[pinkmuffinere]

Are they cost effective? I suppose in the long term you save money by paying for electricity instead of gas, which could offset price differences. I strongly prefer gas stoves over conductive electric ranges, but haven’t tried an induction stove yet.

[cassepipe]

Probably don't make that much of a difference. I know it does not in my country. If anything, at the same price of gas and electricity, gas is less efficient so induction should be cheaper. Imma say this again : Gas is not efficient.

And since it probably don't make much of a difference, if you have the financial room for it, maybe you can make the sensible choice for society ?

Less gas means less methane emissions from gas plumbing (4x times worse than CO2) and less dangerous accidents : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_explosion

Electricity means a single network and can be clean, gas can't. Gas stoves is the gateway drug to gas heating and the industry knows it which is why they spend so much lobbying for it even though it's a very small part of the gas they sell.

I still find it funny that there is such a fuss about when a mentally ill person finds a ideology to die for and blow themselves up for the cause when it's just as likely and deadly than gas accident but barely no one is able to remember last year street explosion because of gas. Both are fact of life and can be mitigated for but one is apparently very meaningful while the other... "oh well".

[Jailbird]

I'm definitely not an expert, but I would say nothing of note has changed with our utility bill since we replaced the gas cooktop with an induction cooktop. The marketing will tell you it's more efficient because all the energy goes into the cooking (heating the pot) instead of heating the room as with gas. But hey, that's marketing.

One other concern was control: we did find out that the power levels on our model were not linear. The first 5 were all low power for low power needs (eggs, sauces, etc) and then 6 through 9 were much larger increments for high power needs (e.g. frying).

Our experiment before committing was using a plug in cooktop. We got a good one, and even though it was "only" 1800W it made many meals. It's power settings were linear but offered us 0-100% in 1% increments (amazing control! Love that thing.)

[cassepipe]

It sure is marketing and... basic physics ?

[pinkmuffinere]

To be fair, there are losses with induction charging, and I imagine there are similar effects here. But it makes sense that induction cooktops would generate less waste heat than a gas range.

[Jailbird]

OK yeah, I was just attempting not to project authority but let the data (which I didn't have handy) be the important part.

[pinkmuffinere]

Thanks for the detailed response, I think a plug-in induction cooktop might be added to my future Christmas list!