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Comment by cafemachiavelli | Hacker News Reader

I'm German and switched to induction from (old) electric after moving to a nicer apartment.

Despite ostensibly knowing about its responsiveness before I still ended up with slightly underdone food for the first week - if you turn off the stove, it will get cold almost immediately, no/little residual heat to make use of.

It also comes with the vaguely flashy feature of letting you run one stove plate with twice the energy by temporarily disabling its neighbor. Since the dial goes up to 9.5 regularly, I call the power boost setting "19" and relish in the knowledge that I'm 8 steps ahead of Spinal Tap.

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Now I want a cook top with a burner that goes to 11. My last gas stove had a 'hot' burner. Problem was the scaling doesn't match the other burners.

I have a glass top range now and it sucks. Problem is most of the good induction units in the US are built in cooktops. Good ranges (combined cooktop+oven) are $$$$.

> Problem is most of the good induction units in the US are built in cooktops. Good ranges (combined cooktop+oven) are $$$$.

Build one yourself, that's what I did when I bought my house in the Netherlands somewhere in the 90's. I wanted induction and a hot-air oven but did not want to pay for the privilege. I built a heavy wooden frame sized to fit the oven and the induction cooker, made a drawer for oven utensils in the bottom and a hard-wood ring around the hole for the induction cooker. Wooded sides make of glued floor boards. Once the hardware arrived I could simply drop and slide it in place, wire it up to the connection box I made on the back and plug it in - voila, an induction range with hot-air oven on the somewhat-less-expensive. I sold the house 5 years later and moved to Sweden where I now cook on a wood-burning stove, from the future to the past. I like the past better, it also fits my rather dynamic cooking style - sliding and banging heavy cast-iron pans around is far less precarious on a cast-iron stove.

We are thinking about doing something similar for our kitchen. We currently have a gas range with a over range microwave, but want to replace all that with an induction cook top and a dedicated range hood vented outside (under cabinet or built-in, 700 CFM or so). We lose our microwave and our oven, so we have ti replace those somewhere. I’m liking the microwave oven combos (not the combined microwave convection oven, though that is cool also), which we would have to build a new cabinet for elsewhere, not beneath the cooktop (or maybe a drawer microwave beneath the cook top and the oven…somewhere else?).

I think that's because most homes do not have sufficient electrical power to run everything at once.

For example: 50A for the heat pump, 50A to charge your car, 50A for the range, 30A for the dryer, 30A for the water heater = 210A (all my examples are for 240V) + various lights and other things. Homes in the US are most commonly wired for 100, 150, or 200A.

So they'll run the range at 30A instead, but that means you can't use all the burners at the same time at full power.

If we are actually going to fully electrify the home 200A or more service is going to have to become the starting point. Residential panels > 200A in the US are rare (from what I read most power companies won't even supply such service), and that might need to change.

> I think that's because most homes do not have sufficient electrical power to run everything at once

Our (five-zone) induction hob uses all three phases, it's connected using a 5-core cable.

See previous discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20798298

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