Limited heat settings left me often wishing for more nuance, especially in lower temperatures.
Hysteresis. You can see this by putting your saucepan with water to 350, then lowering it to 212 when it reaches a boil. It will rapidly cycle between boiling and not boiling, making simmering very difficult. My particular induction burner has one setting for 140F (way too low) and the next setting is 212F. Where's simmer?
It does heat water up faster than a conventional burner, so I use it for cooking the pasta while I make the sauce on a conventional gas stovetop. I also use it when temperature control isn't important, but that's not very often in cooking.
I both agree with and disagree with your post- I agree that induction has not met its potential yet. If every induction range used the Control Freak's control systems, people would be abandoning gas in droves because it's better in every way: https://www.amazon.com/PolyScience-Temperature-Controlled-Co...
I disagree that it's specifically worse for cast iron, especially when you have a good device. The problem there is the quality of the cookware, cast iron works, and an aluminum or aluminum cored stainless steel work perfectly if they're well designed.
I do agree that there are far too many induction cooktops with gawd awful controls that are not responsive; that's more a matter of picking a well designed unit rather than a fundamental flaw in the technology itself. Same with granular control - higher end models offer not just finer control, but different control modes. It boggles my mind there aren't more temperature probe options for automatic temperature control. My GE cooktop had an optional bluetooth probe - but it only worked for low temps. If they had a high temp probe it would be a candy makers dream!
I only use gas when I want to cook with super high heat - like with a wok. And for that I use a left over turkey fryer burner - outside! Double bonus for all the gunk thrown off during cooking not being trapped in my house either. I don't have a restaurant style hood and make up air system; it's far cheeper and easier to just go outside for that kind of cooking.
Have you tried a thicker, heavier pan? A good quality induction cooker should heat reasonably slowly and maintain a constant temperature if you set it to, say, 1/3 or 1/2 power.
I’ve been using a friend’s one recently and found it to be much easier to maintain a steady temperature than with my old electric cooktop.
I was excited by the prospects of induction cooking, and if I'm boiling water, or even making a slow-cook stew, it works great. But for sauces and meat (where fine temperature control is critical), I'll stick to gas or (if I have to) electric.
Indeed I love to cook so much and one of the downsides of induction I didn't see talked about too much in this thread - matching pan size to hob size - bugged me so much on my old cooktop I'm tempted to get something ridiculous like the Gaggenau 400 Series that doesn't have defined areas for pans, but a grid of smaller hobs that will autodetect and adjust to the size/location of a pan. There are at least three versions of that cooktop from various manufacturers and one of the non-Gaggenau ones was something like 30% cheaper. And I just realized I didn't save it like I thought I had. D'oh!
Waiting for integrated temperature control to become more of a thing with induction - higher end cooktops have it; just needs to percolate down. My GE cooktop had a bluetooth probe that worked great at lower temperatures - but usually you want automatic temp control more on the high end - frying and candymaking is what I was missing. I guess if you made lots of delicate sauces the bluetooth probe would have been a godsend and maybe that's what they were going for. Probably cheaper, easier and more reliable to only have a lower temp probe too. Just not nearly as useful for what I would have liked!
If you like to cook invest in good cookware. The biggest problem with induction is cheap cookware with "disks" on the bottom. Having as much ferrous magnetic metal as possible is the real key to success with induction - and why your cast iron performs so well!
I love All Clad - triple ply stainless steel sandwich of either aluminum or (if you are feeling really extravagant) copper. Far easier to maintain than cast iron (although I love my cast iron too - can't get fried chicken just right in anything else). Cookware and More is the official All Clad factory seconds (usual some dent or other cosmetic flaw) outlet with great prices and if you get on their mailing list they have an annual sale where they take even more off. I've gotten All Clad skillets for well under $200 and they will be something I can pass on. Good cookware never dies. Took several years to get the pieces I wanted but I did it without breaking the bank.
If All Clad, even factory seconds, are still too pricy - I'm not paying $500 for a stockpot no matter how wonderful it may be - then Made In has very nice pieces competitively priced. Got my stock pot from them for under $200.
Finally Tramontina has great induction ready clad cookware pieces and can be found at regular big box stores like Costco or even Walmart. Not quite as heavy/well constructed as All Clad or Made In, but still leaps and bounds better than anything with a disk.
Good, better, best - just reject anything with a damn disk welded onto the bottom of it and you will find induction a LOT more enjoyable. As good as your cast iron :)
Fine control comes with higher end units that have more settings. Didn't pay attention to that at my last house and got a cooktop with only 11 choices. My mothers induction range has double that and it's amazing what a difference makes, especially at the lower end - as you note. Getting a new house next month and won't be making that mistake again! Something with a at least 18-20 steps from low to high will be mandatory for me. 11 just isn't enough.
Induction heat transfer is basically generating a magnetic field in the bottom coil, which is then picked up by the vessel, currents induced in it causing the heat.
Cheap induction stoves emulate lower power levels by turning the heat on and off, averaging the heat.
One solution is to use a thick bottom vessel that retains enough heat between the cycles to allow simmering.
Or buy a smooth controlled stove. But I dont think there are any such ones in the market.
I usually use these with electric stoves since they retain heat pretty well. They take a while to warm up though, so there's both time and energy lost in that warming process.
Cast Iron ones will do too.
If you have to cook something to simmer and hold heat for long, best use thick bottomed ones.
What could be done to mitigate the slow heating issue is to use a small amount of water initially, on high settings, allowing it to boil. Then you can add your contents, reduce the power setting and allow it to simmer.
What many dont know is that you can keep a cast iron or steel plate between the vessel and the stove, of a suitable thickness, that converts the induction stove to a "heater" stove (the plate gets heated through induction, but the vessel only sees the heat). However, a word of caution. If the plate is of a very large size, it will have un-even heating and may warp. Best size is one that is slightly smaller than the circular marker on the stove.
The induction stove only heats the bottom plate. Whereas with a gas stove around a large wok, there is a lot of convection heating the thin walls of the wok as well.
Problem is solved by either using better components, or better matching the control frequency to the components used so there a no frequency modes that happen to match up with the resonant frequency of components used. Thus eliminating the transfer of electrical energy into mechanical energy.
Regardless of price, multilayer ceramic capacitors are piezoelectric - meaning they physically vibrate. Inductors and transformers are electromagnets powerful enough to noticeably vibrate and move themselves. In fact, if you test them during assembly before taping them, the two halves of the ferrite core will snap together like magnets. Most noise comes instead from the windings, but that gives you an idea of their physical power. The biggest winding in an induction cooktop is the induction coil itself.
The reason you hear them is because they're being used at audio frequencies. Considerate designers choose higher switching frequencies above what humans and household pets can hear. Induction cooktops are kind of a special case where it's tempting to dip into the audible frequencies. Frequency choice alone doesn't eliminate all noise, so there are other mitigations like materials selection and assembly, to name a couple.
Overall, it's largely due to being cheap about the design and manufacturing processes.
Used to be able to hear it but can't anymore so either they all got better the last few years or I aged out of being able to hear it.
I pity the dogs and cats especially!
The lack of adequate kitchen ventilation is pretty underrated by most people. Picked up a WYND Halo indoor air quality monitor out of general curiosity and was astonished at just how quickly indoor air can sour when cooking if you don't have adequate ventilation.
I cook a lot more outdoors than I used to now!
Ordinary domestic kitchens did not have the ventilation to do it properly.
https://www.thespruceeats.com/best-electric-woks-to-buy-4138...
Also, it throws off way less heat than a gas burner. Almost all of it goes into the pan, where gas tends to throw a lot up around the pan.
I've never run into the problem mentioned by another in this thread about cycling when simmering or burning. My range is a $3500 Samsung range, more than a cheap electric, less than many gas, but not exactly cheap. Well worth it for me.
However, one downside I didn't expect is: My inductive range is more disposable.
Where a regular range, if it breaks, you can probably have a repair guy come by and do some simple troubleshooting and identify a burner element or knob that has failed... The inductive cooktop the repair guys tend to just want to replace the whole thing, to the tune of $750 parts, plus labor. At which point they start recommending you just replace the range, because most people don't want to spend more than a cheap range on a repair.
A year ago my range had two of the burners stop working. Thankfully, it was a well known problem, a blown solder joint on one of the boards deep in the cooktop. I was able to repair it for $0 in 3 hours (my son was helping, probably could have done it in half the time if I wasn't also teaching him), and we were back in business.
But no repairman would have wanted to spend 90 minutes on a "maybe" repair with no warranty and another 90 minute service call or potentially $300 board replacement or $750 cooktop replacement, and an angry customer because their fix didn't work.
No problem for a DIYer.
I get the principle but the UX leaves a lot to be desired. Other than boiling water it's a step down for me.
and loud
I prefer non-induction electric.
The required draw is too high.
Another thing to keep in mind: with gas about half the energy heats the air and flows around the pot or pan, so it ends up being about 50% efficient.
But with all said, the carbon monoxide buildup issue was what swayed me in the end.
I was rather talking about the required instantaneous draw which is usually too high for an average household's Solar setup.
I’m planning to install solar and was thinking around 3KW with battery backup. I definitely want induction cooking.
Should I get more capacity? Bigger batteries? Fewer burners?
[Edit: bigger batteries seems to be the answer, also because of cooking at night.]
Just need a grid-powered charger for the battery to replace the sun with if you worry about running out of electricity to cook.
[Edit: it's off the grid, only gets water, and I want to keep it that way in principle.]
If you have the charging top voltage at/below the peak of 240V mains (which is sqrt(2) higher than the rms of 240V), you can get away with using the load's voltage-adaptive power supply to handle the varying battery voltage. This will work with resistive heaters (no simple thermostats, though; "electronic trailing edge phase cut dimmer" is the technology needed, but with adapted control to work like a normal PWM), but resistive light bulbs would burn out.
There are plug standards similar to the ones used on computer power supplies that are rated as DC variants.
Feel free to stay in contact; I am looking for making use of local solar power for electronic loads that make up most of my electricity usage once I can spend the appropriate money on it, and combining it with UPS functionality as that's rather cheap to add.
Lithium batteries like you find in electric cars probably can support this but it does require a certain additional upfront investment.
The all-electrical all-self-produced setup probably isn't viable without a large enough battery and inverter.
I have to note that it is rated at 2000w at max setting (6), but due to it being so potent, we've never had it set to more than 3 out of 6, anything above that is way too aggressive. So make it 1000w typical draw.
In our kitchen we have both. Items heat faster with less heating of nonessential surrounding areas vs. standard burners.
My guess is cooking aside solar generation is probably not going to be by itself a sufficient source of household power for the foreseeable future. In any case optimizing use of electric energy requires taking advantage of the best available technologies.
https://www.inductioncooked.com/how-much-electricity-does-in...
You don't always have to start out with every burner on high!
Maybe a home however is lacking the battery intermediary.
If I remember correctly, my comment was based on an average household with about 4 to 5 KW installed in western Europe.
This represents about 12 panels which is roughly the maximum amount of panels a regular house has space for.
The first one I looked the specs up on at my home center has a 4.8kW largest element and 8.6kW total. https://images.thdstatic.com/catalog/pdfImages/d9/d92c8678-a...
I'm not even sure if my entire house has a breaker for more than 32A.
Also maybe you want to use the oven and AC and charge the car at the same time etc. As far as I understand, it's a plus and minus calculation. It's not any kind of compatibility issue...
Naturally big electric power sinks need bigger voltages, otherwise the current and thus the cabling would get very thick.
Cooktop with induction cooking zones:
Right front: 8” – 2300W, booster 3200W.
Left front: 8” – 2300W, booster 3200W.
Left rear: 7” – 1800W, booster 2600W.
Right rear: 7" - 1800W, booster 2600W.
Center: 10” – 2500W, booster 3800W.
Voltage: 240/208V.
Connection rating: 15400W.
Current: 40A.
So yeah, if you are in the habit of routinely maintaining four pots of water at a furiously rolling boil you probably will have problems. The rest of us are likely to be pretty safe.
No. Well, yes, a "cheap" electric cooktop that simply produces heat (coil or IR) is worse than burners, and less responsive. But that's not what you want. You want an induction cooktop: safe, efficient, beautiful, and more importantly, more responsive than burners.