Notices by Technology Connections (techconnectify@mas.to), page 3

I have found radiant electric to be Perfectly Fine™

My brain can handle the thermal rubber band thing just fine, and to be honest the whole "the stove is too hot to touch for a few minutes" has never felt all that problematic. I'm used to a thing which produces an open flame, after all!

And to add to this even further, there's the weird spot the US is in right now with market penetration:

It's impressive how quickly that will boil water, and I do appreciate the fact that the surface doesn't really get that hot. But, after a holistic assessment, that's just not that important to me.

Also! The fact that I have the portable burner already, and that it currently lives right next to the stove so I can use it with a kettle or whatever else, means that I'm not exactly making a choice which denies me of induction. I still have it!

But it's truly not that big of a change for me.

Ok, with the gas stove thread, people won't stop asking why I'm not considering an induction cooktop. So here's another thread where I try to answer this.

Perhaps the bottom line is this: I'm a Midwesterner. It carries a lotta baggage.

To elucidate, first you should understand that I have tried induction! Not the best experiences of it, to be sure, but I've used two portable burners and found them both to be impressive (with a few caveats). But on the whole, not a game changer to me.

I have a range (single device, oven and cooktop) and I really have grown to love double-oven ranges. For whatever reason, there are almost no double-oven electric ranges with induction cooktops available right now.

Plus, only about half of my cookware works with induction, and when buying new cookware induction-compatibility remains something you need to seek out here, even with high-end stuff. It's gotten a lot better, but it's still something of a limitation.

So, there ya go.

I still hugely prefer radiant electric over gas. I've found it to be much more powerful, hardly heats up the kitchen when in-use, and clicks with my brain just fine.

Would I like induction even better? Maybe. But aside from rapidly boiling water for pasta, which might only shave off five minutes anyway, the rest of its advantages just don't mean much to me.

Remember, I have tried it - and I still have the option to use it!

@thomasfuchs Ehh... it can be both.

My Ikea burner is definitely worse with some pots, but it makes the same screechy sound even with the single-layer (non-laminated) kettles I have. Heh, and for the hell of it I tested to see if it would work with a baking sheet I have. Yes, it does and yes it made the same noise as always.

I have little doubt that it's worse than a proper stove, but still. Radiant just gives a little bit of a hum.

OK, time for a short* thread** about gas stoves. At this point, I have been *thoroughly* disillusioned and don't know how I ever thought they were any good. I never want one again***

* I hope

** Please read the whole thing (I'll mark the end) before replying, as I might be touching on your thought!

*** Wok-users and enjoyers, boy do I have some interesting news for you about plug-in induction woks and how they're getting fairly cheap

For reasons which are personal and too complicated to get into anyway, I've been living out of two places for like five years. That's coming to an end in fairly short order but the upshot is that I've been regularly switching back and forth between a high-end KitchenAid gas stove and a Whirlpool radiant (not induction!) electric stove.

Now, aside from the energy source, they are essentially the same model. The Whirlpool is just the more budget-focused option.

That's the Whirlpool, and it marked the first time I was using an electric stove day-to-day since my childhood.

And ever since then, I've hated the KitchenAid stove at home more and more. It takes the oven much longer to preheat. It makes the kitchen hot as hell in the summer, and smelly whenever I use it - unless I have the vent fan blasting, that is.

The front-right burner makes the microwave handle above too hot to touch in a matter of minutes, and even worse? It's SLOW.

I had the KitchenAid gas stove first - I was able to pick out my appliances in my new home, regrettably everything was gas but at that point in time I legitimately still thought I preferred cooking with gas so I just went with it.

Lived with that stove for about a year and, aside from the back burners being utterly useless for anything other than simmering, thought I liked it.

Then, about a year later, I installed a range circuit at Place 2 to ditch its gas stove for air quality concerns.

My folks were over for Christmas and we had some potatoes O'Brien for breakfast - just a frozen mix you do up in a frying pan.

It was taking AGES. I could have sped it up moving over to the mega burner, but that would have made the searing heat coming around the sides of the pan even worse! It was damn-near painful to stir that stuff around with a wooden spoon, and it took like 20 minutes to fry up nicely.

They're not fast, folks! They just react quickly. That's it.

So, since I'll be spending less time at Place 2, I've made the decision - I'm ditching the stove at home.

I've made arrangements to have a range circuit installed, and I'll (eventually) be getting the electric version of the same KitchenAid stove (which is nearly functionally identical to the Whirlpool). I'm a sucker for those knurled handles with the red, what can I say?

And guess what? I'm not even going to go with induction. I like glass-top ceramic just fine.

And to those Wok people - I bought an induction wok for $199 just the other day. Round-bottom wok and everything. I have virtually no cooking experience with a wok but would like to try it - and I'll probably be making a video about it, just as a PSA if nothing else.

Woks come up again and again as a sticking point in the gas stove discussion. There are multiple solutions out there.

And to make this anecdote EVEN MORE FUN - I reached out to a neighbor offering them my old stove. They, too, want to switch to electric!

They had an electric stove in the previous home, now have gas, and don't like it as well!

I almost feel hoodwinked. So many of the things I thought were "better" about gas just... aren't.

OK, you can light it with a match when the power's out. Great.

But they make the kitchen hot as hell, are painful to use, and aren't even fast. WTF.

I used the word hoodwinked earlier - perhaps gaslit would have been better!

But that's really what it feels like. How did I ever think I like the smelly, fumy, hot-AF cooking experience more? Why did I think electric stoves were so slow? How did these thoughts get in my head, and stay so pervasive?

And that's the end of the thread. You do you, I'm sure some folks out there still want gas stoves. I won't judge you - but my mind has been changed, and HARD.

Now, will I make a main channel video about the stove situation? Not sure. It will invite a lot of stupid comments, for sure.

But I can repeat the same experiments I did with the first stove rodeo, do it a little better, and it will (probably) be a swap to the SAME MODEL but electric rather than gas.

I'll definitely do more water-boiling timing, oven pre-heat time (I already know the electric will crush it) etc. at least for Connextras.

@Drwave Assuming your last question is to me, it's a combination of stuff:

Big factor is that a double-oven range is more important to me than having an induction cooktop. There are very few options with both and they're all stupid money.

I'm also not super convinced of the long-term reliability and repairability of those kinds of electronics, though I'm not sure how concerned I need to be there.

Bottom line, though, I don't find glass-ceramic limiting or difficult.

I used the word hoodwinked earlier - perhaps gaslit would have been better!

But that's really what it feels like. How did I ever think I like the smelly, fumy, hot-AF cooking experience more? Why did I think electric stoves were so slow? How did these thoughts get in my head, and stay so pervasive?

And that's the end of the thread. You do you, I'm sure some folks out there still want gas stoves. I won't judge you - but my mind has been changed, and HARD.

I've got a new video out today, and making it it was truly a blast!

https://youtu.be/AEm-2giH_zw

"Heat pumps don't work in the cold"

Context: This is data from my mom and dad's new cold climate heat pump. While the system has been calling for heat continuously during this time, it has only needed to kick on the backup resistive heating in the deepest of cold, and even then only for a couple of hours overnight.