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Comment by AaronFriel | Hacker News Reader

Alec, of the Technology Connections YouTube channel, shows it's not just energy saving, but faster and cleaner. Even with US outlet power limits a kettle will boil a volume of water much more quickly than a gas stovetop, and my indoor CO2 sensor won't spike by hundreds to a thousand PPM of CO2.

While the time savings is modest, if you have an electric kettle it's a no brainer to prefer that over gas.

Though induction stovetops can be faster yet, and just as clean.

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Your gas stove will likely dramatically outperform an 1800W electric heater if you use a proper pot:

https://turbopot.com/

I would still rather use a nice induction range, but it is possible to get decent efficiency out of gas.

Buying cookware that works better on gas but is specifically incompatible with induction cooking seems a bit like rigging your Ram to roll coal, at this point in time.

How's that? Most people who have serviceable gas ranges are not going to rip them out and replace them with induction any time soon.

Someone who wants to go electric badly enough to spend thousands of dollars installing a high-current power outlet is not likely to balk at the cost of new pans.

There's still a huge amount of energy that gets dumped out into the kitchen by any non-induction cooktop, no matter what pot you use.

I always wanted some kind of "collar" that I could put around a burner to try to direct that excess heat back into the pan/pot.

The problem is you need airflow or you generate carbon monoxide instead of carbon dioxide. So simple solutions can get more heat but also kill you.

minor side effect

Death only increases the amount of carbon emissions this method saves.

Product idea: a broken CO detector that saves up to 100% of person’s future emissions. Saves money in the future too.

Lower carbon emissions with this one weird trick!

But your decomposing family will release CO2!

It's offset against the future CO2 emissions of the family and their descendants.

(Gee, this thread got dark. Like carbon-black dark)

There used to be (still is?) a sort of vertical chute/collar available to put around camp pots. Think mountaineering applications. The idea was that they would capture heat energy escaping off the bottom of the pot that would rise/disperse into the environment, and channel it close to the side of the pot where it would heat the vessel as it rose. Think of wrapping a section of corrugated cardboard around the outside wall of a pot. Now a birds-eye view down the cardboard should reveal the energy capturing channels that will allow the sides of your pot to heat the pot contents. Adjust your material and tune the sizing and you’ve got a camping gadget.

Typically, those collars are used as a wind screen.

https://www.rei.com/product/139472/toaks-titanium-windscreen

No - found a reference:

https://www.msrgear.com/stoves/stove-accessories/heat-exchan...

This is maybe useful for boiling water but not so great for cooking. You want your pot to have a relatively uniform temperature, and gas burns very hot. This means that, especially if the walls of the pan are thin, any part of the wall that has good thermal contact with combustion products and poor contact with food will get extremely hot, with various unfortunate consequences. Also the handles will get hot.

Well it takes absolutely forever to boil water on a camp stove, so I"ll take it.

Look into jetboil campstove/pot. It's got a heat exchanger fin stack on the bottom of the pot to improve boil time.

Old cast iron skillets had a collar under them to better fit on the pot belly stovetop.

Crazy. Like a Jetboil for your home stove.

What efficiency (in terms of energy transfer to the intended material vs to the environment) is observed with gas? IIRC, gas achieves maybe 35-50% efficiency (depending on the surface area and material of the pan) compared with ~80% for electric resistance heating and >90% for induction.

Adam Ragusea did a water boiling comparison and the gas stove was dumping so much energy into the air around the pot that his thermometer melted [0]. I just don't see how any pan geometry could extract much of the energy from the quickly rising hot gas produced by combustion.

[0] https://youtu.be/Xn1LUo5ra_A?t=249

The claim on the site is that the heat exchanger base boosts efficiency up to 60%.

You still of course do have the problem that home rangehoods usually aren't powerful enough to create enough air-flow to properly deal with the NOx and SOx produced by burning gas, which turns out to be a big health risk...

Most home range hoods are too powerful. Go to any site that calculates commercial range hood requirements, enter in your parameters, and then try to find a nice range hood that matches. Those 700 cfm or 1000 cfm beasts the appliance stores sell are entirely inappropriate.

There may well be a problem with a poorly designed range hood and exhaust that inevitably isn’t captured. And people might not like using the hoods all the time.

Comparing gas with electrical efficiency is not representing realistic end-to-end efficiencies wrt. co2 as long as the vas majority of electricity is generated from primary energy. Power plants tend to have efficiencies lower 50%.

The gas end-to-end "efficiency" will not improve drastically ever, while for an electrical stove it is tied to energy production. Arguing with end-to-end efficiencies and power plants is misleading, as I can power my induction stove from my solar panels

That's true, but I power mine from the municipal grid that burns stuff to make steam and then electricity

Might still be better as efficiency goes up with temperature and industrial generators can achieve much higher temperatures that what you can at home, and also include some clean sources of energy into the mix.

I have a gas stove in my studio apartment. I still use an electric kettle to get water boiling before dumping it into a preheated pan to cook noodles/whatever. Highly recommend this approach if you are stuck with gas.

> Highly recommend this approach if you are stuck with gas.

My partner, who cooks more, bemoans that our new apartment has electric. Grew up using gas and claims that it’s better for cooking. I prefer not to intentionally dump gas into our house and welcome the minor benefit of energy efficiency.

Funny how different people see the world (and technology).

Get a (high power) portable induction hob. If you have an outlet that can supply a 1.8-3kW one, it's better than gas unless you're using a wok or simar.

Watch this video about how the idea that gas was better for cooking was a marketing ploy with no basis in reality and how they used lobbyist to force has connections into building codes

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54

"no basis in reality". Do you cook? Gas is functionally superior than traditional electric resistance cooking. That's not some evil lobby, that's practical experience. You can instantly control the temperature without juggling multiple burners at different heats. That makes it better. I'd take gas over electric (resistive or halogen) all the time - and I've lived with both.

Induction is on par with gas in controllability - and although there are some downsides, the upsides (so easy to clean!) Make it worth it (imo). I'm not saying that because big induction paid me to either.

Every gas range( Wolf, Viking, GE, Bosch, Maytag ) I've used seems to vary dramatically with temps at different settings.

The lowest setting on some ranges might be a High setting on others.

I used to be a cook in a a few michelin starred restaurants, so you can trust my opinion here.

Gas is far superior to electric heating elements because of the speed at which it can change temperature, and makes flambeing a cinch.

That being said Induction ranges are several orders of magnitude superior to gas. As are ovens with humidity and air flow control.

This is the case for every range, gas or electric. Every time I've moved I'd had to "recalibrate" my expectations and use of the stove to account for different temperatures and quirks.

My preference for gas has a lot to do with the fact that my pans, unless they're exceptionally heavy, never sit stably on the conventional coil-type electric stove burners. So the pan isn't level and doesn't heat evenly. Gas range grates don't tend to have that problem.

I've never owned an induction cooktop but I'd imagine the flat surface wouldn't have that problem (assuming the pans aren't warped).

Gas burners put out 3x-4x the power of an electric burner and have much lower thermal mass, so the acceleration in thermal power is much higher and the absolute thermal power is higher.

A large electric burner is 2400-3600 watts, a large gas burner can be 8-16 kw. I think induction could get better power delivery than gas with time.

You can get skillful with electric, you just have to see 30 seconds into the future and anticipate the thermal lag and overshoot when adjusting burner power.

Gas burners may be higher total power, but the heat transfer is surely pretty poor. Induction delivers something like 90% of the power into the pan. Boiling water (which is just an exercise in energy transfer) is much quicker on induction than gas.

In my experience living with an AEG induction stove with a peak single burner power output of 3.7kW - apart from I never did any cooking (apart from boiling water) which needed that level of power for more than a few tens of seconds. The gas stove in my current house felt underpowered in comparison.

No disagreement here, induction has way better power transfer to the food than electric resistance heating. I was only comparing resistance heating with gas.

I cook, and while I acknowledge there are benefits to gas, I can escape the feeling that what a lot of people end up comparing are crappy electric stoves from when they lived in cheap apartments vs higher end gas stoves that they/another homeowner bought for themselves.

> claims that it’s better for cooking

It's not really "better" it's simply easier keep a constant heat. Most electrical cooking stuff works on intermittent on-and-off cycles. An electric oven power up, then start cycling it's internal resistences let's say 10" powerd 5" off, then again 10" powerd etc. Some users here show me in a video an induction plate who use "mini-coils" who seems rotating constantly nearly nullifying such cycle effects on food cooking, but most other electric gears choose a "simpler" approach for their OEM.

Personally I'm all electric since around 8/10 years or so, I've made a habit and not a professional cook (while remaining a professional eater) but I understand those who dislike the initial impact...

Beside that: most actual tech is developed in crappy ways, most product explicitly made not to last and not to ensure evolution with plugged-in recycling but simply ensure a constant buy of new gears who are just crappy like the ones they substitute. Now most people might not realize that as well as a techie but anyone feel that. So...

Induction is much better than gas about 90% of the time. Because the heat can be set much lower than a flame’s temperature, and because heat transfer happens through the whole bottom surface of the pan, it’s much better to keep a low-ish temperature for any length of time, which opens a lot of possibilities. For high heat, the larger contact area makes it much quicker to heat up evenly the whole pan. It pairs very nicely with a cast iron pan as well.

And that’s just from a practical, cooking point of view, without mentioning all the health benefits.

It was not our choice when we got an induction cooktop the first time, but now it would be.

If you can afford it, a high end induction stove might be an upgrade you both enjoy without needing gas. Higher end ones have more precision and consistency and easier controls.

I cook a lot. I enjoy cooking with gas and I appreciate it’s benefits, but I avoid/minimize it because it is so plainly inefficient and frankly more hazardous than a modern electric or induction burner.

I generally heat half the water in the pot, and half in the electric kettle (adjust proportions depending on the relative power of your appliances) Quickest way to heat up the required amount of water

Assuming you have a four-burner stove, you could split your water five-way, and use four pots and your electric tea kettle.

If you want to push, you could improve the efficiency even more. That would require a capital investment into additional stoves and/or electric kettles. You'd probably need something like kubernetes for orchestration as well.

Since I don't have a dishwasher, using more pots actually has time cost, so that approach doesn't work

Interestingly, I feel compelled to wash a pot even if I only used it to boil water, while that's not the case for the kettle. Force of habit I guess

> While the time savings is modest, if you have an electric kettle it's a no brainer to prefer that over gas.

Not quite. Water is heavy and boiling water is dangerous; if you're boiling your water in a teakettle you then have to transfer it to a pot on the stove without scalding yourself.

(This isn't the exact problem I'd experience if I adopted your advice. I have an electric teakettle, but it is low volume and is also sharply limited in the rate at which you can pour out water from it. That's fine if you want to prepare individual servings of tea. It's unworkable if you want to prepare a bunch of boiling water to boil stuff in. But fixing that problem will immediately cause the "boiling water is dangerous" problem.)

Presumably you mean you have a gooseneck kettle, which I agree is not well suited to this task (though if it takes 30s to pour out the kettle, it's not really a big deal). Regardless, pouring boiling water out of a kettle is far less dangerous than pouring the cooked pasta + boiling water out of the pot and into a strainer.

If I'm looking to boil say 2 litres of water, I'll put 1.5 l in the electric kettle, 0.5l in the pot on the gas stove with a lid on. Generally the kettle boils first.

> Regardless, pouring boiling water out of a kettle is far less dangerous than pouring the cooked pasta + boiling water out of the pot and into a strainer.

I don't think this is true. The mechanics are essentially the same. But the colander receiving the pasta + boiling water is situated inside the sink, which will catch the water that is in that case intended to spill out.

The pot is situated on the stove, which is a raised platform that can't catch water at all. Any spill there will splash all over.

Well, with my sample size of one, I've splashed boiling water on the floor when trying to drain pasta or potatoes, but never while pouring out a kettle. Perhaps related, a kettle has a cold base in addition to a cold handle oriented more appropriately for pouring.

>Though induction stovetops can be faster yet, and just as clean.

You have the mother of all hotspots on the pan (less relevant for boiling) where the induction ring itself is and getting simmer right is harder. Induction as implemented right now is on/off with full blast for the duration and just increased downtime. It is not the same as low constant output.

> You have the mother of all hotspots on the pan (less relevant for boiling) where the induction ring itself is and getting simmer right is harder.

Not at all. There is no significant hot spot as heat is actually produced by the bottom of the pan and not the coils themselves.

> Induction as implemented right now is on/off with full blast for the duration and just increased downtime. It is not the same as low constant output.

Again, not at all. All the devices I have used were perfectly fine generating a low, constant heat. what you describe may be the case for bargain basement ones, and it was the case for most resistive cooktops, but is definitely not the case for inductions ones.

I guess you could have a hot spot on the pan if the coils are ill-designed or you’re putting a large pan on a small burner?

The pan will only heat up near the coil, so if the coil covers only the center third of the pan, only that will heat up (though some pans have a heat-spreading layer to mitigate this, and sometimes to add some more inertia depending on the pan’s purpose).

> I guess you could have a hot spot on the pan if the coils are ill-designed or you’re putting a large pan on a small burner?

Yes, but then it’s hardly a problem with the technology if you put a large pan on a small burner.

As for the rest, in all cookers I have seen, the coils cover the whole surface, except for a small spot in the centre. Besides, induced current does not happen only where the cookware is closest to the coil. The magnetic field is more spread out than that and the heating surface is larger than just the surface of “contact” (there is no real contact, but anyway).

I assume there could be an exceptionally badly designed induction cooktop with hot spots (it’d have to have a very weird geometry, though), but that would take some effort.

With most cookware it's pretty obvious where the coils are when trying to simmer. With thinner stuff like carbon steel the hot spots can be pretty nasty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pifD__DIxGU

> All the devices I have used were perfectly fine generating a low, constant heat

I have never seen an induction cooktop that could generate low, constant heat. Even pretty pricy ones (eg. a 3000€ Bora hob with integrated extraction) showed a clear on/off cycle at the lowest heat settings. But maybe tech has improved in recent years, and there are hobs now that have constant low power output?

Maybe the effect also just depends on your cookware? On pots with a heavy bottom with aluminium or copper core you probably won't see the coil patterns and the on/off effect will be less pronounced. If you have a pot with a thin stainless steel bottom, you will definitely see uneven heat, the power from an induction coil is not completely homogenous.

All of the cheap tabletop cooktop I have seen have terrible cycling at lower powers, there seems to be two power levels and when you need something below the lower one, it cycles power at ~10s frequency. In contrast a Bosch integrated cooktop from a couple of years ago also does cycling, but seems to have more power levels available and the cycling is faster, around 1Hz or so. At least for me that is good enough.

My issues with it are more about inaccurate placement causing hot and cold spots and if you move a pot it can triggers cookware detection, which then clicks different coils on and off for 5-10s before it is satisfied with the new configuration. Both of those issues are probably exacerbated by the "FlexInduction" system that promises one large automatic cook area.

I'm hoping that power electronics development for electric cars creates some innovation in this area, but it's really hard to tell because there are no useful review sites and there aren't any places that let you take a cooktop for a testdrive.

> there are no useful review sites

Right! The only thing there is are occasional reviews on shopping websites, but people can usually only compare it to their previous one, so there really are no useful reviews (spoiler: most induction hobs are faster than whatever people had before, and people seem to hate touch controls)

Especially once you get to the fancy features (eg. internal and external temperature sensors) there are almost no reviews at all and all you have is the manufacturers marketing.

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