This was my home’s former cooktop. It was original to the house from 1989.
Over Christmas break, I replaced it with the one seen below.
I ended up installing it myself, aside from extending the house’s natural gas line to the island. For that part, a professional plumber did the work.
I didn’t set out to do the installation myself, but it was surprisingly difficult to try to find someone willing to do the installation work. Some folks wouldn’t do the electric work. Others wouldn’t touch the job if the ceramic tile in the island needed to be cut. (As it turns out, the tile did not need to be cut, but I couldn’t be sure of that until I got the old cooktop off and could measure the hole precisely.) Another one missed the appointment as a complete no-show with no-response to texts…
At some point, it became clear that if I wanted to get it done, I’d have to do it myself. So I did.
The installation was a bit more involved than I had originally hoped, but not so difficult to make it beyond what a decently capable DIYer could do. From my perspective, the toughest part was connecting the downdraft, since the new cooktop’s downdraft fan is offset to the right while the old one’s was slightly offset to the left.
For that, my uncle taught me about adjustable rigid duct elbows. A couple of those and a new set of tin snips to cut the old vent pipe to an appropriate height, and that became a fairly straightforward task.
As for why the replacement in the first place – the two front burners on the old one had stopped working within a few weeks of each other back in the fall. It wasn’t the coils (that would have been an easy fix), but rather with other parts in the system.
The local appliance repairman said that the cooktop was so old that there weren’t spare parts available anymore, so the choices were “live with it” or “replace it.” “Live with it” worked until Thanksgiving, when it became clear that sometimes, you just need a fully functional cooktop.
In terms of shifting from electric to gas, that decision was aided by the fact that it was substantially cheaper to extend the house’s natural gas line to the island than it would have been to upgrade the 240 volt circuit that fed the old cooktop to 40 or 50 amps. The old cooktop was on a 30 amp circuit, and every modern electric cooktop I could find that fit a 36" hole required at least 40 amps.
So now, instead of a 35 year-old nominally 4 burner coil cooktop, there’s a brand new 5 burner gas cooktop in the same spot. It heats up faster, the temperatures adjust faster, and it just looks so much nicer.
It was a project to be sure, but now it’s done.
Regards,
-Chuck