We've owned our Rival 38651 CrockPot for about eight years, and have used it for a variety of recipes. Just how well does this unit hold up?

The short answer is that this unit does not know the meaning of slow cooking. It likes to boil.

The unit has three different temperatures - high, low, and warm. In normal terms, high should be near boiling, low should be a bit below that, and warm should be about 165F. The purpose of warm is to keep the food above the "bacteria danger" level without really cooking it.

However, with this Rival CrockPot, every temperature means boiling. There is nothing here except "cook the hell out of the food". This means your food quickly burns or boils away - and there's no way to simply keep something warm. It will keep cooking to overcook level.

The insert itself is incredibly heavy and while it could go into a dishwasher, I can't find any angle at all to make it fit. It's an odd shape. In comparison the other units I have owned over the years have inserts I can easily dishwash.

Also, because this burns food so regularly, it means cleaning rarely just means a dishwash run. Usually there's a lot of scrubbing involved.

You might ask why we stuck with this for so many years. I suppose we're determined. After all, this is a Rival CrockPot. They're supposed to be good at this. We figured, maybe if this one does this, maybe it's just how all CrockPots work nowadays. Maybe it's what everyone has to deal with.

Finally, though, we went on Amazon to see what our new options were. We saw at a glance that this 38651 unit was deluged with awful reviews - and others had rows of stellar reviews. Clearly this isn't a "crockpot in general" problem. Clearly there's something seriously wrong with this particular model.

We will try to give ours away but I'm not sure who even to subject this fire hazard to. It'll probably go to a charity store and I even feel guilty about doing that.

We would not recommend this, based on our years of experience with it.


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