171–180 of 238 posts
I have several of these and can confirm they're awesome and very satisfying to use (when they're working correctly).
> when they're working correctly Is their toasting a bit hit or miss?
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The knobs are part of it but the actual grill bits are by far the worst. I don't understand why gas stoves are so popular when you have to pull them to bits and scrub down after every use if you don't want them looking like crap. While induction is faster and takes a 20 second spray and wipe.
>I don't understand why gas stoves are so popular when you have to pull them to bits and scrub down after every use if you don't want them looking like crap. Because that literally isn't a concern for almost everyone who has one? I clean mine once a week.
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Gas stoves can put out significantly more power than electric, and achieve high temperatures much more rapidly. It's very convenient compared to electric.
That's not particularly true Inductive stoves are vastly more efficient than the old fashioned resistive coil stoves, so your 3000W of input power can yield cooking heat similar to a 40,000 or 50,000 btu gas stove. They also reach temp much, much more quickly than the old style. You can vary the output as quickly as a gas stove.
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Are they? Is this studied? I have never heard of one failing and know many people with them.
The controllers fail all of the time. Many of them don’t fare well around high heat, and sometimes the capacitive panels delaminate or otherwise fail. Replacement is usually expensive. The failure point of analog controls was usually the trivially replaceable knob. Appliance makers do a ton of reliability engineering to deliver predictable failure rates. Barring atypical screwups and bad design, major appliances tend…
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The induction ones are crazy powerful now. The one I was looking at could pull 12kW. Could boil a pot of water very fast. Much faster than gas.
I suspect that the 12KW isn't to a single burner, but rather the total across all burners. A typical home gas range is probably totalling 17kW or so with all burners going. doing some research in the internet, the large burners on induction cook tops do about 3.5kW, with less common 11" burners getting up to 4kW or so. The large burners on a gas stove do about 17500 BTU, which is about 5kW. I could believe that the p…
I just switched from gas to induction, and am consistently surprised at how cool the area around the pan stays vs. with natural gas. I’d guess the gas burner is wasting at least half the heat it puts off. A 5kW gas burner is definitely delivering less heat to the pan than a 4 kW induction burner.
Induction has other disadvantages though. The most obvious is that the bottom of the pan has to be perfectly flat, and match the burner size (at least for most burners). Lots of specialty cookware fails that requirement (magnetic or not).
They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toaster's 1949 price would be hundreds of dollars in 2021 terms. You can still buy really, truly excellent toasters made for industrial/commercial use, or for the homes of the very rich, and they're quite a lot better than the trash people keep in their houses. And…
From the article it seemed that it's better because it has a radiant temperature sensor rather than a simple timer. Unless you're disputing that and saying it's good for some other reason that would cost a lot of money, a temperature sensor and little control system for it would not cost hundreds of dollars to make today.
EDIT: The problem seems to be that regular consumer appliances seem to have raced to the bottom in the past 30 years or so. It's not that a significantly better toaster would cost hundreds of dollars more, it's that it would cost a few dollars more. The high end things that are 10x the price seem to be priced that way mostly because there is not a strong mid range market, or maybe they compete on gimmicks rather than basics. Because you don't need a $300 powder coated steel toaster with an a glass oven door and 5 cooking regimes including steaming that was mentioned in the article (https://us.balmuda.com/collections/toaster) to get the functionality and robustness of their simple 1940s sunbeam toaster.
They bury the lede in the last fucking paragraph. The reason this toaster is immensely better than the toaster you have at home is very, very simple: this toaster's 1949 price would be hundreds of dollars in 2021 terms. You can still buy really, truly excellent toasters made for industrial/commercial use, or for the homes of the very rich, and they're quite a lot better than the trash people keep in their houses. And…
His whole channel (called Technology Connections) is probably my favorite one on YouTube, can’t recommend it enough! My favorites are his series on refrigeration and heat pumps, for example this one: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto Edit: to clarify, this article is based on an old Technology Connections video, and the creator of that video has lots more!
Seconded, I learned a ton about A/V systems from him. He has excellent technical content. Learning about how the old electromechanical juke boxes worked was fascinating. I can also recommend Applied Science. He explains the concepts behind numerous concepts and applies them to a home project in his garage. Such project include: Home made electron microscope Chemical glass strengthening Robotic cookie maker Creating X…
This toaster was expensive when it launched, but could be considered worth the money since it would last for a long time and it seems to have a good resale price even today. On the other hand, today it is hard to buy simple things of good quality on Amazon - example 100% cotton or 100% woolen clothes. And it would be harder in a physical superstore like Target or Walmart.
You might appreciate the BuyItForLife subreddit. The ad hoc nature can make it hard to find stuff, but the posts are generally all direct testimonial by people who have had a given item for an extended period of time.