Induction can have the crown as soon as appliance designers stop giving them infuriating capacitive touch controls that are a fundamentally bad input method for a fucking stove.
Give them knobs. The UI nerd in me is so angry at the slow death of competent design as its cannibalized by marketing and branding people, and the penny pinchers they serve.
The problem is not with the controls fundamentally, it’s with the low quality controls. A glass touch surface has merit: it’s extremely easy to clean and keep clean, you’re never gonna get boiling pasta juice in there and corrode the contacts or whatever. It’s just that the manufacturers use the worst, most pathetic sensors that stop working as soon as the surface gets slightly moist. My own induction stovetop is pretty bad in that regard, but my parents’ significantly more expensive one is perfectly fine. The control part of the glass surface never gets very hot either.
Point is, it’s pretty good when done right. But they often don’t do it right.
Easy to wipe true, but what if instead of a capacitor button we can have a magnetic control board with magnetic push keys?
It would be fully removable, attachment magnet snaps it into place and then it’s essentially a button with a magnet physically travelling up and down.
The I really hate the capacitor buttons since if you get pasta that boils over it fucks with the buttons pretty fast and the “off button” is just not good for quickly turning it off when flooded. It’s same for pan cooking sauce that splashes a bit, wiping the surface moist rag can have mixed results, paper towels become a requirement. There’s just a lot to not like.
A standard knob, as long as it’s not designed by an idiot, can be very simple by having a piece of heat resistant non corrosive material stuck out of the stove top and the button having a 1cm gap under it. Just make the pin chonky and you can drop a pan on it without anything happening. Lift the button off and it becomes still very easy to clean.
Knobs are definitely better for a stove. Even the best capacitive touch sensor won’t work if you’ve got an oven mitt on, or you need to make a quick adjustment without taking your eyes off the food
Do your parents have cats? Ours have turned the stove on during the night by walking across it. Now we have to “lock” the controls every night, and then “hold for 3 seconds” before we can unlock. The more sensitive the controls, the worse this all gets.
Knobs, dude. If you will it it is no dream.
But I never want to try and find the right place to touch a flat surface when I’m in the middle of basting meat and my pot is boiling over.
Analog style dials (they’re digital now) are easy to reach without looking, which keeps your focus on the task. Muscle memory is super important for flow.
It’s an inductive stove, the pots heat up instead of the surface.
That doesn’t prevent my pots from boiling over.
I tried this once at an Airbnb and it was really annoying to change temperature while cooking, which is one of the things indication is good for
Knobs belong on the front of the stove, under the ledge of the range/counter where you can’t spill anything on anyway.
Induction already wins cleanliness by a mile through not burning in whatever lands on the cooktop. No need to make knobs worse to make them easier to clean, when they don’t get dirty in the first place.
You mean in the space where I have a drawer full of cooking utensils and herbs? Because my induction top is only as high as my countertop. I much rather have the touch buttons than lose that space.
I will say I specifically bought an AEG because it has a slider. I can set it to 1 from 10 with one button press.
There’s nothing worse than having to press the minus-button 10 times when your pot is cooking over.
As long as the knobs aren’t behind the burners I’m happy. Every time I have to reach behind a boiling pot to turn it to simmer I just hear “bad design” in the voice of the audio book narrator for The Design of Everyday Things
But some of the new front knob designs get ruined by steam from the oven opening getting inside.
Why the hell that happens I do not know, but they moved the electronic parts there and steam ruins them.
Induction is fast, but actually cooking is a PITA because mine at least adjusts power output via PWMing the whole output with a very slow square wave: i.e. it alternates between full on and completely off. Yes that’s also what thermostats do on electric stoves with resistive elements, but those have extra thermal mass and thermal lag that smoothes out the overall heat output.
Induction has just gone from “cool, but for the rich folks” to simply an undisputed king of stovetops.
Much like solar and other green technologies.
Induction rules but the touch controls that almost always come with them can fuck right off.
I love the idea. I hate the shitty unreliable overly digital implementation. Induction came around after everything was already well on the way to enshittification. Components are sized to last through warranty, not to last 20 or 30 years.
My gas stove, which has certainly many issues, hasn’t got a chip in it, and with occasional replacement of igniters will likely outlast me, unless we choose to replace it. This is a unique stove though, I will admit.
Our last induction lasted 15 years untill somebody cracked it so you just need to not buy the cheapest ever and it’s alright.
15 years is not long for a stove to last.
Fast heating, wipe clean, works off clean electricity, roasts me less in the summer, doesn’t care about the air coming from a window, starts the first time every time, what more could I ask for? I got this cheap plug in one and it dropkicks my installed gas stove in basically every metric.
I got this cheap plug in one and it dropkicks my installed gas stove in basically every metric.
like a hot plate?
which one my hot plate is too shitty to use my moka pot on but i have zero problems using the moka pot over gas
Probably because your moka pot is aluminum (or otherwise non-magnetic) so induction can’t heat it.
oh, my shitty hot plate is one of those coils. it’s really shitty.
its problem is that it only has two settings, on and off, and it reaches the desired temperature by cycling between those. and full blast hot boils the water too fast.
Aluminum is more conductive than steel so eddy currents flow more easily in aluminum. Some pans have an aluminum disc inside, for induction stovetops. Maybe it’s too much aluminum vs just a disc? His hot plate might be too low power or not induction just a glass top
This is wrong. Induction requires magnetism, not conductivity. A pure aluminum pan will not get hot on an induction hob. Some aluminum pans have an iron or steel plate inserted in their base to allow them to work on induction.
OK you’re saying the higher resistance of the steel is needed for adequate heat. Got it
No, I am saying the pan has to be magnetic, which is what I have said 3 times now. You are completely wrong about how induction cooking works.
Heat from eddy currents is a small fraction of what magnetic hysteresis can produce. You can technically heat any good conductor with eddy currents alone if it is non-magnetic, but the equipment needed is significantly more complex and power hungry than induction cooking hobs.
what more could I ask for?
Longevity. My first induction lasted 10 years. My second 3 years, my 3rd six months, my fourth weeks. I use a conventional glasstop electric now.
Dang, that sucks. I’m still daily using an electric stove from the 1950’s lol. I would love it if modern “environmentally friendly” appliances could last this long
Yeah fast and easy to clean. What more can you want?
Physical knobs to turn instead of the tests of the limits of my patience that are capacitive buttons on a cooking device.
Please and thank you.
I hate capacitive buttons so much
Aaand actual temperature control. Not just on/off 100% power.
Temperature control seems to have so much delay that it seesaws wildly and isn’t actually useful in practice. I couldn’t get mine to boil eggs without it stopping the boil constantly, unless I set it to 160°+ IIRC.
Maybe not temp control, struggling to find a word, but a constant power flow instead of the on off duty cycle
Ah yes, the duty cycling is annoying, too!
Some induction stoves do have real knobs. Smeg makes one that I have not used so I can’t say anything about the quality, but I’m just happy that they exist.
That’s an unfortunate company name. Especially for one that makes kitchen appliances.
It’s an acronym for Smalterie Metallurgiche Emiliane Guastalla (“Emilian Guastalla Metallurgical Enamelling Works” in Italian). They’re actually a pretty high end brand, but yes, the name is amusing
Electric coils suck. They never make even contact with the pan, creating hot and cold spots.
Electric radiant is better. But it’s limited by lower burner output.
Gas solves both problems, but creates an additional problem that it measurably reduces indoor air quality with combustion byproducts.
The simple easy solution to that SHOULD be require a vent hood, and wire it so the fan automatically turns on low when the burners are lit. But that seems to require more brain power than the construction industry (or regulators) possess.Induction solves all problems. No combustion byproducts, even heat distribution, high output.
There’s also a company called Impulse that makes an induction cooktop with a 3 kWh battery inside- crank that guy up to 11 and it’ll dump 10 kilowatts into one burner so you can boil a pot of water in under a minute. Put in contrast, most gas and electric burners put out 2-4 kW. Obviously with only 3kWh it can’t sustain that output continually and once the battery is dead you’re left with whatever your electric circuit is good for, but that’s still plenty to get a pot boiling.
I have gas now. If I ever redo my kitchen I’m getting induction.
Gas also sends most of the energy from burning straight into the air so you heat the kitchen more than heating the food
