I would advise you to keep your expectations low.

BEtween a cheap frame and the pan you have a potential recipe for a disaster. If you are putting in a frame always go Geberit. They look like very simple products on the face of it but somehow Geberit get it right much more often than others. Its worth the extra money. Any remedial work will cost several times the saving. I am not always going to recommend branded toilets, but I do think for wall hung pans, its again worth going branded to get better dimensional accuracy and smoother junctions where it matters. Ceramic is not cheaper for nothing. Its all made the same way till you find out that the rejection rate on some of the top brands is as high as 30% whereas the lesser brands and unbranded stuff will allow more rubbish to go through. I have visited a factory where they make this and I was astonished at the level of investment and automation.

I agree with you. Nothing about DIY looks like its not a good product.

DIY Kitchens mainly use PWS doors and make their carcasses. I havent seen their carcasses so I cant comment but I expect its fairly standard stuff - 18mm egger board with PVC edging. While I dont rate this spec as particularly high, for the prices they are charging, its not bad value, as a lot of high street retailers will sell the same stuff and charge a lot more. There is a perception out there that Blum drawer boxes are the gold standard. They are perfectly fine, but there are better products out there. English manufacturers use them mainly because of low cost and a very good distribution networks and ready availability. Unfortunately Blum's competitor products are not that readily available in the UK so which very popular on ready built European kitchens, very thin on the ground in the UK. Its largely down to the quirky nature of British kitchen manufacturing vis-a-vis the European manufacturers. Blum however have an excellent range of mechanisms for wall units. Coming back to DIY kitchens, the weakness there in my mind is the doors. PWS have had loads of issues in the past and the end result to the consumer is a complete mixed bag, mostly down to how good the retailer was at resolving the problem. I suppose the best way to look at DIY is this - If you are confident of the measuring up, confident enough to plan and get the kitchen install, DIY offers a very credible offering. Much better quality than what the sheds would sell you. Atleast comparable to what most high street independents selling British made kitchens would offer for very good prices. I still maintain that an entry level product from say Nobilia is a more refined offering, but DIY is very likely to have the price advantage.

@Alphonsox you may be right. I was referring to this from memory and fixated on the ventilation aspect.

There is no clear guidance on this to date. By the letter of the guidance an extractor hood installed for the purpose of ventilation to comply with building regulations is allowable. By that same guidance, a recirculation hood doesnt fulfil this criteria so it shouldnt be allowed, but inevitably it appears that HMRC hasnt latched onto this yet so you may get away with it. If guidance is issued in the future, its very likely going to go only one way.

Even the extractor is on dodgy ground as an increasing number of them are now recirculation mode on account of MVHR systems. I havent heard any guidance from HMRC to the contrary though. Is it worth trying to sneak in a claim for a £300 warming drawer and bring the rest of the claim into unnecessary scrutiny? Appliances are not eligible with the above exceptions. Period.

You cant claim for ovens, hobs, refrigeration, dishwashing. You can claim for a boiling water tap if its the only tap in the kitchen. You can claim for a range cooker like Aga if its the main source of heating in the house too.

I would say 60-80% is not unheard of especially with the chinese/turkish made tiles. More like 50-55% on Italian/Spanish.

Why am I getting the feeling that there is tendency to stand up and rally around MBC where anything said about them is not in the most positive light? I have tried to keep the review as unbiased as I can possibly be and this isnt easy given that ultimately I bear the stress/costs cross. I still look at some of the inexplicable flaws in the finishing and cant get away from it. I still worry that there may be bodges in the building that I havent discovered and these may become an issue in the future. Does that mean that other suppliers are perfect. NO. But I care only the experience I have received and not how much worse it could have been. That serves no purpose. As I see it, the mark of a good company is to build a good product to the agreed spec and quality and the cost of this must be borne by their own internal quality processes. Third party supervision should be minimal. And if this is going to be required then lets just accept that with enough hands on supervision, chances are that the performance gap between most companies will get narrowed down significantly and more importantly the price/value equation shifts. Whether MBC can and will learn anything is their lookout, but the purpose of my review was to highlight to any prospective buyers that not all is well with them. They certainly arent this shining beacon of quality and perfection. Their biggest weaknesses where communication and that didnt improve after an expensive debacle. And all of this points to huge systemic failings that need to be recognised.

Actually thats not strictly correct. Normally this would be absolutely fine but with these ultra thin worktops its the lateral support it requires. For instance our suppliers provide metal bars for unsupported gaps of up to 60cm for laundry appliances. Units wider then 60cm have to be ordered with special metal braces as the front rails on carcases arent adequate. This applies to 12mm or thinner solid worktops also.

Sadly Jeremy the aesthetics of a lot of these recycled plastics is pretty awful, particularly if they are visible. But I do agree and would support the use where its invisible.

Yes these are the treated one I have seen. They have turned to mush in a house across the road build in 2012.

I did some research on these recently. Reclaimed railway sleepers will have been treated with creosote/tar but thats what makes them durable. They can stink on hot days but its not a hug problem apparently. New sleepers wont have creosote or tar but I have seen oak sleepers in my neighbours garden rotting away in less then 7 years. There is no legislation against used of reclaimed sleepers provided they arent used indoors, in childrens play area, food prep areas or for benches.

Check the samples and look at them in person. If they are anything like the recycled decking samples I received I wouldnt touch them with anyones bargepole. Why not use reclaimed railway sleepers. High quality hardwood treated sleepers will cost about half of this stuff and looks the business.

Solid laminate at 10/12mm will be OK but anything with a chipboard core I am not sure can be left unsupported over 60cm Neither of these are cheap (in comparison to 38mm laminate tops) so you may as well ask at your local granite yard. They will very likely have a 3m offcut of something 20mm that they can let you have if you are prepared to provide the template and fit it yourself.

I run a kitchen design and installation business and we deal with a brand of German kitchen who also supply the said worktops through us.

If its the utility room I assume you have freestanding appliances. What sort of support do you anticipate putting between units to support the worktop?

The solid laminate tops arent really meant to be cut on site and the idea is to order them precut from the factory where they are cut and finished on purpose made machine. JOins are butt joins only. IMO good product but only if a factory cut solution works ie islands with hob/sink cutouts are premade. Some of the thinner 17mm worktops we supply are made from laminate faced plywood. Again works best when factory cut.

Both Gutmann and Bora are available through kitchen showrooms in the UK. For starters the specification is often different, especially on hobs where access to 3-phase power in much more prevalent on the continent than it is here. You can buy them online from online retailers but you may run into warranty and service issues if they are required. The UK service set up will be able to identify that the product is not a UK spec/sourced and refuse to touch it on the basis that the sales revenue was not recognised in the UK so the service cost wont be borne by the UK operation. The Abajo is a superb product.

So an update on this much discussed topic- We are in now and the kitchen/hob is working. We have a bespoke Gutmann Abajo with a 2 ring induction/hood/2 ring induction/hood/induction wok configuration. I am very impressed with the performance of the hob. Even stir frying on the wok didnt allow any discernable amount of smoke or odours to escape and what little did was dealt with by the overrun on the hob and the MVHR. Hob is easy to use and powerful. Gutmann use the K-Glass from Schott, not the normal Schott Ceran. This is a completely opaque glass with higher scratch resistance. Extractor is very good and Gutmann's tests reveal a higher air suction speed compared to Bora. I am going to lag the duct pipework with some 25mm rockwool to leave a load under the units to provide further noise dampening and see how that performs but overall I am very impressed. Sadly Gutmann hasnt been as effective as Bora at marketing their product but having worked with them and supplied probably 100 Gutmann hoods over the year I rate them very highly indeed.

Try the garage door company in Wellingborough. Not that local but they travel. Excellent pricing and good service. You can fit it yourself, but if its a new build house, that will mean having to recover the VAT and frankly their installation charges are reasonable. Most importantly, unless you or someone you know has done this yourself (not that difficult), its just simpler to get someone to do it. They survey the site and remain responsible for any issues.

Miele hobs and hoods leave a lot to be desired. For the type of product you are looking at, its best to go with products made by specialist manufacturers such as Gutmann, Bora, Novy etc. The others are made by private label contract copy-cat manufacturers and dont quite come close on quality and performance. My recommendation would be to carry out a realistic assessment of how many cooking rings you are really likely to require and base your purchase on this. Most people only require 4 well spaced out cooking rings and this is where the Bora Classic type solution could be very effective. For instance the Gutmann Abajo 4 zone hob outperforms anything else on the market and will come in around the £3500 mark. I have just seen another product called Novy (very well regarded in Europe but new to UK) who do one around the Bora Classic pricing. It looks MUCH better too.

Was this buildings/contents insurance issued without completion or site insurance with permission to live in the property offering buildings and contents cover? Could you PM me your insurers details?