14 out of 14 people found this review helpful.
Well-designed, nice features, & easy on the wallet
Date of Review: Jun 29, 2008
The Bottom Line: Excellent value for the $. Good features, easy to use & clean. Rated a "Best Buy" by "Consumer Reports".
If you're like me & frequently cook meals for your family & enjoy hosting large dinner parties -- but lack the budget or inclination for buying one of those complicated & expensive gourmet ranges, you'll be happy with your GE HotPoint. Especially if you have a small kitchen.
It's simple to use & easy to clean. The stove has two standard burners for normal cooking, a simmer burner (for sauces & keeping soup warm), & a high-heat burner for pan-searing & other procedures requiring high heat. The flames are easy to adjust from low to medium to high. When purchasing a HotPoint, make sure you get the slightly higher-priced model with the simmer & high-heat burners.
I also like the oven, which maintains a consistent temperature & distributes heat fairly evenly for not being a convection oven. It has two shelves which can fit two cookie sheets or baking pans on each one. The oven can be programmed for those recipes which require you to raise or lower the heat at various points. It also has a beeper which goes off when the desired temperature is reached when pre-heating.
The broiler works great & has enough space for most things. The self-cleaning feature works pretty well, though the cleaning cycle takes about 4 hours & major gunk may require a bit of elbow grease. (Do ANY self-cleaning ovens really get everything clean?) Since my daughter was then a toddler, I also appreciated the fact that the exterior of the unit doesn't get too hot (though it does give off enough heat to make your kitchen cozy in the winter & unpleasantly warm in the summer).
I like the removable cook-top grates, because it makes them easier to clean, but you need to be sure to put them back properly so they don't slip around.
We never had any problems with our GE HotPoint, but if you do, you won't have any problem getting it fixed because it's a popular model & most appliance repair people know how to fix them & have all the parts in stock (we made sure of this before buying ours).
We bought our GE Hotpoint for our previous home & it's the only thing we miss about our old house. We're saving up money to replace the range in our current kitchen with another GE HotPoint.
