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The Induction Site




Pros and Cons

—Max Planck


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Instant Adjustment

To serious cooks, the most important favorable point about induction cookers—given that they are 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 other 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 (and nowadays that is very fine, especially at the critical low-temperatures end), 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


As a comparison, 40%—less than half—of the energy in gas gets used to cook, whereas with induction 84% percent (or, by many estimates, more) of the energy in the electricity used gets used to cook (and the rest is not waste heat as it is with gas). There are two important heat-related consequences of that fact:




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! (Nor any rings or bracelets—the units all have sensors that detect how much ferrous metal is in the area that the magnetic field would occupy, and if it isn't at least as much as a small pot, they don't turn on.) And, while an element is actually working, all of its energy goes into the metal cooking vessel right over it—there is none left "floating around" to heat up anything else. (The image at the left shows a hand—wearing a metal ring—harmlessly touching a full-on induction element, while a metal utensil lies equally harmlessly on another, emphatically demonstrating those points.)

gas range labelled as containing PCBs


Ease and Adaptability of Installation

wheelchair-access induction installation



electric wall socket

It is an obvious but still very important fact that induction cookers are powered by electricity. 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.


kitchen duct, shoiwng grease accumulation



The Cooking Vessels


On the other hand, if you have a significant quantity of non-ferrous cookware that is not terribly expensive, you can replace it—possibly with much better stuff!—as part of the process; cast iron is by no means "spendy" cookware. 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 (even when they are still using gas for their cooking). Steel is most cooks' preferred cookware material for many good reasons we discuss elsewhere on this site (see the link below—and recall that enamelled steel cookware also works beautifully on induction.


For the curious, the difference is how much, if any, nickel was added to the stainless, as nickel kills magnetic fields; the sort labelled "18/0" is nickel-free, whereas "18/8" or "18/10" stainless has too much nickel to work effectively on induction cooktops. (Nickel is used because it tends to make a shinier steel.)

As we noted elsewhere, technology to allow use of any metal cookware—even copper and aluminum—is in the pipeline, but there are definite problems with getting sufficient power levels with that technique, so it will likely be many years before units with it start showing up in the mainstream (if they ever do). So, for now, the need for ferric cookware does remain.

(There are now, however, adaptors available that will allow any pot or pan to be used on an induction element; because they essentially turn an induction element into a standard stovetop type of heater, they lose many of the advantages of induction—they are less efficient, they get very hot, and may be restricted as to maximum power level—but if you have a special-purpose item of non-ferrous cookware, such as glass or ceramic, it can be made to work on induction.)


Inadequate Power?

This is not a valid negative—but we list and discuss it here because there are so many falsehoods and misunderstandings floating around on this matter. As we clearly showed, with hard numbers, induction cooking units are not merely as powerful as even "pro" gas ranges (residential "pro", that is), they are almost invariably much more powerful. (And that's using conservative figures for both gas and induction efficiencies.) To recap, a top-line (and top-price) so-called "pro" home gas range might have burners each rated at 15,000 BTU/hour or, in a few cases, as much as 18,000 BTU/hour—but that is only about 2.1 to 2.5 kW for induction elements, and even the most modest cooktops have at least one element of at least 2.4 kW (and many have elements up to 3.6 or 3.7 kW or even more!). Any concern over the adequacy of the "cooking power" of induction units is simply silly and ignorant.

Radiation Hazards?



Induction itself is a noiseless process: the energy fields are generated by electronic equipment, which is silent. But even efficient electronics generates some heat. Whether the amount of heat generated can be dissipated "passively" (just by radiation and natural air flow, still silent) or requires a small fan to augment the air flow depends in good part on how tightly a given maker has packed how much power into how much space—some units have fans, some don't. But even on those with fans: one, the fan does not necessarily run all the time—usually just when the unit is running multiple elements at high settings—and two, such fans are normally pretty soft-sounding. There can also an occasional very soft "tick" sound, as the power controller cycles the elements on or off to keep the element power steady and stable.


Cookware of solid cast iron, including enamelware, is not subject to such issues; and clad cookware of better-quality lines should not be.

Electricity Failures


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. (It is, of course, one shared with all non-gas cookers.) But nowadays, most good ovens—gas certainly, but probably even electric—can do an acceptable job of charring food.

Neutral Or Hard to Reckon

Energy Costs




Purchase Costs

It's hard to say that induction cooktops are "comparable" to gas cookers when induction-unit prices start at close to a thousand dollars: nonetheless, we will say it. 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. One can say that a Chevy and a Rolls Royce are both "cars"—vehicles that take a given number of passengers from Point A to Point B—but there are valid reasons for the difference in their prices.

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. Moreover, consider: right now (early 2013), the top-ranked gas range on Consumer Search's list costs about $1,350; ranges topped with induction cooking surfaces range from $1,150 or so up, with a half-dozen under $1,500. That is awfully competitive. (Curiously, induction-topped ranges cost little more than induction cooktops.)

Vessel Sizes

Cooking vessels at the extremes of size—the very small and the very large—occasionally raise issues. Because the auto-detect feature that all induction units have is meant to assure that things from cooking implements (such as metal tongs or spoons or ladles) to jewelry (rings or bracelets) will not activate an element, the detectors are often set rather conservatively, so much so that on some units very small pots or pans will not be detected (the usual minimum pot base size for activation is from 4 to 5 inches, depending on particular unit.) But that is scarcely a major issue: if you really must have such a pot—say "a butter warmer"—there are accessories available that make it easy.

At the other extreme—things like griddles or fish poachers that are well over 12 or 14 inches in at least one dimension—also present issues, or rather they used to. We still list this as a nagative because not all units can deal with such cookware, but nowadays a large and growing number feature "element bridging", which allows a matched pair of elements (commonly the left front and back pair) to be "bridged" so as to act as a single extra-long element, allowing things like griddles or fish pans to be satisfactorily accomodated.


induction cooktop with grill on bridged element pair.

And today, for those for whom such considerations loom large, there are several induction units available with true "bridged" element pairs (as shown in the image at the left); that means that on a given unit, some same-size pair of elements (it seems to typically be the left-hand front/back pair) can be set as a "bridged pair" making them effectively one long single element, such that a grill or griddle or fish pan will work well on them.

zoneless induction cooktop with large pot and pan.

Moreover, for those with truly unusual needs, there are now "zoneless" units that will take any size or shape vessel you can set down on them (as shown in the image at the right). Zoneless is, so far, still pretty pricey, but units with bridging are little if any different in price from others of their general size and quality.

Get Others' Opinions



Cracked Pots

a cracked garden pot




The old guff seemed to be especially based on the purported weakness of induction units beside gas cookers; today, to anyone who can read without moving their lips, that scarcely rises even to the level of being humorous—it's just so silly. Remember, for comparing induction with gas:

gas BTU/hour = induction kW x 7185


Summing Up

Although this site is about the clear superiority of induction to any other method of cooking, we really have tried to give as balanced a picture as possible. If it seems to you, after reading this page, that we have skewed toward the favorable, that is only because induction really is immensely superior. Its sole consequential drawback is its inability to work with certain kinds of cookware—which is not an inherent flaw, because it works with the very best—but which can be a drawback is you are at present heavily invested (whether in a dollar or in an emotional sense) in incompatible cookware.

(And don't forget to see our page on Induction Cookware.)

You can now explore the rest of this site as you please, but if you want to jump straight to some hard data on real induction-cooking units, the logical next stop is our page on Induction-Cooking Manufacturers and Their Products. Or, if you want a fuller background on the "how and why", check our "mini-course" at Kitchen Electricity 101.




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This page was last modified on Monday, 25 January 2016, at 7:13 pm Pacific Time.