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Comment by YATA0 | Hacker News Reader

I've ran our induction range on our solar panels for about five years now. This is news to me.

Seen RV build-outs with an induction cook-stove (and solar). I think the issue has more to do with battery capacity/current-delivery than with your solar capacity.

Maybe a home however is lacking the battery intermediary.

What solar capacity did you have installed?

If I remember correctly, my comment was based on an average household with about 4 to 5 KW installed in western Europe.

This represents about 12 panels which is roughly the maximum amount of panels a regular house has space for.

Roughly 15kW, so quite a bit more than that.

That’s still enough for a peak of 2kw for an average induction range. Granted you can’t probably run a heater and a vacuum on full power at the same time.

If the peak power is only 2kW (8.3A @ 240V), why do most induction cooktops have a 40-50A beaker (32-40A/7.5-9.6kW continuous)?

The first one I looked the specs up on at my home center has a 4.8kW largest element and 8.6kW total. https://images.thdstatic.com/catalog/pdfImages/d9/d92c8678-a...

Yeah, 2kW seems low for a multi-burner stove. That gets you an electric kettle or a large toaster. Maybe a single element might draw that.

2kw per element is plenty of power, though you could definitely find more powerful ones. In my 3 years of owning an induction cooktop, I don't think I've ever had more than 1 element at full power at one time, it's really only useful for bringing water to boil, waaaaaaaay to much heat for anything else.

I'm not even sure if my entire house has a breaker for more than 32A.

Yeah, indeed, this is not esoteric physics. If you have a 10 kW electric induction stove (you can see the rating from the specs) and you want to operate purely on solar panels, you need at least 10 kW of solar panels and inverter etc.

Also maybe you want to use the oven and AC and charge the car at the same time etc. As far as I understand, it's a plus and minus calculation. It's not any kind of compatibility issue...

Naturally big electric power sinks need bigger voltages, otherwise the current and thus the cabling would get very thick.

If you want to run it just on solar, use one that can be legally fed with DC (almost all work fine, anyways), and hook a battery with suitable voltage between it and the solar panels.

Random model from Ikea: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/samfaelld-induction-cooktop-bla...

Cooktop with induction cooking zones:

Right front: 8” – 2300W, booster 3200W.

Left front: 8” – 2300W, booster 3200W.

Left rear: 7” – 1800W, booster 2600W.

Right rear: 7" - 1800W, booster 2600W.

Center: 10” – 2500W, booster 3800W.

Voltage: 240/208V.

Connection rating: 15400W.

Current: 40A.

If you are running the burners flat out. Which you only do when getting water to boil or preheating cookware. Once up to temp, induction requires far less energy to cook with since it is way more efficient - directly heating the pan.

So yeah, if you are in the habit of routinely maintaining four pots of water at a furiously rolling boil you probably will have problems. The rest of us are likely to be pretty safe.

Yeah, I wasn't intending that, it was just shown to get some feel for the numbers. It was the biggest Ikea cooking top as well.

Would using a whole-home battery in conjunction with the solar installation solve this?

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