Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by 0db532a0 2650 days ago
I really hope they don’t. One, electric cooking is shit however you wrap it up. I have found a large correlation between people being okay with electric cooking in places I’ve lived and also not cooking/not knowing how to cook. That’s probably the only way electric cooking has become so prevalent in the UK. Who would want to anyway if stuck with electric?

Two, I do not want to have to wait hours for the tank to heat up again after someone takes half a minute too long in the shower.

The power just isn’t there when it comes to electric water heating. I am very glad to live in a house with a combi gas boiler right now where the whole house can have a shower on demand, straight after each other if need be.

Until we all have massive heat pumps or some other way of getting high-power heat from domestic electric, it makes complete sense to me for us to pipe gas around while most of our domestic energy usage in the UK goes to heat.

1 comments

Induction cooking is electrical cooking. Do you mean conductive electrical cooking?
Yes, induction does have higher max power in comparison to the terrible resistance hobs and the slightly less terrible ceramics. The problem with induction is that it doesn't work when you don't have a completely even bottom (on your cookware). Cookware warps over time. You can get induction wok stoves, but that misses the point. You can also get a nice gas stove with a massive centre hob for your wok needs.

Even forgetting the evenness issues, which ceramic stoves share too, the modulation just isn't there. Lower power on induction and ceramic means alternating the same power on and off. This does average out over the long term to a lower power, but what if you need a constant lower power? The power settings also tend to be discrete and far apart, which is again completely useless for a lot of fine applications. It's completely useless for instance you want your pilau rice to steam properly at the end of cooking at a low power in a shallow, broad stainless steel pan (as it should be), rather than sticking to the bottom of the pan.

Warped cookware works fine with induction hobs.