I just got an induction cook top and it’s amazing. WAY more efficient than alternatives, better indoor air quality as compared to gas. One problem: can’t cook if the power is out. Good ideas all around.
How often does your power go out that this is a major concern?
You are #3 on the “your power sucks” roster for this thread!
I would just use my camping stove or BBQ if I had to due to an extended power outage. Runs on anything that will burn pretty much.
I mean that’s my play. If you don’t have power for an extended time then you also don’t have refrigeration, or much else.
“Hurricane” parties where you have to eat all your food and drink all the beer before it gets warm.
There are lots of things you can’t do without power, how bad is your power grid that you need to plan everyday life around powercuts?
I’m seeing a lot of derogatory comments exactly like this shitting on the power grid. Either there’s a bunch of southwestern kids on here who never sat through a storm in their lives and can’t imagine weather which impacts infrastructure, or the mockery bots are in play.
It’s winter in the northeast, and it’s been pretty brutal, so power has gone out repeatedly. I’m not planning around them, I just want to cook in the event there’s a multi day outage. And there’s been two this year.
This Copper model (and also the cooktop that Impulse makes) has enough battery to do some cooking even in a power outage.
This is important for those replacing gas or propane stoves and don’t want to add the cost of running a 240V line that most resistance and induction ovens require.
OK this makes sense. It answers my WTF reaction at the thought of a battery-backed range.
As an added benefit besides the environmental ones - you can’t blow out a wall and collapse a house with careless use of an induction cooker. :)
That’s true. I’ve watched Fight Club.
All it takes is someone not knowing how to handle a grease fire, and you can make one of those on anything called a stove.
I don’t know what you’re trying to convey with this.
Also, very unlikely. You need a source of ignition to start a fire. So unless someone is letting grease get so hot that it is ignitable, then lighting a cigarette within inches of the, again, very hot grease. Then the likelihood of starting a grease fire with an induction cooktop is near zero.
The video of the stove setup seems great till they get to the part that you have to connect your stove to WiFi and pair it with their phone app. This means I’m never buying the Charlie stove.
Induction burners are of limited utility in some scenarios like restaurants or with certain cuisines (someone else mentioned woks) but 99.9% of residential needs are readily met with an induction burner. In fact, were I live electric coil stoves are the norm in homes anyway and induction is generally considered an improvement over those.
Their utility isn’t limited. Restaurant chefs love them.
We just don’t have the infra. Buildings and backbone would need retrofits.
And that would obviously be too much of burden for the betterment of things. Small changes but unfortunately dismissed as not a silver bullet.
Again, like I said, practically all residential needs would be met by their use.
I only used induction burners for heating cream to make custard. For careful control of temperature they are great. Wouldn’t use them to saute though
Oh! I’ve heard different reports and noticed I need to make very few accommodations, mostly cutting my lazy bullshit. I’m kind of interested in this.
I mean, when all the gas burners would in use, I would use our portable induction burner for other things like boiling pasta or whatever but for things requiring precise temperature control I started avoiding the gas stoves.
I can tell you’re a genuine line cook, wanna give this one an edit pass later?
what does that mean?
There is a slight limitation on what kind of cookware you can use on them. The pots and pans have to be ferromagnetic. Aluminium cookware doesn’t work and it looks like stainless can be hit or miss depending on how it’s made. It’s not a big issue unless most of your cookware doesn’t work on it.
Do restaurants use a lot of cheap aluminum crap, or prefer shit that will last?
Also: retrofits for existing ones if the former, but new restaurants would prefer induction if infra allowed
Do restaurants use a lot of cheap aluminum crap
With the exception of the non-reactive pans which are rare, it’s all aluminum
Even if you have a gas stove, most people aren’t going to have one that puts out the amount of BTUs to really make traditional wok cooking work anyway, so it’s a bit of a non-issue on at least that front. If I was going to bust out a wok and start trying to nail Chinese food, I’d skip right past my rapid-boil burner and go to one of the portable propane stoves they sell in Asian supermarkets. In the US, at least, I wouldn’t expect to see a stove that can deliver that sort of heat output (aside from something custom made) anymore than I would expect an off the shelf oven to be able to replicate the temps in the pizza oven at a pizzeria.
I have a 100000 BTU burner used for frying turkeys. That gets me almost the same kind of flame I see in restaurants, but I do need to do it outside!
I’ve never seen a home gas stove put out anywhere close to the BTUs of even a commercial gas stove.
It’s also a safety upgrade, as the risk of fires is much diminished.
Maybe if we go for 1,000,000 pilot programs we can piecemeal sneak ourselves into some kind of real change.
The plan is to do a limited-scale pilot, then do 10,000 apartments once a smooth process doing the upgrade is in place
Yeah, test cases to feel out doing shit at scale is good cautious practice for not fucking upat scale
Sadly, a lot of things only make it to the pilot stage, regardless of how great the results might look.
Now, if the Lemmy community could pour together funds, and concentrate on renovating key areas, we can make a drastic difference
Don’t you need special pots and pans for induction stoves? Would a cast iron skillet work on one of those? Or a standard non stick pan?
Yes, you can test with a magnet. If it doesn’t react, it won’t work. Aluminium for instance doesn’t work.
I don’t know why you were down voted and the user below gave misinformation. I bought a non stick pan before without noticing it wouldn’t work with my induction. Now I bring a magnet when choosing a pan.
Aluminium for instance doesn’t work.
A lot of cheap pans I’ve seen at (AU) Kmart, Big W, Ikea etc are aluminum with a teflon-esque coating, but with a carbon-steel circle attached to the bottom that makes it induction compatible.
It was aldi and not too cheap. But it was a while ago when I induction wasn’t common.
Would a cast iron skillet work on one of those?
Definitely, you just need pans with a ferromagnetic bottom, so cast iron works very well.
The outer material doesn’t matter - only the base. Many cheap induction-compatible pans are made mostly of aluminum with a non-stick coating, but containing a layer of ferromagnetic material in the base that will heat up on an induction stove.
Cast iron would work, though you shouldn’t blast the heat on it immediately because of how brittle they are and how unevenly they heat. You can find plenty of pictures online of people just chucking a room temp cast iron on at max heat and splitting them right down the middle. They get plenty hot when preheated at around the medium setting on most ranges, and if you need more you can blast it after it’s warmed up in like 2-3 minutes.
So, you should start my setting the stove to low and gradually heat it up?
If you want to completely mitigate the risk, then yeah it’s ideal to start on low and progressively ratchet the heat up. Personally, I’ve just left it at medium and then cranked it up two notches on the dial after a few minutes. I’ve really never used the maximum heat for anything other than boiling water on my range, since just over medium is more than hot enough for a lovely sear. If the coil is significantly smaller than the bottom of the pan, I’d be much more careful and start on low no matter what pan I’m using just to reduce the risk of warping.
Yeah of course those kind of pans work fine. You don’t need anything special for induction. It’s standard for a lot of the country.
Old pots which don’t have enough iron or nickel in them for a magnet to stick to the bottom won’t get hot on an induction stove.
Cast iron works fine, but that cheap aluminum pot you bought as a student 20 years ago won’t work.
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I’ve removed this post due to misinformation. Copper and aluminum pots on an induction stove arent forbidden; they just don’t get hot on an induction stove.
Thanks for correcting.
There seems to be contradictory information on the subject.
Aluminum foil is proven to melt on induction cookers (see attached photo). But that’s because foil is thin.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Foil_on_induction_cooktop.jpg
A photo I suggest taking a look at: induction heater burning aluminum foil. Taken from the publication “Practical Course on School Experiments for Future Physics teachers”.
…as for thick aluminum cookware, or copper cookware, I was not implying that they would overheat themselves, I was implying that the induction cooker would overheat its coil attempting to work with them, because they conduct current better than the coil. But perhaps that’s prevented by protection circuits or a process I haven’t taken into account. I can’t test since I don’t have an induction cooker at home.
EM-fields induce current in copper and aluminum perfectly fine, no ferromagnetism is needed. You can build a coreless transformer for example, ordinary tranformers simply benefit from having a core (the core is separated into thin layers to reduce heating). Copper and aluminum simply conduct current very well, so appreciable heat does not appear at everyday levels of field strength and current. Steel and cast iron, having considerable resistance, heat up in a similar field, conducting similar amounts of current. There’s a potential gap in my understanding of the process, however - perhaps I’m failing to take into account the frequency of a cooking field in an induction cooker. The frequency determines whether current wants to travel in the depth of the conductor or on the surface of the conductor.
Simple experiments that I can recommend:
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take a circuar magnet and let it drop along a copper pipe -> you will observe that it drops slowly, braking itself by inducing current in copper
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spin a rotor with magnets next to a plate of copper -> you will observe mechanical resistance to spinning, because it induces current in copper
I can also recommend an interesting Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current
Quoting from the article (emphasis mine):
For example, a nearby conductive surface will exert a drag force on a moving magnet that opposes its motion, due to eddy currents induced in the surface by the moving magnetic field. This effect is employed in eddy current brakes which are used to stop rotating power tools quickly when they are turned off. The current flowing through the resistance of the conductor also dissipates energy as heat in the material. Thus eddy currents are a cause of energy loss in alternating current (AC) inductors, transformers, electric motors and generators, and other AC machinery, requiring special construction such as laminated magnetic cores or ferrite cores to minimize them. Eddy currents are also used to heat objects in induction heating furnaces and equipment, and to detect cracks and flaws in metal parts using eddy-current testing instruments.
I also recommend this source and will quote them below:
Induction heating utilizes electromagnetic fields to heat conductive materials without any direct contact. Aluminum, although non-magnetic, heats effectively because of its high electrical conductivity. However, it produces weaker eddy currents in comparison to ferrous metals.
This stuff would matter if induction stoves just had a raw component and no cooling or temperatue sensor or pot presence sensor. They’re an engineered product which doesn’t fail in the same way that the raw components do without any of that.
After thinking about this for a while… I can’t say I agree with that.
Sensors can fail. Some companies may even produce sub-standard sensors or faulty logic. I think it’s OK to tell people that copper and aluminum aren’t allowed on an induction top, and the makers of induction tops seem to think similarly, they just add a sentence “unless equipped with a magnetic base”.
Let’s take a manual of a randomly chosen induction cooker:
https://www.caple.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/C850I-Instruction-manual-May-2017.pdf
Let’s examine what it says:
Cookware made from the following materials is not suitable: pure stainless steel, aluminum or copper without a magnetic base, glass, wood, porcelain, ceramic, and earthenware
On one hand, an aluminum pot won’t heat. On the other hand, aluminum foil will melt, or if placed somewhat closer, catch fire. I think I should be allowed to claim that “aluminum is forbidden” on induction tops and add that “aluminum foil is extra forbidden”.
Will you kindly restore my post? People can downvote or argue it if they don’t like my interpretation, but I don’t think it’s misinformation. It explains some things they might not even know about. I would be sad if people think that ferromagnetism is required for induction heating to happen. It would be nice if people understood how their cooker accomplishes heating in more depth than “if a magnet sticks, it’s OK”.
That manual entry is different from the danger case; it’s just telling you that the stove won’t do anything, which is what ones I’ve actually encountered do: they have a sensor which detects a non-ferromagnetic material, and keeps the stove from activating.
Sure stuff can fail. But designed right, it means that the stove breaks, not that it puts people in danger.
This is a bunch of scaremongering.
This is a bunch of scaremongering.
Then you should also remove my post about it being possible to blow out a wall with a gas stove. It might also scare people. It’s here, I kindly request that you review it:
https://slrpnk.net/comment/19887409
Moderation practises should be consistent, in my opinion.
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Good call asking. It just clicked that my glass pots wouldn’t work. I mean, of course they wouldn’t, but I wouldn’t think of them while stove shopping because I only rarely use them.
5 am rambling about why I have glass pots: I keep them around for a friend that keeps kosher and visits. My non-Jewish understanding is that different folks keep kosher differently based on different traditions. Her tradition is that glass doesn’t pick up meat, dairy, or non-kosherness, so the same pot can be used for meat, dairy, or non-kosher meals, with washing in between of course.
Edit: and to make something explicit that I didn’t know until I started ordering pizza with kosher-keeping D&D friends: there’s a rule against mixing meat and dairy, so it’s important to keep things with meat-i-ness and dairy-i-ness separate, because a dairy plate could transfer dairy-i-ness to a meat meal, which would make the meal not-kosher.
Huh interesting. I didn’t know that.
That’s a fair amount of backup battery and inverter power to run a stove, too. Awesome that that’s cheap enough to install en masse.
Good on them. I’ve only ever seen gas ranges in 100+ year old apartment buildings.
There are some pros and cons like better for environment and health but also some people might think more about electricity being more expensive. Although, because of how efficient induction stoves are, it might be closer than I thought
Electricity could be more expensive per unit, but it also doesn’t generally have minimum amounts for delivery to keep the stove functioning, at least, so it’s a bit of a trade off. I remember growing up, we just stopped using the stove and oven and did everything on the grill, year round, because the company that served our area for cooking gas wouldn’t make a delivery for less than $200 worth of fuel. $200 was way more than my parents had to spare for it at the time, and also like pre-paying for 9-10 months at a time, versus month to month with the electricity bill.
Will they have good enough cookware? And not thin aluminum dollar store junk without the steel insert?
Probably. Induction-ready cookware is cheap and widely available.
Battery backed seems odd. I just got a regular induction stove and it’s great. No idea why someone would choose to use gas. Oh well, their lungs are not my problem.
The battery means you can run a 4-burner stove on 120v, which avoids the need to rewire apartment buildings
why battery backed???
It appears the main driver for the replacements are frequent gas service outages. Presumably they didn’t want to just replace that with an equivalent vulnerability to blackouts.
Also, a battery can add to the power of a standard outlet, so these stoves can have some serious output even without a 240V connection.
One of the benefits of gas is that you can still use it to prepare food and boil water in the event of a power failure due to natural disasters and extreme weather. A battery backup is an essential part of an emergency kit in areas where this is a reasonable concern.
I mean I don’t have one but while we do have power outages my area does get priority for getting back online because we don’t get gas. I actually would love to get a whole unit battery system but there are many things that need renovation and I certainly am not in economic shape to tackle anything atm.
Mainly to avoid the extra costs of installing a 240v socket to kitchens that don’t have one (older kitchens with gas oven’s usually do not).
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Made the switch a year ago and I couldn’t be happier. Induction cooking is really really nice.
Induction is better for both the global and indoor environment. In some countries landlords aren’t allowed to install gas appliances anymore because of the long term effects on the tenants’ lungs.
Could always have a camping stove for the rare power outage.
