I would be more interested in an induction cooker that has a traditional mechanism of action, but with a far more user-friendly, analog control scheme.
The primary challenge with induction is that you cannot really control the heat transfer with cookware placement. There are some that try to emulate this but it is "laggy" and inconsistent at best.
For whatever reason, my brain keeps coming back to something approximating a foot pedal you can use to directly control the amount of current that flows through the element. Remove all of the digital control circuitry and let the user be 100% in the loop. Safety issues be damned. Many are cooking with open flame, so I really don't see the relative concern here.
Today, I prefer induction simply because of the speed. I can bring several liters of oil up to 400F in < 4 minutes. Boiling water for tea takes less than 45 seconds. The tradeoff is the heat control. I've got 5kW of power, but its wrapped in these horrible kid gloves right now.
The biggest issue I've seen with consumer induction cooktops is that all the affordable ones use stop touch/tap interfaces that make it really difficult to adjust heat while cooking.
If the primary input was just a potentiometer (or rotary encoder, if they wanted to be fancy) it would be trivially easy to set or adjust any hob at any time.
This is so American - to provide (dangerously) high power (great for marketing materials!) and then put it behind a crap interface that gets your kid burned by boiling sauce or spattering oil or whatever. RISKS of inappropriately complex and unresponsive control interfaces.
I'm in Europe and the induction cooktops are the same here. There are a few models with actual dials/knobs, but they're (almost?) universally very expensive models.
A friend used to have one with a sort of slider; it was still though a digital touch interface but had enough steps to make it feel continuous. Never wrote down what it was, and never saw one since.
I myselr used to have one that would go in 200W steps, that was also pretty great. Also never saw that on another model.
this one costs around US$15. me and many millions of consumers in india use devices costing around this $12-$20 priced induction cookers because that's the only thing being available...
everyone has a soft button interface which sucks but because of the relatively cheap capital cost, you are able to buy a new one if the old one breaks. with good care i've used a machine not different from above for 4-5 years nonstop
Yeah, aside from the actual interfaces I think induction units are great. They are safer than most (all?) other types of cooker, they're super fast to reach set temperature, and they have the potential to last a really long time.
I just really want at least one inexpensive unit like the one you linked to come out with a knob for temperature control. Surely that wouldn't affect the cost that much?
> Problem: I do not have a good feel for the amount of energy needed to heat a pan vs the amount easily generated by a pedal. If you would need to pedal for hours to get the pan hot that would not be good.
This might be feasible in a setting with multiple people providing power, but I'm not sure how usable it would be with just one person.
As a rough rule of thumb, an average person riding a a bike at about 15 km/h would be using 30-40 watts of power.
Let's assume that this cooking device would be twice as hard to pedal. If it converted your pedaling with 100% efficiency—which it certainly wouldn't—it would give you a peak output of 80 watts of power.
In that case, you'd still only get about 80 Watt-hours of energy after 1 hour of pedaling. For context, it takes about 90 watt-hours of energy to boil 1 litre of water, so you'd be pedaling over an hour to boil it. In fact, that's ignoring the rate at which the water is dissipating heat out into the air. You might not even get it to boil at all.
For this to work at all, you'd need many sets of pedals to allow multiple people to put energy in. With 10 people pedaling in the above scenario you'd be getting 800 watts, which would be usable for a lot of different types of cooking.
> A Tour de France cyclist typically generates 300 to 350 watts. Joe Average on a bicycle will go over 150 watts only in short bursts.
> (And remember: muscles generate heat, too - and they're only 18-25% efficient. So the power peddler will be heating up, but won't have the cyclist's breeze cooling their body down... )
Something to keep in mind is that a hotplate or inductive cooktop may not need to run at full duty cycle depending on the heat dissipation of the materials involved and the setpoint of the themrostat or temperature probe.
It may be pulling its maximum rated power while it comes up to temperature, but it'll be regulated by some sort of thermostat.
Once it's at temperature the rate of heat dissipation of the hob, pan, and even the ingredients themselves will affect how soon it'll drop below the threshold and power draw will resume.
A system with a lower maximum power would still work, but it would be running at a higher duty cycle to maintain the same temperature. It would take longer to get to the set temperature in the first place and slower to bring it back to temperature whenever the temperature drops.
That said, I'm pretty confident that 700-800 watts would be useful for many types of cooking and I think it's achievable with a dozen or so people pedaling.
I want to assemble a gym club with a few rows of bike and suck up the mechanical energy production to power some stuff. People pay clubs and then pay to power machines to then waste energy. Seems cosmically absurd to me.
It would be a cool marketing gimmick, too. Call the gym something like "Watt's Gym", and add card readers to each machine so people can track their total produced killowatt-hours.
The actual amount of energy generated would still be pretty small, but it would be a fun gimmick to motivate people.
You could have an app and little screens showing the total energy that you generated this session or month, and see how much energy you contributed to the total for the whole gym that period.
Heck, an average workout could generate maybe 0.03-0.04kWh and if the gym was popular enough that would add up to a portion of the electricity used by the facility.
Those savings could even be passed on to the members with a reward system of some type, which also works as a marketing/motivational gimmick.
The thing would be to have a global counter per row or room, 0.04kWh seems ridiculous but if you get 10-20 people putting 1kW it starts to get impressive. I also wanted to couple that to shelter so homeless people could warm up food or water etc.
You get free sport and they get a slightly better life..
ps: if you ever set something like that up, please share the plans :)
Yeah, 80 watts was just an arbitrary doubling of a rough estimate for average cruising on a bike.
That said, I think it's still somewhat reasonable to do the calculations below the level of a workout because not everyone is going to want to do a high intensity workout every time they want to cook something.
Oh yeah, even a micro hydroelectric generator can easily do 500 watts continuously, so add a bank of batteries—maybe one made of recycled li-ions—and you could easily store enough energy to run an induction top for all your daily meals.
If you want to see this concept tried in real life, Codyslab has a video. From the description: "I stick a bunch of magnets to the flywheel of a diesel engine to show off some cool science."
In addition to the problem of measly human power (mentioned in other comments), generators are only efficient when the magnets are quite close to the conductor so the metal pots/heating element would have to be held ~2mm from the rotating magnets. Generators succeed in this because they have a small metal housing that holds everything rigid. I don’t see how this could be practical for a large cooktop.
Also the material of the pot/heating element (Al vs Nichrome) only changes the optimal gearing ratio for the bike wheel.
Worse idea occured due to misunderstanding the title: mechanical friction cooker. Clamp a pot to the "stove" which is a spinning metal wheel. Great for people who distrust magnets and/or don't want to buy a new pot before the bottom wears through.
> A hot plate [sic] (includes induction) typically draws 1000 to 1400 watts.
> A Tour de France cyclist typically generates 300 to 350 watts. Joe Average on a bicycle will go over 150 watts only in short bursts.
Halfbakery does better math than HN, can't seem to pin down the conclusion either though. Which is it's a dumb idea, or rework the numbers and show where a non-dumb idea might lead.
The primary challenge with induction is that you cannot really control the heat transfer with cookware placement. There are some that try to emulate this but it is "laggy" and inconsistent at best.
For whatever reason, my brain keeps coming back to something approximating a foot pedal you can use to directly control the amount of current that flows through the element. Remove all of the digital control circuitry and let the user be 100% in the loop. Safety issues be damned. Many are cooking with open flame, so I really don't see the relative concern here.
Today, I prefer induction simply because of the speed. I can bring several liters of oil up to 400F in < 4 minutes. Boiling water for tea takes less than 45 seconds. The tradeoff is the heat control. I've got 5kW of power, but its wrapped in these horrible kid gloves right now.