Bought this oven in March, used it for just over 3 weeks and then one evening, within two minutes of starting to cook a meal, there was a loud noise and the glass lid all around the element had shattered. On lifting the lid, much of the shattered glass broke apart into the glass bowl and naturally all over my meal. The glass particles consisted of very small and very sharp pieces of glass, some of which were extremely thin and sharp slithers of glass. Bigger pieces of glass were embedded all around the element.
On contacting Designer Habitat about this product, I was not impressed by their attitude in a reply email I received from them to my initial email, though after complaining about this future emails were OK.
I am not pleased that I was made to extract dangerous pieces of glass from this product and then package it up for return before I could have my money refunded. I was allowed to not send back the wire rim of the lid and the glass attached to it, but I had to send the element back along with the rest of the product. I was unable to remove the broken glass that was rattling around inside the element and so it had to be returned as it was, with the bits that had been sticking out of it removed by me, it was not a pleasant or easy task to do that.
On the good side, a pickup was arranged for the product and I did get my money back, including postage costs, though it did take a few weeks, I beleive though that this is more down to Amazon's procedures rather than the company's tardiness.
I believe that given that I had supplied Designer Habitat with a comprehensive explanation of what had happened as well as photographs, that I should not have had to handle the broken glass of this product and it would have been better had they 'written it off' and simply returned my money or had offered me a replacement without having to send the other one back.
On a more general point, I found that though I liked the convenience of the oven, I didn't actually find that it cooked any quicker than my normal oven and if fact found that on the whole I had to cook it for longer or have it on a higher temperature setting. I also did not find that it cooked as evenly as all the blurb would have you believe.
I am going to purchase another halogen oven with another supplier, but if that then fails, I am going to call it a day as after having read many reviews now on several brands of halogen ovens on different web sites, my conclusion is that the whole technology of these things is not very refined and there is definitely much room for improved product design and consistency in quality of the product and how well or badly they actually cook the food.