Induced Heat

While I was sitting in the dark yesterday, waiting for the power to come back on, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to buy an induction cooktop.

This might seem like a peculiar thing to be inspired to do, but hear me out. While my gas stovetop can be run without electricity, if I don't mind lighting the burners with a match or something, I can't run the range hood to vent the exhaust outside, and so it's not really an entirely ideal solution. It will certainly work in the absence of any other options, but other options do exist.

Since I have a generator, running a portable induction cooktop is a viable and quite reasonable option. Yes, I know the box says "built-in", but it can run standalone just fine. More on that in a bit.

I also just had a hankering to try out induction cooking, since it's supposed to be all fancy-technological and magical and so on. Since these single-burner units can be had for under $100 ($67 for this one in particular) there's really not a lot holding me back.

The third factor is that if I'm going to put a cooktop of any sort in my van build, it makes the most sense for it to be an induction cooktop. This is why I picked a model that could be used freestanding, but which could also be installed flush with a countertop: I'll play around with it in my kitchen for now, and then later on I'll install it into my van.

It did turn out to be a fair bit larger than it appeared to be in the marketing photos.

Which is not a bad thing, it's just a thing that is.

But anyway, the playing around part. Everyone always gushes about how quickly it can boil water, so let's see how it does with 2 cups of the stuff, starting off at a Nice temperature.

And into the pot it goes to boil.

And the verdict.

Not half bad.

One of the interesting things about induction cookers is that along with just being able to set a power level to operate at, you can also pick a target temperature and it'll use a little thermistor just underneath the glass to try to keep the bottom of the pot and/or pan at that temperature. That means I can set a pot to simmer at, say, 200f and it'll just simmer along at roughly 200f, give or take. I don't have to worry about twiddling with the knobs to make sure that it stays boiling but not boiling over, like I would have to do with most other types of cooktops. Nice.

One concern I had was that people often complain about the noise that induction cookers make. This one has a fan that isn't anywhere near silent, but it's mostly just an inoffensive whooshing noise. There was almost no high pitched squealing when I used this laminated stainless pot, though it did make a bit more noise with the laminated aluminum frypan I tried (it luckily has a steel core for induction compatibility).

All in all I think I like it. I'm not 100% sold on having touch-buttons rather than actual knobs so if I replace my stove in the future with an induction model I might shop around for one with a more tactile interface, but other than that I've got no complaints. I can see myself putting some miles on this unit.

In terms of running this in the van, I'll have to be sure to size the battery bank appropriately. At full zoot this thing will suck 1800w out of the wall, so for an average sized LFP battery bank that stores about 1kWh, that'll give me a ballpark minimum of 30 minutes of cooking time, though I expect I'd get a fair bit more since I'm not going to be running the cooker at max power the whole time. If I get curious enough I might pick up a kill-a-watt to plug this into and see how much sparky-juice this thing sucks up while cooking a few sample meals.

I will enjoy playing with this.