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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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