By Fraser & Lee Mowlem - AGA owners Anglesey

In this blog, my clients give an honest review of an electric AGA conversion plus their update of two years living with the conversion

“We fell in love with that bright red AGA, and the Anglesey blacksmith cottage attached to it!.. as soon as we walked into the kitchen on our very first viewing”

6 months later that beautiful AGA was at last, ours! Slightly terrified we started our wonderful journey into AGA cooking...everything tasted amazing, the kitchen was warm and yes… there was the odd unidentified burnt objects found in the oven the next day – but this was our dream ‘Mary-Berry-farmhouse-kitchen’ life coming true!

Our AGA ran on oil and we had it serviced annually by Andy at ARCS but after a few winters (and a few hefty oil price hikes!) our lovely AGA was being lit for shorter periods of time every year to the point it became a Christmas luxury only. Two months was all we could afford to run her for as our winter oil consumption weighed in at over 500 litres per month. (To qualify this very high oil consumption. We also used oil for our central heating our 4 bedroom home is 50% wood and not very well insulated!!)

We spoke to Andy and he suggested there were ways we could make our oil AGA more efficient, and he performed some modifications and swapped out the old insulation for better, which all greatly improved our overall AGA efficiency and oil consumption, but even Andy couldn’t foresee the huge oil and energy prices that started to soar as we hit 2022… our oil bill had quadrupled over a three year period!

Budget was now our top focus - we were starting to have conversations about selling our beloved AGA and moving over to a conventional (i.e.. boring) cooker but it was breaking our hearts. The AGA was one of the main things that made us fall in love with our home, our first home together.

Can I convert my AGA to electric Andy?

My husband was about to leave the RAF with a retirement lump sum so we decided to look at ways to reduce our day to day running costs, so we asked Andy what the options were. We always wanted solar panels and talking to Andy about that plan, he suggested converting the AGA over to electric.

He explained the pros, cons and running costs of the various electrical conversions available to us and we decided to go with the eControl conversion . The idea of being able to switch the AGA on and off, have it on ‘Eco’ at weekends, when we knew we would be doing more cooking, running the hotplates and the ovens independently and even changing oven temperatures to bake, all sounded perfect!

The big day arrived, and Andy was here early to start the AGA electric conversion. I watched with eagerness as Andy swiftly and expertly switched out parts and put our red AGA lovingly back together with the new improved electric parts ( plus did a great deep clean too!)  She emerged as a beautiful red AGA - mark 2.0, and this time to do her magic running on electric rather than oil… and electric that was made by sunshine (Anglesey weather permitting!)

So, is it worth converting an AGA to electric?

In our view 100% YES!! A few months have now passed and our love for the our little red AGA is still as heartfelt as ever. The AGA is now more flexible, controllable and adaptable. We love the larger hot plate area and often only need to turn one on to do the jobs we need.
We are lucky enough to both work from home and on a sunny winter’s day (if used intelligently) our smart meter bill can be under £3 per day. Spring and Summer will bring a whole different budget friendly way of using our AGA that we can’t wait for! So far the conversion has been very worthwhile and we would love to provide a more detailed update.

Of course the only downside to our electric AGA is now Andy now longer has to come round and do an oil service every winter, so we will miss out on chatting and laughing with him over a mince pie!

“We highly recommend talking to Andy about converting your AGA over to Electric if you live in North Wales. We are overjoyed with our AGA conversion and how it better suits our lifestyle and budget.”

UPDATE: MAY 2024

It’s now been two years with the AGA electric conversion so we wanted to provide an update.

We now get paid for any excess energy that we export to the grid from our solar panels, the funds this raises in the summer months more than pays for the extra winter usage and allows us to have the AGA on more, sometimes even just to warm the kitchen up on the coldest days.

If we are planning a weekend of cooking, if we have guests for instance, it is well worth just dropping to ‘Eco’ setting between cooks rather than letting it cool all the way down to have to heat it all the way back up again.

We have noticed there are hotter and cooler spots on the hot plates which were a more even heat on oil. That was initially viewed as a negative but as we have learned having hotter spots on both plates we can actually use this to our advantage now, adding a little extra flexibility.

Suffice to say, we have sold the back up convection oven and induction hob that we had and now operate solely with the AGA it’s new electrical guise.

We have learned to use the AGA a lot more intelligently; we use the 80/20 rule, where we use the ovens more than the hotplates, we batch cook at weekends, we drop the ovens down to ‘Eco’ if we know we have a period without needing the ovens for a 7h+ period (usually at weekends), we use the cooling down ovens and hotplates too. We re-season all our cast iron pans with coconut oil while the hotplates are cooling down.

The only other change we have in mind is to add a programmable WiFi enabled circuit breaker so that we can see it to come on and off on a schedule or the press of a button on an app so we can come home to a warm kitchen and an oven ready to cook. Watch this space for more updates!

If you are looking at ways to make your AGA more efficient or have been toying with the idea of converting your AGA over to electric with an AGA electric conversion kit, please get in touch!