JJ Lighting & Electrical - Home Electrical Centre

Hobs are probably the most frequently-used appliance in the kitchen, apart from the fridge of course. But it’s perhaps surprising that it’s taken as long as it has to come up with a technology which is a good all-rounder, as all hobs until now have had a few flaws. Gas is good for cooking – fast and controllable – but can be a real pain when it comes to cleaning it. The old sealed-plate electric hobs were robust and easy to clean, but very slow and the only way to stop a pan boiling over was to physically move it off the hob. Ceramic glass hobs appeared in the late 1970s and were a huge leap forward, but still couldn’t get close to gas for cooking performance…

Enter the induction hob

As easy to clean as a ceramic hob...

That’s all changed thanks to the development of induction hobs. They’ve already been around for a couple of years, but have recently started to take off in a big way. Induction hobs look almost identical to the ordinary electric ceramic type, but they work in a totally different way. A ceramic hob gets hot itself and conducts that heat through to the saucepan, thus cooking your food. An induction hob uses powerful electromagnets to react with the saucepan and generate the heat within the pan itself. In other words, the induction hob itself never gets hot, and indeed you can switch one on for hours and it will remain stone-cold to the touch!

An induction hob in action. As can be seen, though the pan gets hot in the usual manner, the hob itself remains cold.

If this all sounds like witchcraft, let me explain. As you can probably remember from physics in school, a side effect of creating a magnetic field is that an electric current is produced. Without getting too embroiled in science, if a magnetic metal pan is placed on top, this electric current is conducted to the saucepan where it suffers from resistance in the metal. Again, if my A-level Physics serves correctly, electrical resistance always creates heat as a side-effect and there you go, the saucepan – and only the saucepan – heats up!

The advantages of this seemingly-complicated method of cooking is that it is even faster and more controllable than gas, since the pan itself provides the heat and doesn’t merely conduct it through a gasflame below. Combine that with the greater general efficiency of an electric hob and you end up with cheap, fast and environmentally-friendly cooking. Because the hob itself never gets hot, it’s very safe even with kids about and best of all, cleaning it requires just a quick wipe-over with a cloth…

Siemens' intuitive "TouchSlider" control makes this hob very easy to use...

This new Siemens hob is an excellent example of the latest generation of induction hobs. It resembles just a totally flush sheet of glass with nothing protruding at all, so you can just wipe it with a cloth. So for once those exaggerated kitchen cleaner ads on TV might just ring true! At first it appears there are no controls to be seen on the hob, but look closely and you’ll find the well-regarded “TouchSlider” control which has featured on Siemens’ ceramic hobs for a few years. The surface of the hob is touch-sensitive – simply choose the ring you wish to use by touching it, and move your finger left or right to decrease or increase the power as you wish.

Inevitably there is one downside to induction hobs, but just the one – and unless you’ve just bought a job-lot of ally pans, it’s a very small downside! Because the hob relies on the pan being magnetic, you would need to make sure before buying one that your saucepans fit the bill. Generally any ferrous metal is magnetic, so steel, stainless steel and cast iron pans are all fine. If yours are aluminium however, they will not work and you would need to budget a new set of pans in with the hob.

But it would be worth it…