Review of the Candy Trio 503: a combination hob, oven & dishwasher

I joined the property ladder 2 years ago, a nice prefab steel-framed maisonette with only one problem - a minute builder-specified kitchen. There was too little storage, not enough worktop space and critically no room for a dishwasher. To the rescue comes the Candy Trio 503 - a free standing, all-electric 60 cm cooker with an integrated dishwasher. The top half is a small combination, fan assisted oven and grill. The bottom half is a single drawer dishwasher which can take 6 place settings. The hob has 3 ceramic rings and 1 halogen. Either the oven or the dishwasher can be run, but not both at once. Around the back it takes a single 32 ampere 240 V supply (or 120 V or 3-phase), a cold water feed and a drain feed. Yours for between £700 and £900 online. A gas model is also available I’ve been using the Trio for a couple of weeks now. I’ll start with the bad. When washing it’s quite noisy, tall plates are tricky to remove from the draw & it doesn’t have a timer function or any indicator of how much time a program has left. The Grill pan doesn’t have a grille, instead it hooks underneath the shelf - so every time you grill something you must wash the entire shelf. There are slots along the grill pan for a handle, but no handle was supplied, with mine at least. So far, on one occasion, the dials got so hot they were painful to touch. Speaking of the dials, they’re made of plastic with a cheap silver coating that’s already starting to rub off. Now the good. The ceramic hob heats up reasonably quickly, it fried some tuna steak well enough. The oven seems to maintain the right temperature and cooked several meals as expected. The dishwasher is like a Tardis, so much more than I expect fits in there - including my largest 6 litre pan. It gets glasses and cutlery sparkling & it’s the first I’ve ever seen that fits a mug stacked under that cup shelf. The glass plus stainless steel finish feels and looks good, the sides have what I can only describe as a mirror finish. So on the whole, not bad but not that great. Wrong, the Trio is a like a dog riding a unicycle. You don’t point out how clumsy it looks, you watch in amazement at the unique spectacle. The Trio is a unique convergence, there are better cookers and there are better dishwashers, but none are so amazingly compact. I love it. P.S. I’m not on commission or linked with Candy, honest. There weren’t any reviews online, that I could find when I made the purchase. If you have any questions, please post a comment.