theinductionsite.com/proandcon.shtml
com site directory Induction Cooking: Pros and Cons "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
they are just as (or more) "powerful" at heating as any other sort--is that you can adjust the cooking heat instantly and with great precision. Before induction, good cooks, including all professionals, overwhelmingly preferred gas to all prior forms of electric cooking for one reason: the substantial "inertia" in ordinary electric cookers--when you adjust the heat setting, the element (coil, halogen heater, whatever) only slowly starts to increase or decrease its temperature. With gas, when you adjust the element setting, the energy flow adjusts instantly. But with induction cooking the heat level is every bit as instantaneous, and as exact, as with gas, yet with none of the many drawbacks of gas (which we will detail later). Induction elements can be adjusted to increments as fine as the cooker maker cares to supply, just like gas, and--again very important to serious cooks--such elements can run at as low a cooking-heat level as wanted for gentle simmering and suchlike (something even gas is not always good at). Someday, perhaps not so many years away, the world will look back on cooking with gas as we today look on cooking over a coal-burning kitchen stove. No Wasted Heat ice on induction element that is boiling water With induction cooking, energy is supplied directly to the cooking vessel by the magnetic field; thus, almost all of the source energy gets transferred to that vessel. With gas or conventional electric cookers (including halogen), the energy is first converted to heat and only then directed to the cooking vessel--with a lot of that heat going to waste heating up your kitchen (and you) instead of heating up your food. The stovetop itself barely gets warm except directly under the cooking vessel (and that only from such heat as the cooking vessel bottom transfers). No more burned fingers, no more baked-on spills, no more danger with children around. safely touching induction cooktop with bare hand Furthermore, because its energy is transferred only to relatively massive magnetic materials, you can turn an induction element to "maximum" and place your hand flat over it with no consequences whatever--it will not roast your non-ferrous hand!
gas range labelled as containing PCBs Moreover, gas--induction's only real competition--has special risks of its own, not all of which are as well known as they perhaps should be. While the risk of a gas flame, even a pilot light, blowing out and allowing gas to escape into the house is relatively small, it does exist. But a much bigger concern is simply gas itself, even when everything is working "right".
Gascape web site, you may never again want to even enter a house with gas laid on (take some time to really poke around on this site--you may be shocked). And, of course, all combustion releases toxic carbon monoxide. Ease and Adaptability of Installation wheelchair-access induction installation Unlike most other types of cooking equipment, induction units are typically very thin in the vertical, often requiring not over two inches of depth below the countertop surface. When a cooking area is to be designed to allow wheelchair access, induction makes the matter simple and convenient. Not every home actually has a gas pipeline available to it--for many, the only "gas" option is propane, with the corollary (and ugly, space-taking, potentially hazardous) propane tank and regular truck visits. But everyone has clean, silent, ever-present electricity. Cleanliness kitchen duct, shoiwng grease accumulation Burning gas has byproducts that are vaporized, but eventually condense on a surface somewhere in the vicinity of the cooktop. Electrical cooking of any kinds eliminates such byproducts. Unfavorable: The Cooking Vessels The most obvious and famous drawback to induction cooking has already been mentioned: it only works with cooking vessels made of magnetic materials. The commonest such materials used for cooking vessels are stainless steel and cast iron. Cookware suited for use with induction cookers, from the extreme high-quality end down to thrift-store modest, is readily available; but if you already have a stock of mostly expensive aluminum or copper or glass or pyrex cookware and little or no cast iron or stainless, you might be up for a cookware investment. If you have ever seen the inside of a real restaurant kitchen, you will surely have noticed that most or all of the cookware is either cast iron or nice, shiny stainless steel (and most restaurants still use gas because the energy cost--which matters to them as it does not to a residential kitchen, because it's on all day long--is lower). Steel is most cooks' preferred cookware material for many good reasons outside the present scope of this site (and recall that enamelled steel cookware also works beautifully on induction).
clearly showed, with hard numbers, induction cooking units are every bit as powerful, and often more powerful, than gas units. To recap, a top-line "semi-professional" home gas range for serious cooks might have burners each rated at 15,000 BUT an hour--but that is only about 2 kW for an induction element.
elsewhere on this site, many modern induction units have capacities well above that number (some have up to 35 kW). Any concern over the adequacy of the "cooking power" of induction units is simply silly.
makers and their units on a separate page of this site, but there is now a real spectrum of available units. Importing can still make excellent sense, but--for the timid--quite a few units are now available domestically in North America (and more will be coming along soon). Electricity Failures If the electricity supply to your home is interrupted, you will be unable to cook; gas supplies can be interrupted, too, but such interruptions are normally somewhat less likely than electricity interruptions. If the electricity where you are frequently goes out for hours at a time, the loss of cooking ability may be an issue for you. Most people living in such circumstances will have provided themselves with a backup, such as a propane-powered emergency generator--but if that's you and you have no backup, factor the matter into your decisions. No "Char" Flames For those to whom charring such items as peppers in an open flame is important, the lack of such a flame is a drawback. Neutral Or Hard to Reckon Energy Costs Energy-cost differences are hard to reckon because the prices of gas and the price of electricity these days are highly volatile, even relative to one another, and vary considerably from locale to locale even on the same day at the same hour (and, of course, by season, too). Let's look at some numbers: Assume that you are using an induction cooker and have two elements, each 2kW, each running at maximum (a hefty load of heat indeed) for a full hour. At the present USA national-average electricity cost of about 93 cents a kWh, you will have used about 37 cents' worth of energy.
The cost difference, in this cost snapshot, and assuming a goodly amount of energy usage, is 7 cents. Granted, 7 cents here and 7 cents there does add up--but to what? And even if the energy consumption per meal cooked is not right, it can't be too wildly off. The reason we do is because one needs to be careful to compare apples to apples, and the conventional 30-inch slide-in kitchen stove is an orange in this analogy. It is not always true that "you get what you pay for", but it is always true that you don't get what you don't pay for. An induction unit is so clearly superior, in so many ways, to any other form of cooking that it is hard to exaggerate the differences. Moreover, a cooker--ordinary, fancy gas, induction, whatever--is a very long-term investment. The cost difference between a simple, inexpensive plain kitchen stove and a decent or better induction unit is not much when averaged out over the likely lifetime of such a unit. More to the point, though, is "apples to...
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