We were absolutely amazed when we turned the oven on one night to find it was not working. The oven has not been used excessively, so to last just over a year was very poor. The main oven on our Smeg A2 cooker stopped working after 14 months.

I too own a Smeg cooker, which I bought 7 years ago when they were relatively new in the UK. The fan oven broke twice within the first 12 months, and it was repaired, but it now hasn't worked for the past 5 years at all, but I refused to pay to have the engineer come out AGAIN. As with most people, I bought this cooker based on its looks. I have replaced the front panel once, as it looked very shabby within 18 months. It now has needed replacing again for the past 4 years, and it looks a mess. Like with a lot of Italians, it has glowing looks in its youth, but they quickly fade and I am left with a shabby cooker that has never really functioned properly. Do not bother buying one of these cookers.

I can not wait until I move house, and I will gladly donate this cooker to the new owners (if they'll have it)!

I was delighted to read the reviews and find that two people have changed their minds about buying a Smeg. Excellent news! Smeg cookers are terrible. The gas rings fail, the fans break again and again, and the official service engineer even managed to blow my SMEG A2 up!

If you already have a Smeg A2, throw it out of the window. If you can't bring yourself to defenestrate it just yet, then here is one useful little tip. 1) If you are trying to keep several burners alight at the same time, keep holding each knob in for about 15 seconds AFTER it's lit. The service engineer recommended this, and it does seem to stop the problem of the burners going out after a minute or two.

If you are thinking of buying a Smeg, I don't recommend it. Before I got the stupid Smeg, I had a lovely old 50's upright, which I adored. It cost me £15 secondhand, and it still worked perfectly after 10 years when I gave it away. It attracted admiration instead of envy from visitors (owning a Smeg just makes everyone think you're rich and can't cook, and indeed, non-cooking rich people are the only people who SHOULD buy a useless, shoddy Smeg).

But I realise many people have dreamt for years of owning a five or six-burner range with two ovens. Here is my advice. I recommend that you instead obtain a photo of an A2. Take the photo to the local printer and have it blown up to life size. Then, paste the poster into the space where the Smeg cooker would sit. You will then be able to gaze in delight at your beautiful Smeg, while freeing yourself from all the aggravation, and enjoying exactly the same level of cooking facilities you would have if you owned the real thing.

We have never manage to get all the six burners working, at best one or two will work properly. I have just spent another 230.00 pounds to get the problem fixed. What a waste of money on a truly useless cooker. I'm a professional in the building industry and I would never specify a smeg cooker (I would loose clients).
At the earliest opportunity we will be putting the smeg A2 cooker in a skip. It's the worst purchase I have ever made and as you might have guessed I am livid.

The main circuit board of the SMEG A2 burnt out.
The main fan stopped working.
And THE most annoying of all are the burners. Of six burners only two are reasonably reliable. Two will not light at all and the other two light for about 2 minutes - and then go out.. AAAAAGH! If I could find a skip I would chuck the thing straight into it. The best £1500 I have ever spent...NOT.

We bought our SMEG A2 from John Lewis and thought that this would mean we could buy with confidence. First Christmas and the door fell off. I had quite a job trying to persuade the reseller that his was a defective product. The replacement part was badly installed (or is that just how they are built). Reading the other reviews, I think I got a good one.

I have a 90cm A1. I thought I'd review SMEG A2 here because I wanted to add support to the long suffering A2ers. This is not just about the A2, this is about Smeg per se. They are RUBBISH. They are RUDE and INSOLENT when you ring with a problem and in the end you just put the phone down without feeling you have achieved anything.

Firstly, there was a mark which needed polishing out on the surface, then the gas thermocouples failed one by one, then the commutator went - twice (that's the thing that selects your oven options), then the centre oven element went AWOL. And now again after I forced SMEG to send an engineer out free-of-charge, another commutator has gone. The thing's been an absolute nonsense. Please don't buy it if you actually want to do some cooking. At the moment, we dare not invite anyone to dinner in case the thing fails while we're cooking. YES it's that BAD.

Unless you want to pounce around showing this piece of "art" off and eat out all the time; this thing is a waste of your hard earned cash.

Even in Australia - Smeg Gas Cookers are over-rated. In desperation I have ended up on the net trying to work out what to do with my dud smeg oven! Two ovens - two dud cooling fans and no-one can fix them. Now my local Smeg rep is trying to tell me that the manual is wrong, and the cooling fan isn't supposed to work on my model!!!

The SMEG A2 looks good! We've only had it for 3 years and an electrical fault has occured resulting in no use of Oven or Grill. Fan is wrecked. Not impressed as we paid £1300 for it.

This Smeg A2 has been a completely unreliable gas cooker. Coupled with Smeg's poor attitude to after sales service, it's has been a nightmare. Two fans have failed, an electrical connection in the hob burnt out. The gas rings constantly cut out and the ignition system has a mind of its own. I've paid for Smeg engineers to fix the problems, but so far they have failed. A twenty year old secondhand Belling was more reliable than this!