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I love induction. The main annoyance, for me, are the touch controls. You regulate up or down in steps, and the controls sometimes have trouble recognizing you
by leobg 5y ago
I love induction. The main annoyance, for me, are the touch controls.
You regulate up or down in steps, and the controls sometimes have trouble recognizing your fingers if they are wet. There’s also no tactile feedback.
I’d much rather turn a knob.
Then it would be perfect.
- kergonath 5y agoYeah tactile controls are rubbish. I can’t wait for the next design fad where we’ll go full circle and have dials and knobs everywhere.
- params 5y agoThis is so true, my parents have an induction stove with touch controls. It takes ONE drop of water on the 10x40cm touch control square to make the whole stove top shut down with a beeping alarm sound. If you have buttery fingers it won't recognize any touches (major annoyance when making butter heavy sauces). On top of that it also relies on long-presses, you have to hold your finger on the "button zones" for 2 seconds, then you can alter the heat, one touch at a time on a 1-10 scale. Takes about 10-20 seconds to adjust the heat. When I looked for a new stove last year I tried to find one with induction AND knobs. I ended up getting a non-induction stove, with knobs, works well enough although I would swap it for one with induction and knobs any day, haha!
- leobg 5y agoYeah. Manufacturers act like having wet or oily fingers was some kind of edge case in a kitchen.
- wallacoloo 5y agostove/oven UX has been shit ever since they were first digitized. my first home had an analog-controlled electric oven: turn the dial to the temperature you want. every oven i’ve owned since uses up/down touch buttons to adjust the temperature in 5-degree increments. it turns the half-second process of swinging a knob to the right place into a 5-second process of holding a button until it hits the right temperature. worse, i find myself trying to micro-optimize my use of oven temperature buttons: instead of holding up until the temperature is reached, i repeatedly tap it to make it go faster — but not so fast that the debouncing mistakes 2 presses for just one press, otherwise it’s net slower. i find myself actively making latency v.s. throughput decisions: i can preheat the oven by pressing “on”, dialing in the temperature, and then pressing “start”. or, i can press “on”, “start”, and then dial in the temperature and press “start” an extra time. preheating begins whenever you first press “start”, so this shaves off 5 seconds of preheat latency at the cost of 1 extra second spent on an extra button press. i get irrationally angry every time i use a digital oven. the digital oven is like some looking glass into a half-dozen interlinking societal systems that have managed to settle into some totally unsatisfying equilibria… and they’ve stayed there for decades. it’s legitimately depressing.
- jonnycomputer 5y agowhat you can't get induction stoves with knobs? is this just a high-end thing in general? man, in the kitchen, keep the controls simple.
- andix 5y agoI hate those too. There are a few models left, that have knobs, but they are getting fewer and fewer. No idea why. Sometimes you need to react really quickly and turn down heat, if it takes you 5 sec more, the food might be burnt already. Lifting the pan might be a good „hack“ though.
- leobg 5y agoYeah, lifting the pan is what I resort to, too. Like cooking on medieval fire. It‘s kinda ridiculous, given the granularity, precision and immediacy that electric heating, and especially induction, would allow for were it not for those dumb touch controls.
- sgt 5y agoTactile feedback? Knobs? What do you think this is, the 1950s? No no. Your next stove should have a touchscreen, maybe not even a screen at all - control everything via your phone using a cloud based platform that connects to your stove./s
- leobg 5y agoHaha. Exactly! Or just use Alexa. „If you don‘t subscribe to Amazon Music now, I‘ll burn your food!“.
- CommanderData 5y agoAlexa. Turn lights on. : Ok, burning house down.
- rvba 5y agoMore like "we have detected that you try to cook meat, so the stove wont start"
- wantoncl 5y agoOK, but where does the blockchain and Stovecoin mining fit in? I gotta make money from cooking on it somehow!
- zrobotics 5y ago>> I gotta make money from cooking on it somehow! This may be old-fashioned, but have you considered using the stove to cook food and then selling the food? If we need to get technology involved, you could accept payments via square. Hell, you could probably even accept payment via blockchain. But then again, how will the poor stove manufacturer continue to capture monetary value from your purchase? I just bought some delicious tamales from a coworkers mom, and I doubt she shared any of those ill-gotten gains with Samsung. Clearly this is a sector in need of disruption StoveCoin is sounding better and better. Plus, all the waste heat from mining can make kitchens as hot as operating a gas stove, which is what induction stoves are missing. Let me know when the ICO is happening!
- gerikson 5y agoWe searched high and low for a stove with an induction top that used knobs and finally settled on a stove from Bertazzoni. Expensive but worth it for us. IMHO touch controls are popular because they are cheap to make and offer a simple way to integrate the hob onto a counter. For a lot of people that is important. For us (my partner is blind) it is not.
- maxwell86 5y agoWe bought one from a restaurant on ebay. The "professional" models for restaurants don't have touch controls or fancy electronics. Just knobs. 100% recommend.
- Jailbird 5y agoMind naming the brand? We got a single pot model (59500P) by Vollrath to test out induction. We love it and wish all hobs had controls by single digit percentage. We cannot seem to find a cooktop equivalent. Edit: I read further and realized you got single plates too. The search continues....
- gerikson 5y agoThis is our model https://universal.bertazzoni.com/products/professional-series/cookers/60-cm-induction-top-electric-oven-8 https://universal.bertazzoni.com/products/professional-serie... SMEG also has induction stoves with knobs but we don’t trust that brand.
- Jailbird 5y agoThanks!
- maxwell86 5y agoI have one similar to thieving: https://rover.ebay.de/rover/0/0/99?loc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.de%2Fp%2F11024133541 https://rover.ebay.de/rover/0/0/99?loc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eba...
- gambiting 5y agoI'm the same. I was a huge proponent for gas stoves, until I got a good induction one and wow. It's just as good when it comes to heat, with extra advantages like not throwing extra heat into my kitchen, things never burning onto the actual plate and it just generally being a much neater solution. But yeah the heat can easily match gas, it's great. And I also agree that the touch controls are absolutely the worst, they are abysmal. I see why they are done this way - it allows the entire plate to be wiped clean very easily. But I still wish you could have separate controls somewhere on the side, with actual tactile knobs.
- DyslexicAtheist 5y agoI don't know how anyone can cook with these things for exactly the reasons you mention. Cooking can be chaotic with many things to keep track at once. Fingers are wet, or greasy so buttons don't work. Something overflows with just a few tiny drops the thing switches off leading to a problem with something else on the stove that requires constant stirring because now you're forced to clean your hands, dry to spillage from the stove before you can continue. Lift a heavy pot from the stove and put it back down (because it was a wee bit too hot to handle) - BAM! the fucking glass is broken. (I broke already 1 induction stove from my brother and my own Ceran this way). WTF designed these things? Certainly not a chef! A bialetti (moka) pot will not work because they're made from aluminum (no induction). The whole thing upsets me so much that it's very high on my list for deciding if I can live in that country. If there is no gas cooking (most of North of Europe) un/-surprisingly the food is also terrible. Maybe there is sample-bias in my statement but I know literally nobody in my family or friends who owns a ceran/indusction stove and who is actually a great cook. The only things better for cooking than gas are wood or coal fires. But gas is the next best natural flame.
- leobg 5y agoApparently you can use propane tanks. That's what a family told us that wanted to move into our last apartment. They swore by their cherished old gas stove, and said one of those tanks lasts them... well, I don't remember exactly, but it must have been half a year or something. In any case, much less of a hassle as I would have thought.
- DocG 5y agoHalf a year to a year depending on usage. We use these 11kg tanks we get on any gas station for as long as I remember. No fuzz with running extra big wires for stove.
- eptcyka 5y agoMy mother uses her bialetti moka pot on her induction stove every morning. I'm not entirely sure what you're on about.
- sirwitti 5y agoI happened to buy a used quality induction stove, that has knobs. At the time I didn't think a lot about it, but to me it's the best stove I ever used. I honestly don't know thw reasoning for using toch controls on induction stoves. They are a pain to use for most people.
- magicalhippo 5y agoMy previous induction cooking top had a very nice system as far as touch controls go. Each of the four zones had a separate ~5cm strip from 0 to 10, and beeped when changed. After a short while I could easily operate it while not looking, and precision control (half-steps) was easy by simply rolling finger. Sadly very, very few seems to have this design. Some have a shared control, but having to select the zone and then power is just... not good in comparison. I have that on my current one and I routinely adjust the wrong one, split between forgetting to select zone and it not recognizing my zone selection. It was still touch though which overall sucks compared to physical controls.
- bbarn 5y agoI've had two induction stoves over the last two years, one newer and one a little older. I came from a lifetime of cooking with gas. First complaint - exactly the same as yours. Even a little boil over can sometimes just shut everything off. Second complaint - "smart" pan sensing. I have a few pots that don't really fit the rings on the stove perfectly, and they have been relegated to the "useless" corner of the cabinet. The temp setting starts to either flash whenever the pot isn't big enough to cover the ring, or just takes forever to heat up. Last complaint - some of my pans are not perfectly flat on the bottom, from either a rough life or warping in the oven, etc. Those pans are also useless on the induction hob.
- _jal 5y ago- They fail to work with non-standard sized pans. - You can't use a wok on them. - In fact, you can't use them with lots of other things, or in many ways I use my gas stove. Yes, these are "off-label" uses, sometimes not even related to cooking. So? Tools should be flexible, not fight back.
- TulliusCicero 5y agoYou can absolutely use a wok on them. I bought a wok while on electric and it turned out to be fine for induction too.
- carlmr 5y ago>You can't use a wok on them. Buy a cast-iron wok from Staub, they work wonderfully.
- gomox 5y agoThat's not a wok, its just a wok shaped braiser. Woks are supposed to be thin and light for fast temperature adjustment and ease of tossing.
- stephencanon 5y agoCast-iron woks do exist, though; we have this and it’s fantastic: https://rikumo.com/products/featherweight-cast-iron-wok https://rikumo.com/products/featherweight-cast-iron-wok It weighs about 30% more than our old carbon steel wok, which doesn’t matter much in practice.
- _0ffh 5y agoMy carbon steel wok works perfectly on induction.
- lukeschlather 5y agoIt's a different tool, it works differently. Induction boils water in less than half the time, and it also has very precise heat control which can go very low, down to 100 degrees, where a gas stove's lowest setting is fast high heat by comparison. How long have you cooked with a gas stove? I would wager that if you spent decades cooking on induction you would have similar complaints about gas. I love cooking with gas, but also I love cooking with electric, and I imagine I could love cooking with induction. (3 minutes to boil sounds brilliant, who needs a dedicated electric teakettle.) The stuff I could do with precise control down to 100 degrees F, I don't even know but that sounds like it requires patience but allows wonders that are impossible with gas. Not to say gas can't work wonders that are impossible with induction, but they're different tools and it's not fair to judge simply on the basis of a few missing features. Also there are pans that don't work as well with gas in my experience. I suspect that if anyone lived with an induction stove for decades and tried to replace it with a gas stove they would also be complaining that half their pans don't work anymore, or at least don't work for the task they've been used for anymore.
- schwartzworld 5y agoMy lg induction stove has normal knobs. It's awesome. I wouldn't go back to gas. The only thing induction can't do well are cooking hacks that utilize the open flame, like toasting tortillas or roasting peppers on the burner without a pan.
- reaperducer 5y agoI’d much rather turn a knob. I have induction with knobs. It's no different. I suspect it's just a knob on the user side, and there's still the big steps behind-the-scenes. My stove's induction knobs give me tactile feedback, but lack the granular control that a real analog knob has.
- leobg 5y agoGood point. Some things look like a knob but are not the same as a know. At least when compared to how it works on a gas stove. It's really weird. Granular and immediate control should be such an easy thing to do with electric. It almost seems as if manufacturers are adding in these "steps" to make it more user friendly in the sense that you can say "I've turned it up to 3". Is there any technical reason to have discrete steps?
- lstodd 5y agoIf they did put a decent encoder behind the knob that wouldn't be a problem. But hey, decent encoders cost.
- samwillis 5y agoWe have an electric Range Master stove with an induction hob. Love that it’s controls are all still knobs! The are big plus is it doubles as extra worktop as it’s just so big (and flat).
- maxwell86 5y ago> I love induction. The main annoyance, for me, are the touch controls. We bought a professional induction stove from a restaurant online on ebay for very cheap. One of the reasons is that all controls were "manual" and with "knobs". The amount of electronics on these is minimal.
- leobg 5y agoDo you have a link to a picture or product page? Just to get an idea. I've been looking for something like that for a while.
- maxwell86 5y agohttps://rover.ebay.de/rover/0/0/99?loc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.de%2Fp%2F11024133541 https://rover.ebay.de/rover/0/0/99?loc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eba... Something like that is what I bought.
- drudoo 5y agoYou can get induction with knobs.
- ajmurmann 5y agoI looked into this a few months ago and found a stove that came with magnetic knobs you put onto the control area. You turn adjust temperature by turning the knob
- Tiktaalik 5y agoYou can def get induction ranges with knobs, I've been appliance shopping recently and saw plenty of them, but at the moment it may be a "luxury" feature that requires getting a model that is a few notches up from the cheapest model. Of course it's silly that knobs would belong only to "premium" models.