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How bad is my gas stove?

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Re: How bad is my gas stove?

#501

Post by jwong_ »

Jailbird wrote: post #273
maxwell86 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We bought one from a restaurant on ebay. The "professional" models for restaurants don't have touch controls or fancy electronics. Just knobs. 100% recommend.

Mind naming the brand? We got a single pot model (59500P) by Vollrath to test out induction. We love it and wish all hobs had controls by single digit percentage. We cannot seem to find a cooktop equivalent. Edit: I read further and realized you got single plates too. The search continues....

Did you ever have any issues with your 59500P? I have the same and never run it above 70 or so, for fear of killing it. I heard they don't do domestic use warranties.

Re: How bad is my gas stove?

#502

Post by b112 »

rohitb91 wrote: post #105
b112 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

400A! I heat my entire home with electric, baseboard heaters, and have 200A. And it gets to -40C where I live! (Power comes from hydroelectric, and is cheap) What are you doing?

Wow that would be exceptionally expensive. In cold areas I've seen people with moderately sized homes have $1000 bills in the cold months in ontario.

Quebec. Power is much, much cheaper there.

Re: How bad is my gas stove?

#503

Post by vba616 »

rsynnott wrote: post #293
bradly wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the US most homes use combination stove/ovens called ranges. These are the cheap option because they are mass produced. Stovetops are more common in bigger, more expensive homes which is why the stovetops at Best Buy are the "premium" models. Also, at least in the US people have been told over and over how a kitchen remodel actually adds value to your house. "Every dollar you spend you get a dollar twenty back!" W…

Interestingly, this is more or less the opposite to Europe these days. While integrated stove/ovens are somewhat rare now, they tend to exist almost exclusively on the high end; a bog-standard cheapest-possible installation will be a separate halogen or induction (or gas) stovetop and a single oven.

>a separate halogen or induction (or gas) stovetop

Are you implying resistive coils, like Calrod, are more expensive, or not available?

Re: How bad is my gas stove?

#504

Post by maxwell86 »

mwint wrote: post #464
maxwell86 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The professional machines don’t look nice, don’t have fancy buttons or electronics. They are not fashion items for fancy looking kitchens. Instead, They are practical. They have insane power (4.5kW is low range… and it goes directly into the pan…). They are easy to clean, and they have physical knobs: one for on/off, and a dial for power, which they display in a cheap display in kWs.

Any pointers on where a residential customer could get one of these?

ebay (buy new directly from the brand). Restaurants open and close, and that stuff needs to often go somewhere else, up to the point that many of these brands sell their new equipment on ebay dirctly via their own shop.

Re: How bad is my gas stove?

#505

Post by maxwell86 »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #312
maxwell86 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it has a flat bottom, then it’s not a wok. It has a flat bottom "outside", inside it has the same shape as a normal wok.

That’s still not a wok. A wok has 2 important features: it has a round bottom and it’s thin. The thin sheet steel allows it to heat up and cool down quickly. Maybe you can make a thick-bottomed pan that has a rounded bottom on the inside. And maybe you can pump enough energy in it to make it heat up quickly, but you can’t suck the energy back out. If it’s that massive it will not cool down quickly.

The materials used for induction woks have very low heat capacity, but are very good at conducting heat. They get instantaneously hot, and instantaneously cold, with just the press of a button in your stove.

This is pretty much the case for all good induction kitchen-ware, since this is one of the main ways of cooking that induction allows that no other kitchen powersupply has.

Re: How bad is my gas stove?

#506

Post by maxwell86 »

oxymoran wrote: post #213
maxwell86 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good induction is light years better than good gas stoves. Ours has 4.5kW _per plate_, and its awesome. Silent, instantaneously hot, instantaneously cold, full control over the heat, no gases, etc. For heating and hot water, "remote heat" is infinitely cheaper, both in acquisition and maintenance costs, and infinitely more environmentally friendly than gas and electric heating. Sure, if you live in a remote region or…

Heat pumps only work on their own in mild climates. Cold climates still require furnace in conjunction with the heat pump. Good luck convincing anyone in the northern United States of getting rid of their furnace or hot water heater. Spouting this sort of head-in-the-clouds, wrong information only weakens your cause. “WHERE DO HEAT PUMPS WORK BEST? Heat pumps are more common in milder climates, where the temperature…

You have left this comment multiple times in the threads, in comments that have nothing to do with heat pumps:

> Spouting this sort of head-in-the-clouds, wrong information only weakens your cause.

The only thing you are showing is your ignorance everywhere.

Re: How bad is my gas stove?

#507

Post by jacquesm »

ikr678 wrote: post #486
rootusrootus wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rubber hose for gas? Is that really a thing? For years now all the appliance-to-supply line connections I've seen have been flexible stainless steel.

Perhaps poster meant polyethelene, which is normal for gas retic.

https://www.europart.nl/aansluitmateriaal/gas/slang/universe...

This is what we use for the final part of a gas line in the Netherlands.

Re: How bad is my gas stove?

#508

Post by BillinghamJ »

lultimouomo wrote: post #465
pkulak wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite way to show people how my induction stove works is to put some cold water in a kettle, pop it on a "burner", then turn it to "power boost". You can instantly see tiny bubbles forming on the bottom, and 20 seconds later it's at a rolling boil so intense you fear it may explode. I have no idea how anyone can say induction is slower than gas. And on the other end, low will slowly melt chocolate or heat a hol…

All the induction stoves I've tried, here in the EU, are great at boiling one pot of water. They suck at everything else. E.g. want to boil two pots of water in parallel? No can do - after warming up seemingly forever you will have one pot boiling for 5 seconds, then stopping and letting the other pot boil for five seconds, and so on. I want to love induction - no gas pipes, so much easier to clean, so much better fo…

So get one which is hard wired on a 32A fuse...? 3kW is on the low end for an induction hob

Re: How bad is my gas stove?

#509

Post by danachow »

pengaru wrote: post #432
danachow wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to break it you but an old 50s era stove works exactly as the GP describes - there certainly wasn’t low cost high power solid state power conversion circuitry in those days - the mechanism is extremely simple, an adjustable bimetal thermostat that can turn the element full on and off with adjustable duty cycle - and that modulation frequency is over seconds. Any smoothing of this mechanism is inherent in the t…

If it's modulating as you describe, it's completely imperceptible, unlike any of the other ones I've had to live with in SF bay area apartments. But I must admit I have not disassembled the thing to understand its workings. I don't even bother with heavy copper-clad pots and pans anymore, which were necessary before. This thing behaves like a gas stove. So it's the heating element thermal inertia that differs, to smo…

As you will see in the schematic of chapter 4 the fixed temp switches vary two voltage combinations (that you get “for free” with split phase power) and two coils to get the limited power levels. But this requires multiple coils per burner as noted. If it’s a single nichrome element per burner then even with fixed detents it may likely use a bimetal switch.

> I assume it's changing the resistance.

This isn’t feasible since you would need a resistor that was as big as the burner and essentially dropped as much heat as a stove element - for instance you would need a dummy load to dump as much waste heat as the burner itself to get a medium setting. In theory one could use a variac or multitap transformer - but again those would be relatively huge and heavy for the currents involved.

Re: How bad is my gas stove?

#510

Post by dpark »

tempest_ wrote: post #313
dpark wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I’ve never seen a wok like this. Most flat bottomed woks are just flat bottomed. A wok with a flat bottom outside and curved surface inside would also be heavy .

I have a cast iron one sorta like this https://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/lodge-cast-iron-wok... Yeah, it is heavy. You cant really toss things in it like you would a carbon steel wok.

My brain wasn’t working I guess. I was thinking of sheet metal woks and didn’t consider cast iron.
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