The Jon Swift Memorial 2024 Blog Roundup
42 minutes ago
Thursday, August 1, 2019
Induction Cooktop
My lovely wife has been bugging me to get an induction cooktop for years. They are supposed to be very efficient. So I do a little research and found one that looks pretty good.
I ordered on and it arrived in good condition. Now here’s why you read the instructions. We don’t use the cook woodstove in the summer. It appeared to be the perfect place to set a portable cooktop. The safety instructions warn not to place it on an iron table. The woodstove is mostly cast iron.
There’s supposed to be a 10 cm clearance from any metal surface. Here in America that translates to about 4 inches. There was a wooden box on my porch that raised it more than high enough for testing purposes.
I can see there’s going to be a learning curve, but it certainly boiled water quickly. Induction cooking works using magnetic fields that create heat in metal cookware. Good thing I have a lot of cast iron pans. There are a few random items that won’t work, like my glass sauce pan, but I knew that ahead of time.
Now all I have to do is to build something prettier than an old box to set it on.
-Sixbears
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I love mine. But... get yourself a good thermometer if you're going to be deep frying, as the 'temp' cooking range on the cooktop is a rough guess.
ReplyDeleteI use mine every day, and the stovetop as a secondary cooking unit.
Thanks for the thermometer advice. I do have one so I'll check how it matches the settings.
DeleteAnd they are small enough you can carry with you and use it for camping (if you have an extension cord or your batteries put out enough voltage.) Dunno how much they draw for solar systems, but should be usable.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to see how it works on the house inverter.
DeleteBe aware that the recommended distance is only a minimum. If that stove is anywhere in the vicinity, there will be inductance interaction. Which will leach extra energy !
ReplyDeleteYou'll not realize it, but it will affect overall performance.
I'll make sure to all more than the minimum.
DeleteThe top of the woodstove is a huge piece of heavy duty glass so the iron is just around the edges. That gives me more distance. Thanks for the advice.
How about using an inverted old desk drawer for your cooktop platform ? Or a Sterilite plastic storage bin w/ drawer to withdraw your cooking implements right in front of the unit ?
ReplyDeleteI see nothing wrong with an old wooden box.
ReplyDeleteI'm starting to love it. :)
DeleteIt will be interesting to hear what the power draw is. If it's low enough this could be a replacement for a propane stove.
ReplyDeleteThe folks on SV Delos replaced their propane stove with induction. They have an awful lot of solar on their sailboat so it easily handled it.
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