What a Bertazzoni Range Costs to Own, Not to Buy

How much do Bertazzoni ranges cost — to keep, rather than to buy

Purchase prices are everywhere. The number nobody publishes is the one that matters after the first year.

Here it is, from this site's own figures rather than from a shrug: roughly one service visit a year, and one repair every three or four years.

The annual number

Brass burner service, from $135. Twenty machines in this line carry brass burners rather than sealed steel, and on those the burner is a serviceable assembly: the cap lifts, the crown comes out, the ports clear individually.

It is priced below every repair on this site on purpose. A maintenance job that costs more than the repair it prevents is a maintenance job nobody books, and the repair it prevents is the ignition call.

If your machine has sealed steel burners rather than brass, the equivalent is the general maintenance visit, from $135, which also covers hood filters, refrigeration condensers and anything that wants descaling.

The repairs that actually happen

Range burner and ignition repair, from $155. The largest category by a wide margin, and set at the low end of the market band deliberately — the commonest version of this call ends with a burner cleaned and seated correctly rather than with a part fitted.

Gas oven ignition and valve repair, from $195. Higher because the cavity has to be opened from below or behind and the gas connection is remade and leak-tested.

Cooktop control and dial repair, from $145. A stiff dial is old grease in a valve stem, and it is a service until somebody forces it — at which point it becomes a valve.

Griddle and grill plate repair, from $175. On the sixteen ranges that carry a cast-iron plate. Its own burner, its own valve, its own ignition, under a plate that comes out first.

What a range does not have

This is the part that changes the arithmetic.

The single expensive repair on this fleet is refrigeration sealed-system work, from $650 — regulated work with recovery, evacuation and a measured recharge, on a machine that comes out of cabinetry.

A range does not have a sealed system. There is no compressor, no refrigerant, no EPA-certified anything. The most expensive thing that can go wrong with a gas range is a control board on a machine that has one, and most of these do not have much of one.

Fifteen years, roughly

A range serviced annually, with one ignition repair somewhere in the middle and perhaps a valve or a griddle circuit later, lands in the low thousands over its whole life. Spread across fifteen years that is a few hundred a year — less than most people spend on the extended warranty they were offered at purchase.

The machines that do not get serviced are the ones that cost more, and they cost more in an entirely predictable way: burner ports that were never cleaned turn into ignition failures, valve stems that were never re-greased turn into valves, and a hood that was never looked at puts grease into all of it.

What we will not tell you

We will not tell you whether it was worth buying. That is a question about how you cook, and every answer to it online is somebody selling something.

What we can tell you is that it is not expensive to keep, and that the things that go wrong with it are mechanical, inexpensive and predictable — which is more than can be said for most of what is in a modern kitchen.