A double-oven range isn’t as spacious or versatile as a double wall oven—but it can still be a good way to add extra cooking convenience to a kitchen that’s set up for a regular 30-inch stove.
Double-oven ranges cram two ovens into the space of a 30-inch range, at the expense of the storage drawer you’d usually find in a single-oven model. The shorter top oven is good for frozen pizzas, baking sheets, or maybe a small chicken, and the bottom oven is big enough for something like a 20-pound turkey.
A double-oven range isn’t really a replacement for a double wall oven, because you’re getting one small and one almost-full-size oven, both sitting low to the ground, rather than two full-size ovens at an easy-to-reach height.
But unlike a double wall oven, which is a built-in appliance that requires a lot of space and a professional installation, a double-oven range can fit anywhere that a regular range can. There’s no renovation or redesign necessary. Double-oven ranges cost less, and they include a cooktop, too.
Double-oven ranges have a shorter oven cavity on top (providing plenty of space for most dishes) and a taller cavity below (with enough room for most roasts). Photo: GE
We were surprised to hear that most people with double-oven ranges don’t often use both ovens at the same time. So what’s the point of having one? Owners tell us that they like the top oven because it’s quick to heat up, and it’s easier to load and unload since it’s not as close to the ground as a typical range’s oven. And then they have the larger oven whenever they need it. On the occasions when you want to simultaneously cook or warm up multiple dishes at different temperatures without strong flavors commingling, having both ovens is super-convenient.
If you’re using both ovens at the same time, you should expect some heat to transfer between the cavities. Woody Delp, an engineer from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, put it bluntly: “These are boxes within boxes separated by another box. Heat transfer happens, and one oven will influence the other.” That said, Robert DellaValle, principal engineer for cooking at Underwriters Laboratories, told us that when it comes to temperature accuracy, double-oven ranges perform more or less as well as double wall ovens, so it’s not a problem that’s specific to double-oven ranges. And we’d guess that heat transfer will be noticeable only when you have each oven set to extremes, like blasting a pizza at 450 °F in the lower oven while the upper oven is set to Keep Warm.
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