Quote:
Originally Posted by ELGo
...Re: your test protocol,
As was posted before me and you realized since you measured how much time the water continued to boil after the power was turned off, some of your resistive heat went to heating up the plate. I wonder if you could have turned off the resistive element say at 12" and then let the water come to a boil from
the latent heat in the plate.
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Yeah, or something close to that.
I also thought about getting the hot plate hot and then putting the pot on top and timing it from that point... but I didn't try it, because nobody really cooks that way.
It did make me realize how much energy is lost in heating up the wrong thing, and that is what induction is good at, its energy goes into the bottom of the pot.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ELGo
I completely agree with you -- go induction for the heat control and timer, not for efficiency. Not that efficiency is bad, just not superior enough to other methods to justify on that basis alone.
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But, there is the control angle to it. If you are really into cooking... making sauces for instance, gas is really nice, because you can quickly and smoothly bring the heat up, and even more importantly, drop the heat before something scorches. Unlike resistance heat, induction does these things well too.
There was an interesting article I saw in New York Times recently about a restaurant that recently opened there. It was a high-end Asian restaurant. To put in a standard commercial range with say 6 or 8 burners would have been pretty expensive in itself. But then for the extraction system to remove all the excess heat (gas is only about 40% efficient) and the CO2 and CO, the cost would have been about $300,000 (NYC, remember?). They were able to do it with a battery of commercial hobs, and there was almost no excess heat to dump and no CO2 or CO to reckon with. So in this case, induction made the new restaurant possible, where it would not have been with gas.
But from what you've said, it sounds like you're living off grid, or are supremely dialed in to lowering your power use. Any way you slice it, I like your approach.
BTW, I used to date a Palestinian woman and she told me that in Arab culture, tea is enjoyed all day long, and they use a thermos, just like you do.
Best,
-AC