Masport Ambassador Kitchen

Not an outdoor kitchen – Purchased from Harvey Norman at a great price for our outdoor covered patio. Gets hot enough for most cooking, unless you want a very hot surface for a rare steak. A second flat hotplate would be good. Have even baked loaves of bread in it. Fridge doors sag a bit but keeps the drink and food cool enough. The end burner is great for cooking with a wok or paella pan. Two years old and have had a few concerns. It is not an outdoor kitchen as advertised as the brackets for the handle for the bbq lid are alloy and very badly pitted and corroded with the polished metal finish coming off. Masport has only a 2 years warranty on the handle brackets and has refused to replace them. The corrosion started when about 15 months old, even though they are regularly sprayed with lanolin. The lights stopped working about 12 months after purchase. The piezo lighter button is rubber and gone hard and won't return after pushing and keeps sparking. Have to remove it and push the centre of the button back out after every use. Otherwise a great BBQ

Fantastic BBQ, nightmare to unpack! – I purchased the Ambassador BBQ set (BBQ, 2 fridges and sink with stone top) earlier in the year and love it. Everything works very well, the fridges are really efficient and the stone top looks brilliant. My only criticism is the effort required to unpack the system. We purchased from Harvey Norman and it was delivered directly from their warehouse, all packed on three lovely purpose built pallets with thick cardboard cartons to protect the units. We (wife and myself) unpacked the smaller carton (sink) and struggled a little with the two fridges, but it was impossible for us to unpack the main BBQ unit - at 130kg it was just too heavy to lift. The main problem was that the castors which support the unit and should make it easy to move it, were sitting in holes recessed into the base of the pallet. This meant that in order to move the BBQ around on its castors you have to lift the BBQ out of and off the pallet first - lifting an already raised 130kg BBQ is no mean feat for two 60 year olds. Feeling dumb, I rang Masport, thinking I was missing something simple. After speaking to no less than three people first, the very helpful technical guy on the other end finally told me that no mate, it's simple! You just knock out the cardboard supports under the pallet and then wheel off the BBQ on its castors. I felt really stupid UNTIL I discovered there were no cardboard supports - they were some sort of chipboard supports which were nailed and glued to provide strength. They worked - it was all very strong but also impossible to break apart. Apparently they had done away with the cardboard option a few months earlier, as they were receiving complaints about the bases not being strong enough. The new system was brilliant, albeit impossible to dislodge. The only solution - pay another $100 for a "premium" delivery service, which basically means that they send back two large delivery guys to unpack and lift the BBQ unit out of the holes and onto the floor. We had no other choice. Apparently Harvey Norman had never run into this problem as it was a new system, the local Masport installer had never seen this system before, and apparently, even the guys in the Masport office weren't aware of the issue. I suggested to Harvey Norman that they might charge customers a premium delivery fee up front in future to save a lot of frustration which of course leads to disappointment. Their response was - we told you that assembly was required! My response was - I'm okay with assembly, nobody told me I would need to be a weightlifter! Come on guys - someone stuffed up the design and there needs to be a better solution to unpacking - not everyone will be happy to pay $200+ for delivery.