How to Fit In Gas Hotplates That Won’t Fit

Do you have gas hotplates in mind but they’re not quite the right size?

Check out this video to see our solution!

The Issue

This is an interesting one. One of our customers called us out to change over their hotplates. But the trouble was, she’s bought hotplates that was slightly smaller than the cutout. Now, back in the day, they had some funky cutout sizes for the hotplates, and it’s very hard to match them nowadays. You can always go bigger and cut the bench out a bit bigger. But sometimes that interferes with the cupboards and the range hood as it might make the bottom of the cupboard too close to the burner. So it’s something that you got to watch out for.

There are many options for the standard cutouts and they’re pretty inexpensive to buy, but she still didn’t have much option there because of the size. The only thing you can do really is to replace the whole top or make some sort of surround. So that’s what we’ve done here.

In the video, we show you the hotplates set up. It had the 600 range hood, which is pretty standard. As you can see the original hole was slightly too big, but this is a really nice range hood and hotplates.

The Solution

So all we’ve done was we chopped up a little bit of wood and made that to fit to fill in the holes. So now it’s well supported. And then we’ve had to take all the measurements to make up a surround to go around it. And it was going to match the black glass on the hotplates. So we just needed to take the hotplates out, put the surround in, and then screw it all down back again.

The reason we couldn’t really go bigger was because the bottom of the cupboard would probably be too close to the range hood because it’s got to be 600 from the top of the burner. So if she were to extend for bigger hotplates, then it may cause trouble with the cupboards there.

The Result

You can see we made up the surround with the edges the same all the way around, except at the back, otherwise, there’d be a little gap at the back. So, of course, we didn’t want to have that little gap there for food and stuff going in. The plan was that it would go hard up against the splash back tile. So it’s really easy to clean.

So if you’ve got the hotplates problem that you can’t fit because you can’t really go bigger because of the cupboards, and you can’t go smaller because there’s going to be gaps on the side, you can try this really good solution. Just get your gas plumber to measure up surround and get that sorted. Just remember up the back, if you can go all the way to the tiles, hat would be good. So there’s no bits of food and anything that can go around. Also, try and get the edges of the hotplates to be the same all the way around except at the back. It’ll look really awesome when it’s finished and we think it’s been quite a good result.

So there is hope for this kind of situation. And if you can’t get anyone to do it and you live in Perth, give us a call, we’ll come sort it out.