Product review (4 stars): This is a good downdraft cook top for a 30 inch opening BUT safety issue
This is a good downdraft cook top for a 30 inch opening. A lot of the cook tops out there are too big and have 5 burners. I didn't need that -- I've hardly ever used 4 burners at the same time, so it didn't make sense to use up island space with a 36 inch unit. This unit works very well as far a cooking goes. I was concerned about other reviews stating the flame is sucked into the downdraft. The downdraft is indeed pretty strong (which is a good thing) but the flame-pull issue does not seem to be a problem at all on my unit. You can see a little slight tug of the flame, but no problems -- the heating is fine. Here are the reasons I gave only 4 stars: 1. Once when the water boiled over, it knocked out the flame. If I hadn't been standing there to notice what had happened, I'd have been none-the-wiser with the gas coming out. 2. If you turn the cooktop knob too fast, it bypasses the lighting of the flame, and then again, just gas is coming out. (My husband did this. He had too quickly turned on the cooktop to pre-heat the pan, but he never noticed that there was not an actual flame lit under the pan.) These both seem like safety issues to me. My previous gas cooktop had a continual clicking when the flame was either knocked mid-cooking out or not lit at start up. Therefore, you knew there was a problem and did not walk away until resolved. I feel people should be aware of this safety issue.