Impulse Induction Stove: boils water in 40s and has backup battery for outages
impulselabs.com
impulselabs.com
This requires 15amp service (from FAQs), so it can pull (120x15) = 1.8kw from the outlet. I will assume you can draw the 3kwh battery to 0 (good lithium/over provisioned).
If this thing can output 10kw on a single burner, assuming no overhead for fans, which it will certainly need, it will be using 10-1.8 = 8.2kw from the battery, the rest coming from the wall. Battery is 3kwh. So it will be able to run for (3/8.2x60) somewhere around 20 minutes at this rate before dropping back to 120v outlet power.
20 minutes seems like not much, but that's cooking at an incredibly high heat. Stir fry needs like 3/4ths of that power, and it's done in ~5 minutes.
A more likely scenario is you want to make a a nice spaghetti dinner but you are impatient, you have 3-4 pots going. Steaming carrots in one, boiling noodles in another, browning meat and also simmering sauce.
So lets look at it as one 120v burner, plus 3 battery powered ones. If they also work at 1.8kw then the run time would be 3x1.8 = 5.4kw. 3/5.4x60 = ~33 minutes. In reality the steaming/noodle burners would need a ton of power for a few minutes, then only 1000watts. The browning burner probably needs 1200 and the simmering one 600-800.
Seems like a pretty brilliant idea to add the battery. You suddenly made a single induction burner setup into a 4 burner setup. I have a hard time imagining a single meal that will get close to emptying this. The FAQ says if the power goes out you can make 3 meals on this stove-top. I have 4.8kwh worth of batteries and I can make ~2 days of meals (coffee/oatmeal, soup/hot chocolate, spaghetti) off the battery in winter, and run my lights, charge phone. I agree 3 meals would be easy, and I bet you could stretch to more if you were judicious.
edit - fixed formatting.
So compared to that, $5500 for an induction stove that also had 3x the performance of the average induction stove and 5x the performance of most gas stoves looks like a really good deal.
Because from the site it looks like it works with both 120v and 240v:
> Designed to fit inside most standard countertops and work seamlessly with 120V or 240V connections.
CORRECTION: It only draws 15 A at 120 V, the remaining power comes from the 3 kWh battery. So you have 22 minutes of 10 kW until the battery is empty, then you have 1.8 kW
I'm not in the US so not that familiar (all my outlets are ~240v) with how it & appliances generally work and are marketed, but I assume the nominal 10kW is at 240, and that that drops (though it is still supported to work) at the lower voltage?
I can choose between hitting the arrow & getting halfway to the (faded out) next section. Or using the scroll wheel & skipping 3 sections at once.
How do I read your homepage? Please help.
Once you use temperature-controlled cooktops, you can't go back. You can set your garlic to saute and walk away.
Otherwise, this thing looks like an expensive maintenance nightmare. Those lcd's will break. There's obviously firmware which will rot, and who knows if it's going to hang and start outputting 10KW while cooking your french omelette. Is the UI even usable, or a random cacophony of menus? The battery has a limited life, and will be taking some fairly punishing spikes, etc. I would be interested in some of these ideas in a more modular form.
Indeed. Our house has an electric stove from, probably, the 1960s. Complete with screw-in fuses. That's ~60 years of operation now. This thing will last 10 years tops. Their marketing talks a lot about "a sustainable future", but that doesn't jive with a future where major appliances have to be scrapped and replaced every 10 years or less.
All the major components for induction cookers are commodified (coils, IGBTs, etc), it's simply a matter of making the whole thing more modular (particularly, separate the UI from the induction control), and for someone to make an actually-good induction control microcontroller/firmware package as a module.
Also -- a display in the center of the stove? Seems... like a bad place for it.
I am happy to see competition in the space though and I hope more induction burners can get more accurate temp sensing and PID control
I recently bought a https://www.webstaurantstore.com/hatco-irng-pc1-18-rapide-cu...
instead of a control freak as it has a temp probe and I wanted to see how well it worked.
Haven't gotten around to seriously testing it yet but the plan is to mount their drop in 2 burner version in the counter if the probe works well.
The display in the center is bad if it’s a touch screen, water gets on it and it starts going crazy, very annoying.
yeah. I get the ease of nice displays controls, but being right under where hot pots and pans will inevitably land is a recipe for early impact and heat failure. Not to mention how many people will reach for one of these controls and inevitably burn their hands on the pot simmering right next to it.
This feels like one of those things that looks good on a design presentation but once you field-test it, you quickly realize "oh, this is not great. at all."
If you don't just have 5k lying around doing nothing, I would ask for pretty strong warranty with all this.
But this particular stove has knobs, which hopefully improve the situation.
The thing is most the cheap chinese single cooktops all use the same microcontroller/firmware package, but the firmware is absolute garbage. It really wouldn't take much to make a good, PID equivalent (and BTW, have the UI run on a separate controller over an i2c or spi connection, so manufacturers can differentiate that way), and then even all the cheap cookers would be actually good.
[1] https://www.ikea.com/nl/nl/p/tillreda-draagbare-inductiekook...
I recently bought a waring countertop oven (instead of a ninja/anova) because I could find replacement parts online (for now).
I also did the same for a countertop induction burner -- commercial version had a replacement parts list in the manual with numbers for every part!
Batteries are definitely disposables. Would love to understand what degree of standardization exists and what the replacement will look like after 5-8 years on this product. If there isn't a plan, their "sustainability" pitch is nothing more than greenwashing.
I get this is for price-insensitive luxury early-adopters, but it would be nice if startups rewarded their early customers with something like extended warranties for the extra company risk they're taking on, especially with something expected to last 15-20 years. If these guys are around in 8-12 years, they will have ideally 10x'd their volume a few times by then so the extra warranty costs will be minimal. But most startups fail, so odds are this appliance will be e-trash then... would be nice to have some bonus reward for being the first to take on that risk.
But, yes, it is a risk buying from them.
The FAQ is also full of subtle weasel language:
> Our battery is designed to last beyond the average lifetime of standard appliances, and if a replacement is needed, the battery is modular and can be replaced upon request.
It talks about the battery being rated beyond some ambiguously-defined category lifetime. What is the "lifetime of standard appliances"? 3-5 years, going by average consumer dishwashers these days? That's not a lot for a $5k stovetop. Note though how they don't talk about THEIR appliance, and they don't talk about the battery being operated under THEIR usage.
My EV has a "10-year / 100,000mile" warranty, including battery, and they define battery performance as dropping below 70%. Unambiguous and straightforward. That the battery is the main justification of the price tag, they don't offer any specifics about the warranty, and they use ambiguous weasel language make for a huge red flag.
Best case: they're a startup and haven't figured this out yet. Worst case: the real-world performance will be a replacement money sink and this is vaporware. If you want to convince your early-adopters and instill confidence that this isn't expensive e-waste, offer a de-risking sweetheart warranty deal to your first batch of pre-order customers.
I don't need to tell anyone induction hobs aren't new, and in a few seconds' searching I found Miele and Fisher & Paykel (i.e. not cheap brands) 8kW hobs well under £1k, I'm sure I'd find 10+ kW if I bothered a little longer.
Seems like another example of 'what if we made a flashy website and a 'startup' out of something ordinary; pitching it as new, exciting, and high growth' to me.
I miss the days when companies competed on quality and price.
Edit: Also, aren't we all a little jaded by "Reserve yours now, coming in Q4!" I wish companies would go back to shipping already, then putting up the flashy web site.
The sensationalist money collection for a non-existent inventions is something of a no go to me. Too many bad experiences collected by others in this regard throughout the past decades. Meanwhile, I can use that money now, for something I need now, on something that exists now.
Interesting read and experimenting on others though.
This hob uses US 240v outlets if available (I suspect the nominal 10kW is not available otherwise, but I don't know) and surely you have electric ovens too anyway?
A standard outlet as for a kettle though, yeah, absolutely. And in fact even in the UK oven/hob is usually on its own 32A circuit, which if you P=IV suggests 8kW is probably a common rating for a reason.
BTW for a much more detailed answer to your original question of what's new, and of why this is important: https://www.volts.wtf/p/induction-stoves-with-batteries-buil...
Summer peak: $0.61806
Summer off-peak: $0.53462
Winter peak: $0.51536
Winter off-peak: $0.48701
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
> With the integrated battery that can slowly charge up when you're not using it, and then quickly release that energy when you turn up a burner - there’s an incredible equivalent of 72,000 BTU/h of heating power, or 10 kW. (Compare that to 18,000 BTU/h for the best gas stoves currently on the market, or the equivalent of 28,500 BTU/h for some of the best induction stoves.)
If the 10kW is per burner, that's a record. Highest I've considered is 5.5kW in two Bosch models (PIV975DC1E, 775, using a 32cm pot) that aren't sold anymore. Apparently not enough demand - most models are 3.7kW with boost. There are higher priced models that go to 7.3kW but that's a twin boost that works with an oven dish, not just a circular pot.
And then I start to think that maybe the better solution would be a smaller version of something like a powerwall. Maybe something flat that would easily fit behind the kick-board under the units in the kitchen and then could be wired up to provide multiple uses.
Or maybe add a couple of sockets to that induction hob, that let you use it as a UPS for your fridge? Boiling water in 40 seconds might be fun, but doesn't strike me as a killer feature. Only time I've ever wanted a more powerful hob myself, is when I've got my wok out.
They mentioned adding a built-in outlet so that you could then have something else be on battery backup as well (fridge being the obvious application). I'm not sure if they ended up adding that for this version or not.
That's not how it works.
I don't have one any more, but mine did that; I never found it an issue - unless you're cooking with copper (solid, not the pointless/aesthetically clad stuff) or really thin aluminium I can't see that it's going to appreciably lose heat between cycles. Maybe mine just had much shorter periods than those that people complain about, I don't know.
It's most noticeable with water or a pan of food you want to simmer, it will turn the heat on high for a few seconds leading to items to burn/boil for a few seconds, before turning back off.
That means that if you are making something that needs low and slow heat you get these moments where the heat is WAY too high.
I like to make things like candied mango pieces or strawberries for on top of pancakes, and with an induction stove that has an on/off cycle vs being able to modulate the sugar will quickly burn to the bottom of the pan because the temperature is far too high while it is in its "on" cycle.
It's not about heat retention between cycles, it's that during the on cycle it's too much heat.
Very thick bottomed pans can help dissipate some of it by capturing it, vs just dumping it directly into the cooking surface of the pan, but those pans are heavy and cumbersome and fairly rare.
Now I'm envisioning a stove with a stalk coming out over each burner with an infrared temperature sensor and a lidar sensor to monitor the temperature and height of each pans contents.
The temp measure is also a little confusing, but I'm guessing it's measuring the outer temp of the pan. That's definitely pretty good and comparable to a how an oven sets temp. I think it would actually be pretty amazing to include probes and set the temp based on the water or oil in your pot. In that case this would be functional as a sous vide cooker.
Elsewhere described as low current. That's 43A per burner, and 4 of them. Just two burners running is more than my 6 bed detached house's entire grid supply is fused for.
Even if you smooth that out with massive super caps and local battery storage, I don't think my pans are going to last long doing that intensity.
Sounds amazing. Too amazing.
I’d love to see this idea applied to a tankless electric hot water heater.
If the recipe says 'bring to boil, then simmer', then I want the smart stove to do that ~10 kW at first and automagically lower the power once the content is boiling.
I’ve read many reviews of it and the people who have one claim that these precise temperature control features are the future of cooking.
We bought a stove that has this embedded cloudshit that wont let you use the whole oven for its intended purpose. And no way in hell I'm hooking it to a network.
Consumer electronics have lost the right have the benefit of the doubt. So unless these things are explicitly mentioned on the product page, you should always assume worst-case.
Appified bullshit is what it is.
Heck. I bought one induction cooker on Amazon for inr 1300 or US $ 15.