Stoves spares

A few years ago we bought a range-style oven, with 3 ovens, a warming drawer and 7 gas burners. It’s a lovely thing, resplendent in a bright royal blue paintwork, and makes cooking even the biggest of meals pretty easy. It’s also got all kinds of cooking modes, and various “designer” features, including these nifty sliding telescopic shelves:

These work by having telescopic runners attached to the shelf supports in the sides of the oven, and then the shelves clip to the runners and can be slid out of the oven so you can more easily access the cooking food. This seems like a great idea in the showroom, but turns out to be less useful in real life, because:

• The runners are in fixed locations. So you can only use them if you want the spacing between the shelves that the manufacturer decided on when they made the shelf supports.
• Although you can take the shelves off the runners, and use them in some intermediate locations, there just isn’t enough flexibility in the design of the shelf supports, and you often end up needing to use a second oven because you can’t space the shelves well enough. Not good for the environment, or the cooks temper, to have to start a second oven part-way through cooking dinner for eight.
• Getting the shelves in and out of the runners is awkward when the oven is cold, and extremely difficult when it’s hot, which means you tend to be forced to select a shelf configuration at the point you turn on the oven. When you discover you guessed wrongly, it turns out that rearranging shelves of partly cooked food (at 200c) is no-ones idea of fun.
• Finally, they just aren’t robust. If the shelf isn’t fully retracted into the oven when you close the door, there is a good chance that the runner will be pushed off the shelf support (along with a shower of tiny ball-bearings).

This latter problem is what finally drove us over the cliff. I repaired the runners twice but the third time I couldn’t find all the ball bearings, and it was clear that a replacement was required. Cost, over £100. Just to get all the same problems as before. So we decided we didn’t want telescopic shelves any more. We wanted old-fashioned low-tech shelf supports, that didn’t telescope, but did have more options for height adjustment.

The manufacturer (Stoves) were not terribly helpful. Their helpline staff (and the outsourced spare-parts operation) were all operating purely on a system that required you supply the oven serial number, and they’d tell you the official spare part that you needed for your device, and the cost to deliver it to you. Which is fine, until you’re trying to find out if they have any other shelf-supports that will fit.

In the end I trawled through all the online suppliers I could find, looking at Stoves shelf supports for all their different models (including those sold under other brand names) checking the pictures and descriptions for likely candidate replacements. And it turns out that they do have exactly what we wanted, for £22. And a day of effort.

So if like us, you have a Stoves Richmond Range Cooker, model DFT1000, and you’re at your wits end with the telescopic shelf supports in the main oven, then you can replace them with a “Guide Shelf Large Rh” and “Guide Shelf Large Lh 1979”, stock numbers ES924555 and ES924554 from http://www.espares.co.uk. They fit perfectly.