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Comment by stephencanon | Hacker News Reader

It’s really not. We built an all-electric ADU for my parents, then ended up living in it while renovating our house. As someone who cooks pretty much all meals, the induction range is better in almost every way than the fancy gas range that came with our house, so we’re replacing it with an induction cooktop in the renovation.

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I bought my parents an induction range too and had the same revelation visiting them: I actually cooked more, despite the higher friction of having to cook in an unfamiliar kitchen, because it was so much faster to get things going.

Even for something as simple as pasta, having boiling water in 2 minutes instead of 7 or 8 minutes is huge. I can wait for the former, but with the latter I usually end up doing something else for a bit, and then suddenly 7 or 8 rounds up to 10 or 15 minutes.

100% agree. Apart from breathing in the gas (which isn’t good) and combustion products (ditto), setting the heat is very imprecise with gas. How hot? Ah… a “medium heat”. What is that? Or “when the flames are smallish”. With induction you write your recipes with a solid number and get consistent results.

I disagree with this. The “numbers” that are on induction stoves are not at all consistent. They aren’t even consistent within the same range between different burners.

Are they intended to be? Assuming the burners are different sizes - I would not expect the same setting to equal the same wattage on different size burners, as intuition would dictate that a large burner would be more powerful for tasks like wok cooking. What does the operator manual say?

It really depends on the quality of the appliance; something like the Breville Control Freak can give you induction cooking with temperature control down to the degree, whereas my cheap countertop Tefal induction hob just gives a few settings with broad power ranges and you have to figure out what works best for you.

Ok so “burner 1, power 6, 10 minutes”

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