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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

I can contribute another simple example of a kitchen appliance that didn't necessarily get smarter: the cooking plate! Remember the good old cookers with rotary switches? Those actually had up to seven different stages of heating (see schematic here http://www.herd.josefscholz.de/7Takt/img16.gif)! While the new digital ones are... digital - i.e. they switch the plate on and off repeatedly to produce different amounts of heat, but that depends on the pot/pan/whatever you put on it to store the heat while the plate is off. So a definite step backward if you ask me...

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The digital touch screen ones won because they are so much easier to clean. A current model induction stove is a completely flat sheet of glass. You spray some chemical on it and give it a wipe down and its done. No pulling knobs off, working between gaps, etc.

And on the switching behavior, I believe that is more related to just how induction cooking works rather than the way you control it. The values on the control panel are not exact anyway, you are always going to have to get a feel for how they work for your setup.

I moved from a house with an induction stove to a classic gas stove and its an absolute nightmare. Cooks slower and takes 50x the effort to clean.

To be fair, they do have gas stoves with inductive touch panels now. Only thing to clean are the grills themselves.

The knobs are part of it but the actual grill bits are by far the worst. I don't understand why gas stoves are so popular when you have to pull them to bits and scrub down after every use if you don't want them looking like crap. While induction is faster and takes a 20 second spray and wipe.

>I don't understand why gas stoves are so popular when you have to pull them to bits and scrub down after every use if you don't want them looking like crap.

Because that literally isn't a concern for almost everyone who has one? I clean mine once a week.

Gas stoves can put out significantly more power than electric, and achieve high temperatures much more rapidly. It's very convenient compared to electric.

That's not particularly true

Inductive stoves are vastly more efficient than the old fashioned resistive coil stoves, so your 3000W of input power can yield cooking heat similar to a 40,000 or 50,000 btu gas stove.

They also reach temp much, much more quickly than the old style. You can vary the output as quickly as a gas stove.

The induction ones are crazy powerful now. The one I was looking at could pull 12kW. Could boil a pot of water very fast. Much faster than gas.

I suspect that the 12KW isn't to a single burner, but rather the total across all burners. A typical home gas range is probably totalling 17kW or so with all burners going. doing some research in the internet, the large burners on induction cook tops do about 3.5kW, with less common 11" burners getting up to 4kW or so. The large burners on a gas stove do about 17500 BTU, which is about 5kW.

I could believe that the power transfers more efficiently on an induction stove as the pot itself heats up. Maybe it's enough to balance out to roughly equivalent to gas, and a 12kW induction range sounds like a nice convenience. I would bet that you aren't boiling your water as fast as you think you are relative to a gas burner though. :-)

> I would bet that you aren't boiling your water as fast as you think you are relative to a gas burner though.

I moved recently to somewhere that has gas and noticed its is quite a lot slower than the induction stove I was using. The gas one seems worse in every way but initial cost.

The operating cost is generally lower for gas as well. It's certainly true where I live, where 1 kWh is seemingly something like $0.40 after all the rates, fees and taxes.

Is your gas stove in your new place nice or is it kinda cheap? I've certainly used plenty of mediocre gas burners. I would expect a high end induction stove to be a better experience than a low end gas burner. I think we can all agree that electric coil burners are terrible.

Induction ranges are ~ 2x more energy efficient than resistive, since there’s no loss of heat between the heater coil and pan.

I just switched from gas to induction, and am consistently surprised at how cool the area around the pan stays vs. with natural gas. I’d guess the gas burner is wasting at least half the heat it puts off. A 5kW gas burner is definitely delivering less heat to the pan than a 4 kW induction burner.

Induction has other disadvantages though. The most obvious is that the bottom of the pan has to be perfectly flat, and match the burner size (at least for most burners). Lots of specialty cookware fails that requirement (magnetic or not).

Ah, cool. Looking up efficiencies, it looks like induction is about 80% vs. gas about 40%. So that puts output power at 2.5kW for a large induction burner vs 2kW for a large gas burner. So I suppose you could boil water slightly faster with a nice induction stove, assuming good heat transfer on both.

Better more precise temperature regulation, plus instant on.

yeah, it's really easy to clean if you don't wait too long.

My best friend growing up lived in a multigenerational home with hardcore Italian grandparents who took care of everything. I’d venture to guess that most objects in their home were nicer than the day they were purchased. The couches were covered in vinyl, floors waxed weekly, etc. The basement of that house was like a museum to tools and laundry.

Even his grandparents didn’t clean the stove after each use. They lined the burner area with foil instead.

> The digital touch screen ones won because they are so much easier to clean. A current model induction stove is a completely flat sheet of glass.

For sure it’s easier to clean, but on the ones I’ve used I find the “buttons” very fidgety because of this flat design. I’d sacrifice some ease in cleaning for the tactile feedback of mechanical buttons or ideally a (stepped) dial.

At least from my experience my induction stove does not seem to have this problem, which kinda makes sense if you think about it: It already has to switch on/off many times per second to induce current, so it can just skip some cycles.

I suppose as induction slowly wins over resistive heating this will become a non issue once again.

I really loved my induction range and miss it, having moved back to gas. It could bring an 8 quart pot of water to a rolling boil in two minutes flat.

Isn't it much more efficient to use pwm than resistors to adjust energy in that fashion?

Not to mention the digital ones are more prone to failure.

Are they? Is this studied? I have never heard of one failing and know many people with them.

by cooking plate I mean the cooking plates in the normally sold induction stovetop, in those of course the failure is generally not on the cooking plate but the stovetop itself but that doesn't matter, once the stovetop goes you can't use a plate because it's all one big integrated appliance.

So anyway I bought a slightly above medium priced one a few years ago, and it has failed about 5 times. When we had the guy out to fix it he said that it was a common problem that the part where you have to push to start a particular plate cooking can fail to register a push anymore and as a general rule if one of the 'buttons' couldn't be pushed none of them could be pushed because after all they aren't really buttons.

I asked why is it continually failing he said oh sometimes there is some underlying electrical issue, but I think we have everything fixed now.

Anyway after the fifth breakdown in a couple years it has been going pretty good for a year now.

Now of course since an induction stovetop is one big piece, there are fewer parts that can fail. So maybe there actually is a higher failure on analog stoves, but I remember every time I had a failure on my analog stoves it was only one piece that failed, and sometimes it was easy to make it work again, like a broken knob, or it was only a partial failure like that cooking plate doesn't get as hot as it used to. When my current stovetop fails, it is all failed.

A case in point I bought a small portable two cooking plate analog stove at the same time I bought the more modern induction one. One of the cooking plates got broken some years back but the other still works. We also need it to make espresso as the pot is too light to register on the induction stovetop.

on edit: must be tired, changed in case of point to a case in point.

The controllers fail all of the time. Many of them don’t fare well around high heat, and sometimes the capacitive panels delaminate or otherwise fail. Replacement is usually expensive. The failure point of analog controls was usually the trivially replaceable knob.

Appliance makers do a ton of reliability engineering to deliver predictable failure rates. Barring atypical screwups and bad design, major appliances tend to fall off a cliff about a year after the expiry of their extended warranty (usually 4-6 years)

We had a trade off, we mostly traded labor for parts cost, the labor to change parts is now basically trivial, but the parts are 3-4x more.

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