31 August 2011

Day 51: Major milestone.. we're cooking with gas!

If you've been following our posts for the past 7 weeks, you'll remember we've had to become very creative with a microwave oven, a 2-burner hotplate and an electric skillet, doing double duty as an oven. All this changed this evening.

Our sea container arrived about 10 days ago with the new gas range we purchased several months ago from Lowes. Since Costa Rica does not have natural gas, they gave us the kit to convert the burners to LP (liquid propane). Last week we found the local LP distributor and bought our gas cylinder and John started the task to change out all the natural gas orifices to LP orifices. He quickly discovered the kit we had been given did not have a single one of the ones we needed. So he call Frigidaire in the States and they confirmed we had been given the wrong convesion kit. They told him the sizes he would need and recommended we call their distributor in San Jose to come do the work for us.

We setup an appointment for Monday and when we called to confirm, the distributor informed us it would be Wednesday instead. In the meantime, we contacted a local guy to come run a gas line from our new propane tank, located outside, through the back wall into our kitchen/living room. He came around lunchtime on Tuesday, figured out what kind of connection we needed and then came back in the evening to get us hooked up.

Now all we needed was to get the actual burners converted to LP. The Frigidaire rep finally got here around 5:15 PM this evening and in 30 minutes we were cooking with gas!

I immediately moved the 2-burner hotplate and electric skillet off the counter and into the storage closet. Now, we have just about doubled our counter space and I'm ready to get back into some serious home cooking. One of the first things I want to do is re-activate my sourdough starter so we can have some really good homemade bread in a week, or so. Tomorrow, I'm going to start a big pot of spaghetti sauce and stock the freezer with quick meals.

Love my creature comforts.... Life is Good!

4 comments:

  1. ohhhh, good to know. we're bringing a gas grill, I wonder if well need to make any changes!?
    I had never heard of needing conversions, did you get any info as to how they're different?
    --Jimena

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  2. If your gas grill uses a propane cylinder in the States, no conversion is needed.

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  3. With the cost of electricity here after about 300 KWh, cooking with gas really saves some bucks, ... errr, Colones! We use a simple two-burner cooker out on the patio mostly for boiling water and that shaved off about 20 bucks from the ICE bill for about 8 bucks worth of propane.

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  4. Casey, thanks for the feedback. That confirms my earlier research on propane cost.

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