I purchased a Thornhill 5 oven Eco Oil/Electric hybrid range.
Nice looking range but let down by the electric side and the awful customer service.
Ordered Oct 22. After much chasing, the wrong one arrived mid June 23 ( 8 months waiting). Instead of an apology I got an angry email accusing me of reusing the cooker. I replied with the confirmatory evidence I had changed the original fuel from wood to oil 3 months before. The correct one arrived 3 weeks later.
Although the website says “installation is included in the price”, this is not the case. They only deliver and put in position. I designed the space around the cooker specifications on the website and checked them by phone. However, they failed to tell me the oil pipe sticks out a further 8 cm. My plumber,therefore, had to reroute the internal oil pipe through the back of the range so we could get it in.
As it was summer I was using only the electric side. It is not fit for a large family if you want to rely on this part in the summer months. It is very basic with only two halogen hobs. The whole space seems to be wasted. The touch sensitive controls are in the way and if you have a large pan/frying pan on the back ring, there is no room for a pan on the smaller front ring without causing the child lock or off buttons to trigger unknowingly. Very frustrating.
The two electric fan ovens have poor controls. They are difficult to turn with greasy cooking hands or arthritis. There is no temperature indicator so you have no idea what temperature the ovens are actually at without turning the knobs to hear the click of the thermostat. The ovens take at least 30 mins to heat up to a decent cooking temp, and the food is unevenly cooked and needs turning to prevent burning at the back. The whole purpose of a fan oven is to allow even cooking without turning. When I first received the cooker, the heat up time on the electric side was almost 60 minutes to 180 degrees. The customer service reply about my issues was curt, bordering on rude and offered no explanation or resolution except “nobody else has had any problems”. In fact we discovered the doors springs were not in the correct position and altered them ourselves to improve the heat up time to 30 mins.
Despite being describe as ultra efficient I was surprised to see that on the oil side the two hobs are connected by a huge uncovered part. This means heat constantly escapes (using more oil) and unlike with an AGA you cannot drape anything over the lids due to the exposed hot plate and fire risk.
The only saving grace for this range is that it can be programmed to come off and on. If you do go for this range, do not expect any servicing instructions. Apparently the servicing is “basic for a qualified oil engineer.”However, do expect the engineer to be puzzled by the lack of gas sampling port. On questioning this on installation, this has to be drilled through your nice new enamel flue ( obviously). Also do not expect more than one shelf per oven, any oven instructions, warranty information nor receipts for your hard earned cash. To conclude, having paid over £12000 I was expecting a quality product, good customer service and a cooker that would be a joy to use. In all these aspects Thornhill have fallen short of the mark.