[thfuran]

>inductions jobs will use duty cycling (pulse width modulation if we’re getting technical). But that doesn’t determine responsiveness.

It absolutely does when the pulses are on the order of ten seconds long, as in many electric ranges. But yes, the thermal mass of the heated coil/cooktop are also a major factor.

[avianlyric]

No it doesn’t, because change the ring setting will interrupt the current duty cycle, and terminates it early if it needed. A control system that didn’t do that would be more complicated than one that did, because it would require the control system to persist internal state across duty cycles.

[thfuran]

Sure, in the limited sense of immediacy of response to change in control input. But in the more general sense of also considering accuracy/consistency of response to a control input, not so much. If you have a low thermal mass pan on a middling heat setting on a hob with excessively wide pwm like that, you can tell when the hob is on and when it's off just by how much the contents are sizzling any given second. The pan temperature is not stable because the pulses are too wide.

[avianlyric]

I’ve personally never encountered such a poorly designed induction hob. Induction hob require proper electronic control systems to operate, it would be weird to design such a system to operate with a wide PWM, it’s costs nothing for the system to operate at 1Hz or higher.

In ceramic hobs, they usually don’t have proper power control systems. They normally rely on a set of thermal switches to disconnect the main heating element when the ceramic element gets hot enough. The entire control system is analog and relies physical phenomena like wax expansion etc. Phenomena that is well know to be unresponsive, but very cheap.

[rcxdude]

My induction hob does similar on low power settings (at the lowest it's something like 1 second on to 4 seconds off). On higher power settings it's not noticable. I suspect the main reason for this is it's often harder (and more expensive) to design power electronics to operate over a wide PWM duty cycle efficiently, so the low-speed cycling is a way to provide the low settings without a significant cost increase.