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Comment by amanda99 | Hacker News Reader

I thought this was going to be about clean cooking fuels. One of the significant projects of the WHO is transitioning the world towards cooking with clean fuels that reduce indoor air pollution. In the worst case certain populations are burning plastics to heat their water, food, and homes, and as you can imagine this is incredibly destructive to health.

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We also need trash collection, otherwise people are forced to burn plastic to get rid of their trash. The whole city of Kinshasa is nauseating due to this.

Even in developed countries like the US a lot of people burn fossil fuels for indoor cooking, even when they could choose a better alternative.

What better option? resistance electric is clearly worse in other ways. I've heard induction is good but it is an expensive luxury option and not common even in that niche.

i've heard it is reasonable priced in other countries but not the us.

It's a tale as old as time: "I don't want to poison myself, but I also cannot bear a minor inconvenience." This is honestly one of the main reasons I believe that environmentalism will never meaningfully succeed.

There are many options to make environmentalism also the better choice. My electric is 104% from wind last year (which is to say for every 100kwh my entire city used last year, my utility claims they generated 104kwh from wind - I don't know what they did when the wind wasn't blowing or what happened to that other 4kwh) Cooks tell me induction is better, but there are enough roadblocks that shouldn't exist such that I can't try it.

My real rant though is there is no reason why induction should be an expesnive niche. There is no reason I should pay extra for features that don't cost extra.

You can get an induction hob for 50 bucks at IKEA.

So spending more than a 200 $ premium over a resistance stove with 4 hobs means you're being ripped off or spending on luxury.

Right, but the premium tends more to $1000 for the brands that have earned a bad reputation. If you want something that you can expect to be good quality you are looking at more like $2000.

One needs more than a single cheap induction hob to cook a family meal!

Okay so keep your current ones, and mainly use the induction one for which will probably satisfy upwards of 80% of your needs anyway.

Hence getting the 200 $ total of 4 hobs as a premium to whatever the base standalone stove costs, assuming that you could in the factory just mount these units in the hobs. Just need to modify a little to have remote control as the original uses a microcontroller to handle the touch IO and the high frequency transistor triggering, which may both not work over a wire long enough to reach from the back hob to the front of the stove where you'd want the controls to be to not reach over or even in-between the hobs in operation.

Is $59 for a single hub, or $849 for a full cooktop really that much of an "expensive luxury"? These things last for decades and cost less than most mobile phones.

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/induction-cooktops-20813/

A hob takes up space my tiny kitchen doesn't have to spare, and besides the limited power available at the wall in the US means it isn't that useful.

In the US we almost always use a range not a cooktop. I need one with an oven. Something like https://www.homedepot.com/p/Amana-30-in-4-Burner-Element-Fre... - which is several hundred cheaper than what you linked. As long as I'm going to replace what I have, spending a little more for the other features I want seems like a good idea - I will likely use it for decades as you say, and induction is in a very limited selection such that I can't really get any other options at any price. (well I did eliminate some Samsung options - Samsung has earned their bad reputation in kitchen appliances)

You're linking to literally the lowest end builder grade piece of crap* non flat range, you even picked the one that doesn't have the oven window! I've even had near slumlords at least spring for the windowed glass top GE special when it was on sale. (I say crap, but that is unfair, having used these growing up, they are simple and basically won't break down and exceptionally easy to get parts for and repair [because it doesn't have any, not even a timer], and if the tenants destroy it, who cares). But Ikea doesn't even cater to that market at all, so it's disingenous to use that as a counter example. Most people are looking for something at least slightly better and those are going to cost more in the $800 and up range. And now that I have a job and a little money I would never willingly go back to a calrod electric cooktop. I'm sure there are some John Bircher types that pine for the days of mom's 1961 GE P7, but that seems like a minority.

This might be a better comparison:

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Frigidaire-Gallery-30-in-6-2-cu-...

Yes, induction is still more expensive, but it is not crazy more expensive either for middle class homeowners that no matter the fuel want something nicer than that shitty Amana linked (that's low end even for grad student slums).

What must have features are you unable to find in the current crop of induction ranges?

ikea is for people who will settle for worse than builer grade so long as they can convince themselves it is better. sure it is better than walmart furniture and a lot of 'high end' is just as bad, but it isn't real quality. Rant over, I'm sure some who don't know better will challenge that, but I'm not responding.

I expect my range to last for a few decades and I cook often. If I'm going to spend several thousand dollars I want something worth it and so far I can't find anything that fixes all the issues with the 40 year old range that came with my house and so I'm saving my money for some other 'toy' I will enjoy. as an engineer I'm in good finiancial shape but not so good I can replace my range whenever I feel like it (if I was I'd have a much larger kitchen)

> ikea is for people who will settle for worse than builer grade so long as they can convince themselves it is better. sure it is better than walmart furniture and a lot of 'high end' is just as bad, but it isn't real quality.

Irrelevant. I'm not debating the merits of Ikea furniture, but they do not produce appliances, they rebadge Electrolux, Whirlpool (Amana) and Frigidaire, and the models they are offering are simply not the most basic ones (though they have just the tier above - this gets you at least a fucking oven timer and lighted, windowed oven), that's just a fact.

I grew up with a Calrod cooktop, like non-stick cookware they are iconic post WW2 marketing Americana. Like Oscar Mayer bologna, they were considered suburban "luxury" and marketed as superior to gas (the marketing of gas superiority is whole other thing, but prior to inductive it was actually superior for most things, that's why it was/is the mainstay of the restaurant industry). https://thisoddhouseblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/electric-s... But I have no desire to go back to that. Terrible heat conductivity, slow response, imprecise temperature control, terribly inefficient especially in the summer (as a side effect, piss poor cooking power compared to even a domestic gas range, yet no ability to go as low). It's hard to overstate how much easier (if not just possible) to cook certain foods on something with precise wide range heat control whether it be gas or inductive.

Obviously people made do with these for years, and if one is happy with that level of functionality and convenience (especially at the lowest of the low end of features), and it allows them to prepare what they want, it's unlikely they'll appreciate any of the benefits of an inductive cooktop.

But it gives precise and rapidly changeable heat control, a radiant heater does not. This is important to people preparing more varied dishes. This sounds like this is simply of little benefit to you, because you still haven't mentioned what features on the current selection of inductive ranges is missing.

They're also wickedly more efficient because you're not radiating a ton of waste heat into the conditioned space (at least in summer and warm climates). There are people that cook and bake enough that the electricity of both the heating and the space cooling are a noticeable monthly expense. Not the primary benefit point though, true.

The difference between electricity cost per btu and gas cost per btu is the sticking point for the bulk of consumers.

No one ever figures in the cost of medical care from breathing low-grade gas fumes for years. Or the occasional spontaneous house explosion.

Just barely or just barely not making ends meet doesn't have great long term health outcomes either.

When you add up all the things we're "supposed" to be doing for one reason or another it's a pretty large cumulative burden.

This would be a relatively major thing, since you generally have no choice but to breathe the air in your dwelling. As a policy matter (i.e., one in which the government can offset out-of-pocket costs for greater savings on the back end), subsidizing electrification so that Americans can have a better quality-of-life with less incidence of cancer, respiratory illness, and catastrophic detonation of inhabited residences seems like a no brainer.

And for people who must have their gas appliances, there are always portable units/generators. They can use those.

> breathing low-grade gas fumes for years

I have been doing most of my cooking on a gas hob for 5 years now. Could you share more detail on this point?

I feel the need to be scared today (it is Halloween after all).

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-health-risks-...

I don't think any cook at home has ever used enough energy that that matters. Once in a while someone will have a broken furnace and try to use the oven to heat their house (this is dangerous: don't try it), but otherwise cooking doesn't use energy to really matter.

I'd like to see a good comparison in running cost of a gas stove versus an induction stove.

Comparing BTU's wouldn't be an accurate metric since with gas a lot of the heat is lost just going around the pan/pot and heating the air. This source [1] claims it took 992 BTUs for gas and 430 BTUs for induction to boil 1qt of water.

https://www.treehugger.com/which-more-energy-efficient-cooki...

In the US and other developed countries, they burn clean fuels like natural gas or propane. These emit minimal soot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_fuel#/media/File:Access_...

Unfortunately perhaps not as clean as you would hope: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9819315/#:~:text=5.....

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