It took most of April to replace my old gas stove (see photo). Along the way I hope I learned to have a bit more patience and also not to use Home Depot’s installation services for any future appliances I might buy from them.
The stove saga started back on April 12 when the old stove’s oven bake igniter died. Because the old stove was purchased sometime in the late 1990’s, I opted for replacement over repair. Believe me, I questioned that decision several times during the long replacement process.
Finding a new stove was easy. I chose a GE gas range from the Home Depot website with some desirable features that my old stove doesn’t have like an air fryer and convection cooking. Dimensions and color looked good. The price did too. I added the stove, installation, and haul away to my cart and clicked purchase. So far, so good.
Home Depot contracts with Temco for delivery, installation, and haul away of kitchen appliances. The people Temco sends out are good at delivery, but they aren’t problem solvers. If there are any installation issues (gas line, electrical, and perhaps others), they note them and it’s up to you to get them fixed before the installers come out again for the next round. This happened four times with a two- to three-day scheduling delay between each visit. If only they had listed every issue on the first trip. That would have saved a week or more overall.
Home Depot has a referral service you can use to contract with plumbers, electricians, and other professionals to fix installation issues. The plumber I hired owns Cascadian Plumbing and is a good one. He worked to make sure the installation process could move forward, not to find reasons why it couldn’t. To be fair to Home Depot, they did credit my account for the amount of his bill since I had already paid them for installation.
After Home Depot’s fourth visit and fourth “we can’t complete installation” excuse, I finally got smart and asked Cascadian Plumbing to make another service call to complete the installation. To schedule Home Depot for a fifth visit would have cost me the remainder of my dwindling patience. Together, the plumber and I got it done. I didn’t try to pass the cost of his second service call on to Home Depot.
In all it took 15 days from the time I bought the new stove online to the completion of its installation on April 29th. That’s a lot of time to depend on just a microwave and a toaster oven for cooking.
The new stove is working great. I hope it doesn’t need any service or repairs for a long time.
Looking back on the chain of events, I should have hired a plumber for the installation process from the start. Yes, with a gas stove installation, a plumber is the person to hire. Because the kitchen was last remodeled almost 30 years ago, inevitably there were going to be issues. It wasn’t a job for Home Depot.
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