Now we're cooking without gas

For some years now, we've been waffling over the question of when to start electrifying our home. Not adding electricity to it, that is, but replacing our old gas-burning appliances with electric ones. It's a bit of an ecofrugal dilemma, because electrical appliances are clearly better for the planet, but not better for our budget. According to the Personal Electrification Planner tool from Rewiring America, replacing all our gas appliances (boiler, water heater, dryer, and stove) with electric ones would cost us over $15,000, after tax credits—and on top of that, it would add an extra $200 per year to our utility bills.

And the cost isn't the only challenge—particularly where our gas stove is concerned. It may be old, inefficient, and polluting, but it also works during a power outage, something no electric stove can do. I was reluctant to give up that fail-safe for the sake of a possibly faster, possibly cleaner cooking experience. So, while I figured we'd have to upgrade to an induction stove whenever this one bit the dust (which, considering its age, could be any day now), I wasn't keen to junk it any sooner than I had to.

But recently, I realized there was a middle ground. Rather than replace this stove outright, we could supplement it with a stand-alone induction burner. This would only cost around $100 and wouldn't require any rewiring of the kitchen. We could use the induction burner for most of our cooking tasks, while keeping the gas as a backup. It could step in during a power outage and also handle any job that called for multiple burners and/or a piece of cookware that wasn't induction-compatible.

I consulted several sources for recommendations on which induction burner to buy, and all of them had good things to say about the $110 Duxtop 9600LS. However, the slightly older and cheaper Duxtop 9100MC had most of the same features, and the ones it lacked—like touch-screen controls and a 10-hour timer—were ones I didn't think we'd have much use for. Plus, its slightly larger size looked like it might come in handy for our big Dutch oven. So I ordered that one for a mere $88.49 (including tax), and two days later, it arrived on our doorstep. We plunked it down on the counter right next to the stove, plugged it in, and we were ready to cook.

So far, we've used it for just a handful of tasks: boiling water, making pasta, cooking an omelet, and simmering a pot of soup. Although the controls are quite simple (just set set a pot on it, turn it on, and push the buttons to adjust the heat up or down), we faced a bit of a learning curve in figuring out what settings to use. On high heat (9 or 10 out of 10), it boiled a half-full teakettle noticeably faster than the gas stove, yet it seemed to take longer to bring a full pot of water up to a rolling boil for cooking pasta. Brian also discovered that this heat setting, which he thought was comparable to what he would use for an omelet on the gas stove, is decidedly too high for this purpose on the induction burner. The omelet came out rather torched, and he had to haul out our giant fan to clear the smoke out of the kitchen. (So much for improving our indoor air quality.)

This revealed another weakness of the induction-plus-gas setup: With the burner sitting next to the range, the hood can't clear away steam and fumes. We couldn't fix this by setting the burner on top of the stove because of the risk that we might accidentally turn on the flame. We thought maybe we could get around that by removing the knobs of the stove burners, but there was another problem: according to the instruction manual, the burner couldn't be placed directly on any metal surface. And putting a board on top of the existing stove grates wouldn't work either, because the burner also couldn't rest on any surface that could be flammable. 

Eventually, though, we found a work-around. We still had a few of the big porcelain tiles left over from our downstairs bathroom renovation, and it turned out that one of those was just large enough for the induction burner to fit on. So, to cook the soup, Brian set the tile on top of the stove burners, set the induction burner on top of the tile, and removed the stove knobs to eliminate any risk of accidents. This allowed the soup to simmer away merrily on top of the burner while the range hood vented away the steam. 

Unfortunately, we can't just leave this setup in place full-time, since the induction burner can't be sitting on top of the range while the oven is in use. Instead, we've stashed the ceramic tile in the cabinet underneath our big cast-iron skillet, ready to grab whenever we want to cook an actual dish on the burner. If we're just using it to boil a kettle of water, it can stay next to the stove instead.

It's too early to say yet whether this little burner will save us energy or money. We plugged it into our Kill-a-Watt meter just to get an idea of its energy use, and we found that it draws 7.5 amps and 850 watts on the 5 setting and 11 amps, 1.25 kilowatts on 9. But we don't have much idea how that compares to the amount of energy our gas stove uses. We'll check and see if there's any noticeable change in our gas or electric use on our next utility bill, but I suspect the difference will be too small to detect.

However, we have identified a couple of other advantages to using the induction burner. First, it's remarkably easy to adjust. We already knew that induction stoves were much more sensitive than regular electric ones, which take quite a long time to heat up or cool down when you change the temperature setting. But Brian thinks this one is actually easier to control than our gas stove. When he turns the knob on the gas stove to, say, 6, the actual size of the flame won't be exactly the same every time. It may sputter or waver, so its heat output won't be consistent. But if he sets the induction burner to 6, he knows he'll get exactly the same level of heat he got the last time, and it will be even across the entire surface of the pan.

Second, nearly all of that heat will get transferred directly to the contents of the pot. Little or none of it will dissipate into the surrounding air—a major perk during a hot summer like this. Even the pot handles and lids don't get nearly as hot on this induction burner as they do over a gas flame. When Brian cooked the omelet on this burner in our cast-iron skillet, the bottom of the pan got really hot (a bit too hot, in fact), but the handle was still cool enough to grasp with his bare hand. Likewise, I've noticed that when I boil the kettle on the induction burner, I don't need to use a pot holder to lift and pour from it the way I do when I heat it over gas.

So, while this little induction burner isn't going to replace our gas stove entirely, we suspect we'll be using it in future for the majority of our frying, boiling, and simmering. And, almost as important, it will provide a valuable fail-safe. We've known for some time that the gas range was nearing the end of its life; one of the buttons on its control panel has already failed, and if the next one to go out is the one that turns on the oven, that will be game over. But thanks to this little burner, we'll have something to cook on while we go through the process of finding a replacement—and making any necessary upgrades to our electrical system so we can get it installed.