Smart looking oven but sadly plagued with problems
2/5
Our purchase of this oven was cursed. First oven delivered had a fault with the main fan oven and it would not work (no light and no heat) on installation so it was removed and taken away again by AO same day. A second oven was ordered, delivered and installed a couple of days later without any problem. The second oven worked but developed a fault on day 2 where it would start beeping at random times in the middle of the night, waking the household and causing a lot of lost sleep. The beeping began anywhere from 6 to 12 hours after cooking dinner. It wasn’t consistent but did happen every night. The timer function had never been used so it wasn’t that. In the end we just tried to remember to turn the oven off at the mains after cooking whilst we tried to reject it as faulty. It’s not practical to have to reset the oven every time you want to cook and forgetting to turn it off at the mains meant another disturbed nights sleep.
After a very tense call to AO who wanted an engineer report before they would accept it as faulty, Belling agreed to credit note the oven without an engineer report. It has now been removed and replaced with a different brand and model which unfortunately has a much smaller oven capacity. Not ideal for our family but it was what was available in price range, in stock and what would fit around our existing gas hob installation.
Was this a dodgy batch of Belling ovens? I don’t know. But we were definitely unlucky. I certainly wouldn’t buy another Belling appliance in a hurry as I simply don’t trust the components used. That said, the main fan oven itself when cooking did the job, it got up to temp quick and stayed at the set temperature. I can’t say anything about the other functions (top oven/grill, semi or auto cook or the defrost setting) as I didn’t use them. The function/temp control knobs are fine although others complain that the temp settings are too vague, I had no problem with them as they were similar in design to the original broken Whirlpool oven.
The digital control panel is fiddly to start with and made more cumbersome by having to take the oven out of standby mode each time. Belling could really do with rethinking and ditching that function. The oven looks smart, and has a big main oven capacity which is what I chose it for. It’s a real shame the components of the ovens we experienced were faulty/ poor quality.
AO staff have mostly been helpful throughout and I can’t fault the installation guys who came three times in three weeks to remove and fit a new oven.
I can’t give this model of oven more than 2 stars, but I would give 4 stars to AO customer service staff and 5 stars to the different installation teams.
Gill