Good and bad?

We are moving and house we own now is gas. New house is induction. I have no knowledge of that surface. But all my current pots and pans are viable (yay money saved).

I stayed at an Airbnb once that had them. Loved the heat control and how quickly pans heated but they had a buzzing sound that was just barely audible but incredibly annoying. Maybe it was just that stove or that model but definitely something to look out for.

We have an induction range. It's the best of both electric and gas. There's a reason they are so popular in European high end kitchens. Ours is very powerful, it's amazing how fast water can boil on one. The heat control is extremely precise. You can sear a steak on a burner and 1 minute later sweat chocolate on the same one. Perfectly. Ours measures the heat of the pan and can tell you exactly how hot it is and then you can adjust temp almost instantly. I've taken a hot cast iron pan off mine and then been able to put my hand on the "burner". The biggest drawback is cookware. It must have enough ferrous metal to work. Basically, if a magnet doesn't stick to the bottom of your cookware it won't work. We had all-clad stainless and it all worked fine. Cast iron is nails on it. Nothing gets cast iron ripping hot as fast as induction.

In short, we love it and I will never go back to gas or electric.

We have one at our weekend condo. Salute the Marines summed it up well in terms of functionality. They do some pretty amazing things in terms of temp control, heating quickly, boiling water etc.
It is light years better than electric and I even prefer it to the gas stove in my first house.

That said, we have a Blue Star gas stove at our current home and no f'ng way would I trade it for Induction. The Induction is a Tesla and the Blue Star is a Shelby GT500 with three pedals.

I was thinking of getting one for outdoors steak searing and other things. Anyone have one of the portables that they like?

We were in the same situation and have been very happy with our induction cooktop! I hope you all enjoy it too!

Tony Franklins Other Shoe said:

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I was thinking of getting one for outdoors steak searing and other things. Anyone have one of the portables that they like?

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Got a single burner off Amazon about 6-7 years ago. Use it outside with a cast iron skillet for steaks. Works great. Probably around $75, so a typical cheap induction burner. Duxtop or something like that.

We've had one for 8 years because our house doesn't have gas. Not much to add to the other comments, but yeah boiling water is a thing of beauty on an induction burner.

The only downside I've found, well there's a couple, is:

1. Can't do proper wok cooking
2. Can't char peppers (i used to always cook poblanos over an open flame)

These are small sacrifices to make.

Here are what I see as the major advantages of induction:

1) MORE POWER: An above-average gas top big burner will give you about 15,000 BTU's - a large induction burner should give you around 28,000. That essentially halves the amount of time it takes to boil a pot of water and just as importantly return your pot to a boil after adding what you are putting in it.

2) MORE EFFICIENCY: 80% of the energy created by a gas top stove is lost into the air. 90% of the energy created by an induction top goes to cooking your food. Remember, an induction stove heats your pot, not the surface of the cookstop. (This also means that you aren't pouring tons of heat into the air during our lovely TX summers which keeps your house much cooler during cooking.)

3) MORE ACCURACY: Induction is automatic on/off just like a gas cooktop and also the instant range of heat - it allows you to have very small amounts of consistent heat as well (i.e. you can cook chocolate or an egg-based sauce without using a double boiler).

That being said, induction cooktops vary in quality/power just like gas cooktops do and you generally get what you pay for. If you already have the pots/pans that work for induction you are most of the way there.

Just to play devil's advocate and offset the induction lovefest. A couple of other downsides to induction that I can think of:

- That's a lot of complicated electronics strung together so overtime, I would suspect you would face the possibility of replacement vs cost of repair sooner than with a gas range.

- I didn't love that my cooking controls were done on a digital keypad. Harder to manage when you have wet/messy hands.

- It's not quite as quick to react to setting changes as gas (but still far better than traditional electric).

- I like to slide pans around and tend to bang things when I cooked. They induction cooktops can scratch and break.

No judgement at all for those owners and posters above...and as said above, they are fun to cook on. Just wanted to offer an alternate point of view.

Flame away.

Good luck with that induction cooktop keeping you warm the next time ERCOT ****s up and the electricity is off for 3 days in sub-freezing weather.

you use your stove to keep warm?

Sooner Born said:

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Flame away.

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Literally or figuratively?

That's funny!! That definitely crossed my mind when we were freezing our butts off! Thankfully we had a small generator to make coffee and hot chocolate.

DPlainview said:

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Sooner Born said:

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Flame away.

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Literally or figuratively?

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Amazing.

Used two burners on during the day only when I was at home and awake.

House we purchased last year has one.

Overall I would probably rather have gas.

Most of our cookware worked, so that wasn't an issue. The fast boil part is really cool and nice. Otherwise, though, I don't really like ours for normal person cooking. Though maybe it is just ours. Makes a loud weird noise that makes me wonder if it is dying or about to blow up. Alarms go off whenever you set something on it when not in use, though child lock helps with this. Most annoying, you cannot pick up a pan to flip or move something without the stupid alarm going off in2 seconds and turning off the burner.

More finicky than it needs to be and negative outweigh the positives. Rather have my old gas cooktop. Maybe model selection would elimante some of these negatives.

I have an induction range and your model sounds miserable.

I prefer the aesthetics of a gas grill but high end induction is awesome. And yes for three days I boiled huge pots of water to keep the ambient temperature up in key areas of my house and was still able to make espresso on the stovetop

The last apartment I lived in had an induction stove and I hated it. Being an apartment, I'm sure it was low quality, but food didn't cook as well.