Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Which appliances useful in your Common House Kitchen?

[Larry Miller (larry.miller]

Oak Creek Commons has 36 families with common meals twice a week. We typically 
get about 30
people at a meal and a cooking team usually consists of 3 cooks. 

We have a 6 burner stove with a double oven. For most meals this is fine. Thew 
stove is a Dacor
and, unfortunately, it has not been very satisfactory with a number of service 
calls. I can't
recommend it.

We have a commercial Jet-Tech dishwasher with about a 3 minute cycle time. I 
can't imagine
trying to do dishes with 1, 2, or even 3 standard dishwashers since we 
typically have about 8 -
10 loads. The dishes come out extremely hot and self dry in just a couple of 
minutes. For a much
smaller community, a standard one might work, but I would not recommend it if 
the cleaning crew
wants to spend minimum time cleaning up. 

Our refrigerator is an Amana "French door" type with a bottom freezer and an 
icemaker. It has
been perfectly adequate for our needs and has never needed service. The ice 
maker has been an
important feature as we serve ice water at every meal. The bottom freezer tends 
to be full, but
generally holds everything we need. 

In a separate laundry room, we have 3 washers and 2 driers, all Kenmore, 
residential type. They
are used by about 18 households and we average around 150 washer loads a month. 
They are now
almost 5 years old and are still in pretty good shape. We bought the 5 year 
extended warranty
and they receive annual service, but have not had too many problems. They are 
not coin operated.
We have a list posted and, on the honor system, people put down how many loads 
they used.
Monthly, a volunteer tallies the list and sends out bills. 

Larry Miller

-----Original Message-----
From: Susana Michaelis [mailto:susana [at] pacificgardens.ca] 
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2009 2:49 PM
To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
Subject: [C-L]_ Which appliances useful in your Common House Kitchen?


Hi everyone,

I volunteered to ask other Cohousing Communities which appliances you 
found to be most useful in the Common House kitchen.

At a minimum I gather that we need one stove, one fridge, one 
dishwasher. How many washers and dryers, if about 6-10 households use them?
Any recommended brands?

Do you use household appliances, commercial, heavy duty or other?
Are your washer/dryers coin operated?
Some people think we need 2 stoves, maybe a deep freeze or even 2 
fridges. Realistically, how often are these appliances used?

When responding, it would be helpful to know how often a meal is cooked 
in the Common House kitchen.
We don't want to have excess appliances in order to cook a Christmas 
dinner!

Thanks for your feedback!
Susana Michaelis
www.pacificgardens.ca


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