I have an induction hot plate and it’s very good at three things: Boiling water, getting a cast iron pan rocket hot, and burning anything I want cooked on low heat.
This is because it’s a cheap hot plate with a terrible control mechanism, but there must be some out there that can simmer rice without doing 100% power for one second followed by nine seconds of doing nothing. It’s not a good look for induction, and I don’t want to end up buying a stove that consistently burns my delicious marinara. Especially because I also need to do significant electrical work in my house just to have one.*
Resistance electric stoves are not just terrible but also inefficient. But I still don’t trust induction cooktops and when I ask the guy at Home Depot to try to cook a meal on one he looks at me weird.
* Unless I get one of those neat battery-backed induction cooktops that use a 110V hookup.
ETA: Instead of downvoting maybe you could convince me that not all induction stoves will burn my marianara due to shitty control systems
The problem is that most electric stove tops duty cycles this way. It’s terrible for low temperature applications in something that doesn’t have the mass to retain heat. And something that does have the mass takes a long time to hit those low temps unless you start with longer time on duty cycles. They also suck for precise heat control.
You can’t use a resister anywhere else in the circuit because it would be wildly inefficient that way. The only option might be regulating voltage. But that’s easier said than done.
I don’t think electric is necessarily bad. But it’s choosing the right tool for the job and both should probably be in a range instead of having it be one or the other.
The other problem is that duty cycles are such a nerdy thing to be concerned about nobody has any answers about them. The specifications don’t have them, the sales guys know nothing, and short of disassembling the stove and looking up the model number of the regulator I can’t make an informed decisions. Which sucks when you’re dropping a thousand bucks on a stove and a few hundred to get electric run to my kitchen.
Which is why I would love to be able to test drive a stove. Even if it’s just with a pot of water I could get an idea of how frequent the duty cycles are on various settings. But there’s no appliance store that will let me do that.
I have an induction hot plate and it’s very good at three things: Boiling water, getting a cast iron pan rocket hot, and burning anything I want cooked on low heat.
This is because it’s a cheap hot plate with a terrible control mechanism, but there must be some out there that can simmer rice without doing 100% power for one second followed by nine seconds of doing nothing. It’s not a good look for induction, and I don’t want to end up buying a stove that consistently burns my delicious marinara. Especially because I also need to do significant electrical work in my house just to have one.*
Resistance electric stoves are not just terrible but also inefficient. But I still don’t trust induction cooktops and when I ask the guy at Home Depot to try to cook a meal on one he looks at me weird.
* Unless I get one of those neat battery-backed induction cooktops that use a 110V hookup.
ETA: Instead of downvoting maybe you could convince me that not all induction stoves will burn my marianara due to shitty control systems
The problem is that most electric stove tops duty cycles this way. It’s terrible for low temperature applications in something that doesn’t have the mass to retain heat. And something that does have the mass takes a long time to hit those low temps unless you start with longer time on duty cycles. They also suck for precise heat control.
You can’t use a resister anywhere else in the circuit because it would be wildly inefficient that way. The only option might be regulating voltage. But that’s easier said than done.
I don’t think electric is necessarily bad. But it’s choosing the right tool for the job and both should probably be in a range instead of having it be one or the other.
The other problem is that duty cycles are such a nerdy thing to be concerned about nobody has any answers about them. The specifications don’t have them, the sales guys know nothing, and short of disassembling the stove and looking up the model number of the regulator I can’t make an informed decisions. Which sucks when you’re dropping a thousand bucks on a stove and a few hundred to get electric run to my kitchen.
Which is why I would love to be able to test drive a stove. Even if it’s just with a pot of water I could get an idea of how frequent the duty cycles are on various settings. But there’s no appliance store that will let me do that.