When my wife and I picked out our appliances for our remodel it was one of the funnest parts of our remodel.  My wife is a culinary whiz in the kitchen and for years we dreamed of owning commercial style appliances that could heat food up to 16,000 BTUs of convection bake a souffle with true consistency rack by rack.

On top of  the  sticker shock we were also weary about the warranty of many of these appliances being only limited to a year.  We own appliances by Viking, Miele, Thermador, and GE Monogram for a reason.  It’s good to know that the manufacturers we picked stand behind their products for the quality you expect and pay for.  Here’s a story of one such incident…

We decided to purchase the Thermador built in microwave and convection oven combo for its convenience, great styling and of course cooking performance.  We were really excited about the convection oven’s features to be able to roast, broil, bake and convection bake to perfection.  We had talked to many other homeowners and remodelers and for the price value and longevity of longstanding quality we went with Thermador over many other brands.  Everything was fine and dandy until one day we had a power outage and when the power came back, it looked like our Thermador oven’s control panel was on the fritz.  We were lucky and within our one year warranty period and they came out and repaired the unit replacing the circuit board.  The factory service technician finished up everthing in a jiffy but the problem was they didn’t test all the functions of the board.  We don’t bake that often and the self clean function and a whole row of buttons didn’t seem to function.  Of course we didn’t notice this well until just after a year later.

When I called up Thermador customer support, I pretty much got the shoe after the support representative looked up our registration information, even after explaining that their service technician never left me a copy of a checklist testing the unit fully or even spot checking each function before leaving the repair.  You could imagine how distraught my wife and I were after having spending more than $2.5K+ for this oven combo.

Out of desperation and of course thanks to the suggestions of the readers of  this blog, I reached out Zach Elkin, Director of Marketing at the BCD Group, owners of the Thermador brand.  Zach saw that we were just a month and a half out from our warranty period but still decided to stand by their product especially given the hurried circumstances of our initial repair.  He had his customer service manager arrange to have an authorized repair specialist contact us to arrange for another control panel swap.

I’m happy to report that this story ended well, and this is the reason why we love our Thermador built in oven!