Only if you use the higher settings, which you typically don't unless you are boiling water. Source: I have induction and solar and my stove-top is 90% solar (with BESS). The oven is a different story.

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 definitely think you are right about efficiency.

I was rather talking about the required instantaneous draw which is usually too high for an average household's Solar setup.

Is there a simple trick to make this work?

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.]

If you can get the required parts in the single quantities you'd need, you may want to consider a battery voltage suitable for the induction stove to run directly off of, so you wouldn't need the dance with a bigger inverter and that.

Just need a grid-powered charger for the battery to replace the sun with if you worry about running out of electricity to cook.

Thanks, I will keep voltage in mind. I have ample wind so my long-term plan is solar plus small windmills on the roof. For bigger cooking sessions I will have an outdoor grill, might add some burners too. This is Spain so big LPG tanks for the home are totally common.

[Edit: it's off the grid, only gets water, and I want to keep it that way in principle.]

Yeah, if it's already off-the-grid, just combine batteries with a DC microgrid if you're aiming for cheap and efficient.

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.

Induction cooktops are wildly popular on solar powered sailboats, do you have any sort of information to back this claim up? There are tens if not hundreds of sailing vlogs on youtube who are exclusively using induction cooktops because they don't want to carry propane onboard.

I find that quite surprising. I don't have an induction hob, but I do have an electric fan oven, and I find my batteries, charged from solar cope with that just fine, or a 3kW electric kettle.

They are particularly suitable to be run directly off of a battery with no inverter, because they are essentially a switched mode power supply with the pan as the secondary winding. They already have a rectifier front end.

Wouldn't a battery bank/wall be the buffer that would solve this problem? The battery bank could be supplied by an electric vehicle, plugged in when at rest for such a purpose.

Don't quote me on this but usually, regular batteries usually don't allow for such an instantaneous draw.

Lithium batteries like you find in electric cars probably can support this but it does require a certain additional upfront investment.

fair enough - i did just assume that this could be built "easily".

It can be built easily, but perhaps not yet cheaply. Just buy a Tesla PowerWall or similar.

That's a very categorical statement for a comparison of two quantities, both of which vary (cooktop power and solar power). And ultimately if you're using a lower-power cooktop it .. won't cook properly.

The all-electrical all-self-produced setup probably isn't viable without a large enough battery and inverter.

This doesn't sound right (correct me if wrong)... but we've ran a small one plate cooker off of a camping solar system + battery kit & off of a petrol generator and it all seemed fine and working as normal. Usually when putting heavy load on the generator you can hear it work harder, but with this plate it barely makes a difference.

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.

That may be true but gas cooking isn't available everywhere. So if electricity-based cooking is necessary, induction is likely more efficient than conventional resistance coils.

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.

We have solar panels on medium sized house in the UK (15 panels - half east, half west roughly) and an induction hob and use it without needing power from the grid!

Induction stoves are anywhere from 1200W to 3800W for the larger ones at full power. Looks like the size just needs to be considered when building it out.

https://www.inductioncooked.com/how-much-electricity-does-in...

Induction is way more energy efficient than electric though (and therefore draw less), so what are you suggesting?

You are talking about overall power consumption, not the instantaneous draw which is the one I was thinking about.

If you are concerned about instantaneous draw you can always start low and ramp up.

You don't always have to start out with every burner on high!

What do you mean by instantaneous draw?

I would like to know what is your point here? You can't consume locally produced gas either, can you? Or are you comparing with non-induction electrical stove?

Neither is gas, or I assume resistive electric. An energy storage system solves that problem.

lower draw than IR or coil

I've ran our induction range on our solar panels for about five years now. This is news to me.

Seen RV build-outs with an induction cook-stove (and solar). I think the issue has more to do with battery capacity/current-delivery than with your solar capacity.

Maybe a home however is lacking the battery intermediary.

What solar capacity did you have installed?

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.

That’s still enough for a peak of 2kw for an average induction range. Granted you can’t probably run a heater and a vacuum on full power at the same time.

If the peak power is only 2kW (8.3A @ 240V), why do most induction cooktops have a 40-50A beaker (32-40A/7.5-9.6kW continuous)?

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...

2kw per element is plenty of power, though you could definitely find more powerful ones. In my 3 years of owning an induction cooktop, I don't think I've ever had more than 1 element at full power at one time, it's really only useful for bringing water to boil, waaaaaaaay to much heat for anything else.

I'm not even sure if my entire house has a breaker for more than 32A.

Yeah, indeed, this is not esoteric physics. If you have a 10 kW electric induction stove (you can see the rating from the specs) and you want to operate purely on solar panels, you need at least 10 kW of solar panels and inverter etc.

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.

If you want to run it just on solar, use one that can be legally fed with DC (almost all work fine, anyways), and hook a battery with suitable voltage between it and the solar panels.

Random model from Ikea: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/samfaelld-induction-cooktop-bla...

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.

If you are running the burners flat out. Which you only do when getting water to boil or preheating cookware. Once up to temp, induction requires far less energy to cook with since it is way more efficient - directly heating the pan.

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.

Yeah, I wasn't intending that, it was just shown to get some feel for the numbers. It was the biggest Ikea cooking top as well.

Yeah, 2kW seems low for a multi-burner stove. That gets you an electric kettle or a large toaster. Maybe a single element might draw that.

Would using a whole-home battery in conjunction with the solar installation solve this?

Roughly 15kW, so quite a bit more than that.