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Comment by ericbarrett | Hacker News Reader

A proper induction range will boil water much faster than gas. Under two minutes to take a full pasta pot—8 quarts (7.5L) of water—from tap-cold (50F/10C) to a rolling boil. Do not confuse them with resistive coil electric stoves, which are inferior in every way! Unless you're dead set on aluminum cookware.

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I like induction cooking as well, but it's not _that_ fast. Assuming a 3 kW (usually it's less powerful) induction stovetop, 7 kg of water, 4 J/(g.c) specific heat and 90 C temperature increase, that would take at the very least 14 minutes. Should take longer if you include heating the pan itself, phase change energy and heat losses. If you wanted to do it in two minutes, that would take twice as much power as a home Tesla charger. Heating water just takes a ton of energy.

I can confirm that our induction stove is very fast, much faster at boiling water than the (domestic) gas stoves I've had experience with. A pot of water really does boil in under two minutes, so I wanted to question your math, but it seems correct :-). The problem here is the quantity, why are you (gp) boiling 7 liters of water?

edit: the boost is more powerful (3.7kW for the largest zone), but still. That's time limited (10 minutes or less), and limits the current to the other zone on the same phase.

The difference in volume between a normal tea kettle < 2 mins and large pasta pot ~14 mins seems intuitively correct simply based on volume.

I've recently put in a jennair unit that will do 5kW into the main element.

The speed with which it heats things is actually kind of scary. I can take one of my 9" iron skillets from dead cold to smoking hot in under 20 seconds.

For sure - the first time I made popcorn on my induction stove I figured I'd put it on high heat for a bit to get it up to temperature like you would on a gas stove. Nearly ruined that pan.

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