Dozens of public housing apartments will get plug-in induction ranges as part of the initiative, which aims to eventually shift 10,000 NYCHA homes off the use of polluting fossil fuel appliances.
Good call asking. It just clicked that my glass pots wouldn’t work. I mean, of course they wouldn’t, but I wouldn’t think of them while stove shopping because I only rarely use them.
5 am rambling about why I have glass pots: I keep them around for a friend that keeps kosher and visits. My non-Jewish understanding is that different folks keep kosher differently based on different traditions. Her tradition is that glass doesn’t pick up meat, dairy, or non-kosherness, so the same pot can be used for meat, dairy, or non-kosher meals, with washing in between of course.
Cast iron would work, though you shouldn’t blast the heat on it immediately because of how brittle they are and how unevenly they heat. You can find plenty of pictures online of people just chucking a room temp cast iron on at max heat and splitting them right down the middle. They get plenty hot when preheated at around the medium setting on most ranges, and if you need more you can blast it after it’s warmed up in like 2-3 minutes.
If you want to completely mitigate the risk, then yeah it’s ideal to start on low and progressively ratchet the heat up. Personally, I’ve just left it at medium and then cranked it up two notches on the dial after a few minutes. I’ve really never used the maximum heat for anything other than boiling water on my range, since just over medium is more than hot enough for a lovely sear. If the coil is significantly smaller than the bottom of the pan, I’d be much more careful and start on low no matter what pan I’m using just to reduce the risk of warping.
Yes, you can test with a magnet. If it doesn’t react, it won’t work. Aluminium for instance doesn’t work.
I don’t know why you were down voted and the user below gave misinformation. I bought a non stick pan before without noticing it wouldn’t work with my induction. Now I bring a magnet when choosing a pan.
A lot of cheap pans I’ve seen at (AU) Kmart, Big W, Ikea etc are aluminum with a teflon-esque coating, but with a carbon-steel circle attached to the bottom that makes it induction compatible.
Definitely, you just need pans with a ferromagnetic bottom, so cast iron works very well.
The outer material doesn’t matter - only the base. Many cheap induction-compatible pans are made mostly of aluminum with a non-stick coating, but containing a layer of ferromagnetic material in the base that will heat up on an induction stove.
I’ve removed this post due to misinformation. Copper and aluminum pots on an induction stove arent forbidden; they just don’t get hot on an induction stove.
A photo I suggest taking a look at: induction heater burning aluminum foil. Taken from the publication “Practical Course on School Experiments for Future Physics teachers”.
…as for thick aluminum cookware, or copper cookware, I was not implying that they would overheat themselves, I was implying that the induction cooker would overheat its coil attempting to work with them, because they conduct current better than the coil. But perhaps that’s prevented by protection circuits or a process I haven’t taken into account. I can’t test since I don’t have an induction cooker at home.
EM-fields induce current in copper and aluminum perfectly fine, no ferromagnetism is needed. You can build a coreless transformer for example, ordinary tranformers simply benefit from having a core (the core is separated into thin layers to reduce heating). Copper and aluminum simply conduct current very well, so appreciable heat does not appear at everyday levels of field strength and current. Steel and cast iron, having considerable resistance, heat up in a similar field, conducting similar amounts of current. There’s a potential gap in my understanding of the process, however - perhaps I’m failing to take into account the frequency of a cooking field in an induction cooker. The frequency determines whether current wants to travel in the depth of the conductor or on the surface of the conductor.
Simple experiments that I can recommend:
take a circuar magnet and let it drop along a copper pipe -> you will observe that it drops slowly, braking itself by inducing current in copper
spin a rotor with magnets next to a plate of copper -> you will observe mechanical resistance to spinning, because it induces current in copper
For example, a nearby conductive surface will exert a drag force on a moving magnet that opposes its motion, due to eddy currents induced in the surface by the moving magnetic field. This effect is employed in eddy current brakes which are used to stop rotating power tools quickly when they are turned off. The current flowing through the resistance of the conductor also dissipates energy as heat in the material. Thus eddy currents are a cause of energy loss in alternating current (AC) inductors, transformers, electric motors and generators, and other AC machinery, requiring special construction such as laminated magnetic cores or ferrite cores to minimize them. Eddy currents are also used to heat objects in induction heating furnaces and equipment, and to detect cracks and flaws in metal parts using eddy-current testing instruments.
I also recommend this source and will quote them below:
Induction heating utilizes electromagnetic fields to heat conductive materials without any direct contact. Aluminum, although non-magnetic, heats effectively because of its high electrical conductivity. However, it produces weaker eddy currents in comparison to ferrous metals.
This stuff would matter if induction stoves just had a raw component and no cooling or temperatue sensor or pot presence sensor. They’re an engineered product which doesn’t fail in the same way that the raw components do without any of that.
Don’t you need special pots and pans for induction stoves? Would a cast iron skillet work on one of those? Or a standard non stick pan?
Good call asking. It just clicked that my glass pots wouldn’t work. I mean, of course they wouldn’t, but I wouldn’t think of them while stove shopping because I only rarely use them.
5 am rambling about why I have glass pots: I keep them around for a friend that keeps kosher and visits. My non-Jewish understanding is that different folks keep kosher differently based on different traditions. Her tradition is that glass doesn’t pick up meat, dairy, or non-kosherness, so the same pot can be used for meat, dairy, or non-kosher meals, with washing in between of course.
Cast iron would work, though you shouldn’t blast the heat on it immediately because of how brittle they are and how unevenly they heat. You can find plenty of pictures online of people just chucking a room temp cast iron on at max heat and splitting them right down the middle. They get plenty hot when preheated at around the medium setting on most ranges, and if you need more you can blast it after it’s warmed up in like 2-3 minutes.
So, you should start my setting the stove to low and gradually heat it up?
If you want to completely mitigate the risk, then yeah it’s ideal to start on low and progressively ratchet the heat up. Personally, I’ve just left it at medium and then cranked it up two notches on the dial after a few minutes. I’ve really never used the maximum heat for anything other than boiling water on my range, since just over medium is more than hot enough for a lovely sear. If the coil is significantly smaller than the bottom of the pan, I’d be much more careful and start on low no matter what pan I’m using just to reduce the risk of warping.
Yes, you can test with a magnet. If it doesn’t react, it won’t work. Aluminium for instance doesn’t work.
I don’t know why you were down voted and the user below gave misinformation. I bought a non stick pan before without noticing it wouldn’t work with my induction. Now I bring a magnet when choosing a pan.
A lot of cheap pans I’ve seen at (AU) Kmart, Big W, Ikea etc are aluminum with a teflon-esque coating, but with a carbon-steel circle attached to the bottom that makes it induction compatible.
It was aldi and not too cheap. But it was a while ago when I induction wasn’t common.
Definitely, you just need pans with a ferromagnetic bottom, so cast iron works very well.
The outer material doesn’t matter - only the base. Many cheap induction-compatible pans are made mostly of aluminum with a non-stick coating, but containing a layer of ferromagnetic material in the base that will heat up on an induction stove.
So will they be offering compatible cookware is the other question. Otherwise it is just an added expense.
Removed by mod
I’ve removed this post due to misinformation. Copper and aluminum pots on an induction stove arent forbidden; they just don’t get hot on an induction stove.
Thanks for correcting.
There seems to be contradictory information on the subject.
Aluminum foil is proven to melt on induction cookers (see attached photo). But that’s because foil is thin.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Foil_on_induction_cooktop.jpg
A photo I suggest taking a look at: induction heater burning aluminum foil. Taken from the publication “Practical Course on School Experiments for Future Physics teachers”.
…as for thick aluminum cookware, or copper cookware, I was not implying that they would overheat themselves, I was implying that the induction cooker would overheat its coil attempting to work with them, because they conduct current better than the coil. But perhaps that’s prevented by protection circuits or a process I haven’t taken into account. I can’t test since I don’t have an induction cooker at home.
EM-fields induce current in copper and aluminum perfectly fine, no ferromagnetism is needed. You can build a coreless transformer for example, ordinary tranformers simply benefit from having a core (the core is separated into thin layers to reduce heating). Copper and aluminum simply conduct current very well, so appreciable heat does not appear at everyday levels of field strength and current. Steel and cast iron, having considerable resistance, heat up in a similar field, conducting similar amounts of current. There’s a potential gap in my understanding of the process, however - perhaps I’m failing to take into account the frequency of a cooking field in an induction cooker. The frequency determines whether current wants to travel in the depth of the conductor or on the surface of the conductor.
Simple experiments that I can recommend:
take a circuar magnet and let it drop along a copper pipe -> you will observe that it drops slowly, braking itself by inducing current in copper
spin a rotor with magnets next to a plate of copper -> you will observe mechanical resistance to spinning, because it induces current in copper
I can also recommend an interesting Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current
Quoting from the article (emphasis mine):
I also recommend this source and will quote them below:
This stuff would matter if induction stoves just had a raw component and no cooling or temperatue sensor or pot presence sensor. They’re an engineered product which doesn’t fail in the same way that the raw components do without any of that.
Yeah of course those kind of pans work fine. You don’t need anything special for induction. It’s standard for a lot of the country.
Old pots which don’t have enough iron or nickel in them for a magnet to stick to the bottom won’t get hot on an induction stove.
Cast iron works fine, but that cheap aluminum pot you bought as a student 20 years ago won’t work.