After a while it soon became apparent to us what the worst thing about owning an Aga cooker was, and it had nothing to do with the cooker itself:
Now, we didn't have a problem with the fact that it needed regular servicing (about every four months for our old converted oil fired model). The problem was with how inconvenient the whole process was. It was inconvenient for two reasons:
1. The Aga needed to be cold for servicing to take place. This meant that we had to turn it off midday the day before the engineer was due to call. We soon had a new immersion heater fitted in our hot water tank and bought a small portable cooker unit just so that we could have hot food and water during the service periods. We could easily forgive this though due to the real benefits owning an Aga gave us. It's the next point that was the shocker.
2. We never managed to arrange a service on the weekends. Now, we both worked so there was never anyone in during the working day. We had to take days off work to have our Aga serviced! We may just have been unlucky with our servicing agents so this may not be a general problem with Aga ownership. Then again....