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Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

It's not just buzz. It's more efficient than resistive heating and modern units have better performance in cold temps. Hence the push to promote them. The downside is that you have added complexity driving up installation costs and reliability down.

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Walk around in the American Heating and Refrigeration conference for a while to get a feel of these trends, this was specifically called out by many manufacturers as driven by the green movement.

That doesn't make them a buzz word.

It's being driven by government pressure to reduce energy consumption and dependence on fuel imports. That isn't a bad thing. It's the sort of thing a responsible government should be planning for.

Natural gas is available in abundance, is nearly free in terms of cost, and is vastly more "green" than many alternatives available today.

It may not be as green as pure electric can be in theory, but in large portions of this country electric isn't all that green either.

Heat pumps appear expensive to operate. Imagine running your AC year-round... that very thought makes many-a-homeowner shudder.

Heat pumps are expensive to operate, and a nightmare to fix. There is a big movement to build whole subdivisions without using natural gas at all, electric ranges and heat pumps. I don't know why it upsets me so much but it does.

Well, the no-gas thing upsets me because cooking on modern electric cooktops/stoves is still staggeringly awful.

Induction cooktops heat faster and more evenly than gas

There's many good reasons induction cooktops aren't used in commercial kitchens... and those reasons apply for home-cooks as well.

But they are used in commercial kitchens. I joined a cooking course arranged by a well-known restaurant where I live, and to my surprise the kitchen we used used induction. Very easy to operate, and you could easily set the heating exactly. It worked basically as a gas restaurant kitchen, just without the gas.

Woks suck on induction by design and that’s pretty much it. The rest is uniquely US problem of not having 400V installations.

you have wok shaped induction plates that work extremely well

It's a niche, I give you that, and the plate can only be used with specific sized woks, but they exist.

https://maxima.com/en/induction-wok-wok-burner.html

Inertia? Ignorance?

I've seen induction cooktops in commercial kitchens before, maybe they were just being stupid?

Heat pumps for homes aren't expensive to operate. They are cheaper to "operate" than resistance heaters. I doubt they're a nightmare to fix - I have actually had to get mine "fixed" once. It was still fairly new, and it turned out there was a leak in the tube so the coolant gradually (over the last year) got out. The company came and fixed that easily enough. Since then (January 2011) the heat pump has been running 24/7 with no issues whatsoever. In fact you're not supposed to turn them off at all, the moving parts are supposed to keep moving. So, if I'm away for some weeks I simply set the temperature to the recommended "idle" temperature of 17C, which in practice means it's not really doing any work, but it's not off either.

Being responsible is so trendy.

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