This is definitely the main reason behind the battery. Being able to cook during a power outage is nice and all but it doesn't justify the very steep price all by itself. I have a cheap camp stove I can use for the rare times it happens.
I have a tiny NY apartment with ancient wiring, no 240v plugs. Upgrading would be a massive operation requiring cooperation from all the units below mine down to the basement - plus probably $50k or more.
So compared to that, $5500 for an induction stove that also had 3x the performance of the average induction stove and 5x the performance of most gas stoves looks like a really good deal.
Not sure what exactly ancient wiring implies but at 120 V this thing will draw 83 A to deliver 10 kW.
CORRECTION: It only draws 15 A at 120 V, the remaining power comes from the 3 kWh battery. So you have 22 minutes of 10 kW until the battery is empty, then you have 1.8 kW
I think that's what GP means, that this is appealing to them because others at 240v only aren't.
I'm not in the US so not that familiar (all my outlets are ~240v) with how it & appliances generally work and are marketed, but I assume the nominal 10kW is at 240, and that that drops (though it is still supported to work) at the lower voltage?
The battery isn't the only interesting thing here, either. Thermocouples in the burners and magnetically attached physical knobs are both big quality of life improvements that probably don't have a huge impact on cost.
YES! The thermocouples are such a big deal. I have been using the Breville Control Freak cooktop ($1500, single 1800w burner) for years — this was the first device to include this feature.
Once you use temperature-controlled cooktops, you can't go back. You can set your garlic to saute and walk away.
You're right, especially the water example. However, an induction cooktop with a working closed-loop temperature control system would be nice. The one I own has a temperature control and it's anyone's guess what it's thinking. The outcome of setting the temperature control is completely random. Also, since my cooktop works on an extremely coarse duty cycle control it goes full power for several seconds and then is off for several seconds, which isn't even slightly helpful. A cooktop with better electronics that can modulate the power at high frequency, and control the temperature, would be great.
I have a high end Bosch induction cooktop which can modulate the power, and doesn't just do the on/off cycle that so many induction cooktops do to get to a certain power level. It feels more like a gas cooktop than anything else and it is fantastic.
> doesn't just do the on/off cycle that so many induction cooktops do to get to a certain power level
I don't have one any more, but mine did that; I never found it an issue - unless you're cooking with copper (solid, not the pointless/aesthetically clad stuff) or really thin aluminium I can't see that it's going to appreciably lose heat between cycles. Maybe mine just had much shorter periods than those that people complain about, I don't know.
It's most noticeable with water or a pan of food you want to simmer, it will turn the heat on high for a few seconds leading to items to burn/boil for a few seconds, before turning back off.
That means that if you are making something that needs low and slow heat you get these moments where the heat is WAY too high.
I like to make things like candied mango pieces or strawberries for on top of pancakes, and with an induction stove that has an on/off cycle vs being able to modulate the sugar will quickly burn to the bottom of the pan because the temperature is far too high while it is in its "on" cycle.
It's not about heat retention between cycles, it's that during the on cycle it's too much heat.
Very thick bottomed pans can help dissipate some of it by capturing it, vs just dumping it directly into the cooking surface of the pan, but those pans are heavy and cumbersome and fairly rare.
the breville/polyscience control freak does this, as a single burner, _very_ well, though it's not cheap. I use mine for anything requiring fine temperature control over time & deep frying, but just use my gas range for more general cooking tasks. the control freak certainly proves that it's possible to make a non-gas burner that performs acceptably for me (also no touch controls, which is mandatory), but nobody else is making one. My ideal range setup would be something like 2x control freaks and then a 30k BTU gas burner with an electric combi oven that can do temperature & steam control as precisely as anova's countertop one, but there's zero chance of anyone ever making something like that.
It's vague marketing speak, but I took that to mean now that you know the pan temperature you can monitor and not burn your garlic.
Now I'm envisioning a stove with a stalk coming out over each burner with an infrared temperature sensor and a lidar sensor to monitor the temperature and height of each pans contents.
Why do you need 10kw? I can boost my induction stove to 3.6kw if i need to and this is more than enough, my water also boils in seconds. I am not trying to be a hater here, but some of these features do not make a lot of sense to me.
> With the integrated battery that can slowly charge up when you're not using it, and then quickly release that energy when you turn up a burner - there’s an incredible equivalent of 72,000 BTU/h of heating power, or 10 kW. (Compare that to 18,000 BTU/h for the best gas stoves currently on the market, or the equivalent of 28,500 BTU/h for some of the best induction stoves.)
If the 10kW is per burner, that's a record. Highest I've considered is 5.5kW in two Bosch models (PIV975DC1E, 775, using a 32cm pot) that aren't sold anymore. Apparently not enough demand - most models are 3.7kW with boost. There are higher priced models that go to 7.3kW but that's a twin boost that works with an oven dish, not just a circular pot.
That's a fairly radical change, from 5 minutes to boil to 40 seconds. How is that even possible? If you pour water on a pot that's been dry heating for 10 minutes it'll boil immediately, but only the water that touches the metal and soon the temp drops.
After having dealt with electronics, what Iam really bothered about is serviceability. Tired of having to toss out stuff that cant be repaired or comes in sizes that aren't standard etc. I am ready to go back to wood stoves.
If you can afford it the commercial versions are always superior to the consumer ones. The spare parts are available but at household levels of use, they’ll almost never break.
Buying a first-generation battery-laden appliance from a new startup in a category where my existing electric stove is about 20 years old and still works fine is quite the serviceability risk.
Batteries are definitely disposables. Would love to understand what degree of standardization exists and what the replacement will look like after 5-8 years on this product. If there isn't a plan, their "sustainability" pitch is nothing more than greenwashing.
I get this is for price-insensitive luxury early-adopters, but it would be nice if startups rewarded their early customers with something like extended warranties for the extra company risk they're taking on, especially with something expected to last 15-20 years. If these guys are around in 8-12 years, they will have ideally 10x'd their volume a few times by then so the extra warranty costs will be minimal. But most startups fail, so odds are this appliance will be e-trash then... would be nice to have some bonus reward for being the first to take on that risk.
It uses LFP batteries which are rated for thousands of cycles. More than anyone outside a professional kitchen would reach in a decade. The battery is also replaceable, which they state in their FAQ.
Thousands of cycles at what depth-of-discharge at what power? This use-case is pretty much the most aggressive, worst-case for batteries: ramp up to max power from a cold start, and then drain the whole thing.
The FAQ is also full of subtle weasel language:
> Our battery is designed to last beyond the average lifetime of standard appliances, and if a replacement is needed, the battery is modular and can be replaced upon request.
It talks about the battery being rated beyond some ambiguously-defined category lifetime. What is the "lifetime of standard appliances"? 3-5 years, going by average consumer dishwashers these days? That's not a lot for a $5k stovetop. Note though how they don't talk about THEIR appliance, and they don't talk about the battery being operated under THEIR usage.
My EV has a "10-year / 100,000mile" warranty, including battery, and they define battery performance as dropping below 70%. Unambiguous and straightforward. That the battery is the main justification of the price tag, they don't offer any specifics about the warranty, and they use ambiguous weasel language make for a huge red flag.
Best case: they're a startup and haven't figured this out yet. Worst case: the real-world performance will be a replacement money sink and this is vaporware. If you want to convince your early-adopters and instill confidence that this isn't expensive e-waste, offer a de-risking sweetheart warranty deal to your first batch of pre-order customers.
The battery work-around to low power mains supply seems it could serve a niche. Magnetic knobs seem like a great idea, and the 10kW max power level seems intriguing - I'd like to know what extra capabilities that allows.
Otherwise, this thing looks like an expensive maintenance nightmare. Those lcd's will break. There's obviously firmware which will rot, and who knows if it's going to hang and start outputting 10KW while cooking your french omelette. Is the UI even usable, or a random cacophony of menus? The battery has a limited life, and will be taking some fairly punishing spikes, etc. I would be interested in some of these ideas in a more modular form.
> Otherwise, this thing looks like an expensive maintenance nightmare.
Indeed. Our house has an electric stove from, probably, the 1960s. Complete with screw-in fuses. That's ~60 years of operation now. This thing will last 10 years tops. Their marketing talks a lot about "a sustainable future", but that doesn't jive with a future where major appliances have to be scrapped and replaced every 10 years or less.
I have a similar electric stove, and yeah, it still delivers a terrible cooking experience decades later. We're going to replace it in a kitchen remodel soon. Induction is a better experience, and if it means replacing hardware every 10 years, so be it.
All the major components for induction cookers are commodified (coils, IGBTs, etc), it's simply a matter of making the whole thing more modular (particularly, separate the UI from the induction control), and for someone to make an actually-good induction control microcontroller/firmware package as a module.
So, the question needs asked: Do you need cloudshit to use this?
We bought a stove that has this embedded cloudshit that wont let you use the whole oven for its intended purpose. And no way in hell I'm hooking it to a network.
I think it's safe to assume that the answer to this question is "yes". There's probably also a subscription service, and it's only serviceable by them.
Consumer electronics have lost the right have the benefit of the doubt. So unless these things are explicitly mentioned on the product page, you should always assume worst-case.
What's the fan like in that Hatco? I have a countertop induction cooker and I use it less often than I'd like because its fan runs full blast, at all times, regardless of the power setting. If I need to cook something at a very low heat for hours the fan noise is just too obnoxious to tolerate.
So, tried making an omlette today, at about 65% is when the fan kicked on. It felt like about 20-30% louder than my sous vide. So not unbearable, but noticeable.
It seems like a function of time as well. I was simmering on it tonight at 35% and fan came on around I'd say 30 min or so. Again, Not an aggressive fan and muuuuch less so than the convection fan on my Waring https://www.waringcommercialproducts.com/p/bn3k1/quarter-siz...
> a display in the center of the stove? Seems... like a bad place for it.
yeah. I get the ease of nice displays controls, but being right under where hot pots and pans will inevitably land is a recipe for early impact and heat failure. Not to mention how many people will reach for one of these controls and inevitably burn their hands on the pot simmering right next to it.
This feels like one of those things that looks good on a design presentation but once you field-test it, you quickly realize "oh, this is not great. at all."
If you don't just have 5k lying around doing nothing, I would ask for pretty strong warranty with all this.
Displays along these lines are how most of the high-ish end residential induction cooktops work these days. They’re generally very annoying to use and often laggy and unresponsive, but they generally do work.
But this particular stove has knobs, which hopefully improve the situation.
> I am happy to see competition in the space though and I hope more induction burners can get more accurate temp sensing and PID control
The thing is most the cheap chinese single cooktops all use the same microcontroller/firmware package, but the firmware is absolute garbage. It really wouldn't take much to make a good, PID equivalent (and BTW, have the UI run on a separate controller over an i2c or spi connection, so manufacturers can differentiate that way), and then even all the cheap cookers would be actually good.
What does this $823 single-coil 1.8 kW induction hob have over an IKEA €40 single-coil 2 kW induction hob [1]? You can get 20 of those IKEA hobs for the price of one of these so 'it will last longer' does not really apply.
Space does the same as the arrow for me - gets me through some sub-100 % of a transition to the next section, which gets more & more out-of-whack the more I hit it.
Are there any 'smart' appliances that can respond to what is happening in the pot?
If the recipe says 'bring to boil, then simmer', then I want the smart stove to do that ~10 kW at first and automagically lower the power once the content is boiling.
There are. My parents have an induction hob that sort of does that. I think the biggest issue with these kinds of "smart" features is the UI: you don't really want a hob that has dozens of buttons etc, that you don't understand, nor many menus with options, etc.
I had a pretty 'dumb' AEG induction hob that would do that. Sort of effective, but honestly I never used it other than figuring out how to do it once - combination of fiddly to do and just not something I personally think is that useful.
All of this looks awesome! I can't wait until the tech cheapens to make a consumer-class version of this available. Always nice to have some luxury items that are actually worth aspiring towards!
At this price it would never pay for itself, but an offsetting benefit of this battery system is, or at least might be, that for those of us paying time-of-use electric rates who also cook and eat dinner at dinner time, induction cooking is surprisingly expensive. If this thing can charge itself off-peak, and use its battery even when the grid is available, that could save a dime here and there. My summer peak-hour marginal cost is 54¢/kWh.
I like the idea - but then wouldn't it be nice if your fridge had battery backup in case power went out? or your washing machine could charge cheaply overnight and run during the day?
And then I start to think that maybe the better solution would be a smaller version of something like a powerwall. Maybe something flat that would easily fit behind the kick-board under the units in the kitchen and then could be wired up to provide multiple uses.
Or maybe add a couple of sockets to that induction hob, that let you use it as a UPS for your fridge? Boiling water in 40 seconds might be fun, but doesn't strike me as a killer feature. Only time I've ever wanted a more powerful hob myself, is when I've got my wok out.
The benefit of building it into an appliance is that the device itself is certified, and you don't need an electrical inspection for just plugging it in.
They mentioned adding a built-in outlet so that you could then have something else be on battery backup as well (fridge being the obvious application). I'm not sure if they ended up adding that for this version or not.
Really don't understand what about this thing makes it worth $6KUSD. Induction cookers aren't new technology, and batteries certainly aren't either. Just reeks of yet another "Tech" startup slapping a 1000%+ markup on their BoM because rich folks will pay whatever they're charging for the latest shiny gadget.
A few things I'm confused by. For one 10kw would just instantly trip a breaker wouldn't it? Standard household circuits in the US are 110v at 15 amps which is 1.6kw no? A battery could make up the difference but it would either be huge or only last a few seconds.
The temp measure is also a little confusing, but I'm guessing it's measuring the outer temp of the pan. That's definitely pretty good and comparable to a how an oven sets temp. I think it would actually be pretty amazing to include probes and set the temp based on the water or oil in your pot. In that case this would be functional as a sous vide cooker.
That's one of the main selling points I think. With a 3kw battery in there you could supplement the output using the battery to reduce peak amp draw, then slowly recharge it later.
96 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadSo compared to that, $5500 for an induction stove that also had 3x the performance of the average induction stove and 5x the performance of most gas stoves looks like a really good deal.
Because from the site it looks like it works with both 120v and 240v:
> Designed to fit inside most standard countertops and work seamlessly with 120V or 240V connections.
CORRECTION: It only draws 15 A at 120 V, the remaining power comes from the 3 kWh battery. So you have 22 minutes of 10 kW until the battery is empty, then you have 1.8 kW
I'm not in the US so not that familiar (all my outlets are ~240v) with how it & appliances generally work and are marketed, but I assume the nominal 10kW is at 240, and that that drops (though it is still supported to work) at the lower voltage?
Once you use temperature-controlled cooktops, you can't go back. You can set your garlic to saute and walk away.
Heck. I bought one induction cooker on Amazon for inr 1300 or US $ 15.
That's not how it works.
I don't have one any more, but mine did that; I never found it an issue - unless you're cooking with copper (solid, not the pointless/aesthetically clad stuff) or really thin aluminium I can't see that it's going to appreciably lose heat between cycles. Maybe mine just had much shorter periods than those that people complain about, I don't know.
It's most noticeable with water or a pan of food you want to simmer, it will turn the heat on high for a few seconds leading to items to burn/boil for a few seconds, before turning back off.
That means that if you are making something that needs low and slow heat you get these moments where the heat is WAY too high.
I like to make things like candied mango pieces or strawberries for on top of pancakes, and with an induction stove that has an on/off cycle vs being able to modulate the sugar will quickly burn to the bottom of the pan because the temperature is far too high while it is in its "on" cycle.
It's not about heat retention between cycles, it's that during the on cycle it's too much heat.
Very thick bottomed pans can help dissipate some of it by capturing it, vs just dumping it directly into the cooking surface of the pan, but those pans are heavy and cumbersome and fairly rare.
Now I'm envisioning a stove with a stalk coming out over each burner with an infrared temperature sensor and a lidar sensor to monitor the temperature and height of each pans contents.
> With the integrated battery that can slowly charge up when you're not using it, and then quickly release that energy when you turn up a burner - there’s an incredible equivalent of 72,000 BTU/h of heating power, or 10 kW. (Compare that to 18,000 BTU/h for the best gas stoves currently on the market, or the equivalent of 28,500 BTU/h for some of the best induction stoves.)
If the 10kW is per burner, that's a record. Highest I've considered is 5.5kW in two Bosch models (PIV975DC1E, 775, using a 32cm pot) that aren't sold anymore. Apparently not enough demand - most models are 3.7kW with boost. There are higher priced models that go to 7.3kW but that's a twin boost that works with an oven dish, not just a circular pot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yMMTVVJI4c
I recently bought a waring countertop oven (instead of a ninja/anova) because I could find replacement parts online (for now).
I also did the same for a countertop induction burner -- commercial version had a replacement parts list in the manual with numbers for every part!
Batteries are definitely disposables. Would love to understand what degree of standardization exists and what the replacement will look like after 5-8 years on this product. If there isn't a plan, their "sustainability" pitch is nothing more than greenwashing.
I get this is for price-insensitive luxury early-adopters, but it would be nice if startups rewarded their early customers with something like extended warranties for the extra company risk they're taking on, especially with something expected to last 15-20 years. If these guys are around in 8-12 years, they will have ideally 10x'd their volume a few times by then so the extra warranty costs will be minimal. But most startups fail, so odds are this appliance will be e-trash then... would be nice to have some bonus reward for being the first to take on that risk.
But, yes, it is a risk buying from them.
The FAQ is also full of subtle weasel language:
> Our battery is designed to last beyond the average lifetime of standard appliances, and if a replacement is needed, the battery is modular and can be replaced upon request.
It talks about the battery being rated beyond some ambiguously-defined category lifetime. What is the "lifetime of standard appliances"? 3-5 years, going by average consumer dishwashers these days? That's not a lot for a $5k stovetop. Note though how they don't talk about THEIR appliance, and they don't talk about the battery being operated under THEIR usage.
My EV has a "10-year / 100,000mile" warranty, including battery, and they define battery performance as dropping below 70%. Unambiguous and straightforward. That the battery is the main justification of the price tag, they don't offer any specifics about the warranty, and they use ambiguous weasel language make for a huge red flag.
Best case: they're a startup and haven't figured this out yet. Worst case: the real-world performance will be a replacement money sink and this is vaporware. If you want to convince your early-adopters and instill confidence that this isn't expensive e-waste, offer a de-risking sweetheart warranty deal to your first batch of pre-order customers.
Otherwise, this thing looks like an expensive maintenance nightmare. Those lcd's will break. There's obviously firmware which will rot, and who knows if it's going to hang and start outputting 10KW while cooking your french omelette. Is the UI even usable, or a random cacophony of menus? The battery has a limited life, and will be taking some fairly punishing spikes, etc. I would be interested in some of these ideas in a more modular form.
Indeed. Our house has an electric stove from, probably, the 1960s. Complete with screw-in fuses. That's ~60 years of operation now. This thing will last 10 years tops. Their marketing talks a lot about "a sustainable future", but that doesn't jive with a future where major appliances have to be scrapped and replaced every 10 years or less.
All the major components for induction cookers are commodified (coils, IGBTs, etc), it's simply a matter of making the whole thing more modular (particularly, separate the UI from the induction control), and for someone to make an actually-good induction control microcontroller/firmware package as a module.
I’d love to see this idea applied to a tankless electric hot water heater.
We bought a stove that has this embedded cloudshit that wont let you use the whole oven for its intended purpose. And no way in hell I'm hooking it to a network.
Consumer electronics have lost the right have the benefit of the doubt. So unless these things are explicitly mentioned on the product page, you should always assume worst-case.
Appified bullshit is what it is.
Also -- a display in the center of the stove? Seems... like a bad place for it.
I am happy to see competition in the space though and I hope more induction burners can get more accurate temp sensing and PID control
I recently bought a https://www.webstaurantstore.com/hatco-irng-pc1-18-rapide-cu...
instead of a control freak as it has a temp probe and I wanted to see how well it worked.
Haven't gotten around to seriously testing it yet but the plan is to mount their drop in 2 burner version in the counter if the probe works well.
The display in the center is bad if it’s a touch screen, water gets on it and it starts going crazy, very annoying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CrI33N-Sjg
yeah. I get the ease of nice displays controls, but being right under where hot pots and pans will inevitably land is a recipe for early impact and heat failure. Not to mention how many people will reach for one of these controls and inevitably burn their hands on the pot simmering right next to it.
This feels like one of those things that looks good on a design presentation but once you field-test it, you quickly realize "oh, this is not great. at all."
If you don't just have 5k lying around doing nothing, I would ask for pretty strong warranty with all this.
But this particular stove has knobs, which hopefully improve the situation.
The thing is most the cheap chinese single cooktops all use the same microcontroller/firmware package, but the firmware is absolute garbage. It really wouldn't take much to make a good, PID equivalent (and BTW, have the UI run on a separate controller over an i2c or spi connection, so manufacturers can differentiate that way), and then even all the cheap cookers would be actually good.
[1] https://www.ikea.com/nl/nl/p/tillreda-draagbare-inductiekook...
I can choose between hitting the arrow & getting halfway to the (faded out) next section. Or using the scroll wheel & skipping 3 sections at once.
How do I read your homepage? Please help.
If the recipe says 'bring to boil, then simmer', then I want the smart stove to do that ~10 kW at first and automagically lower the power once the content is boiling.
I’ve read many reviews of it and the people who have one claim that these precise temperature control features are the future of cooking.
Summer peak: $0.61806
Summer off-peak: $0.53462
Winter peak: $0.51536
Winter off-peak: $0.48701
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
And then I start to think that maybe the better solution would be a smaller version of something like a powerwall. Maybe something flat that would easily fit behind the kick-board under the units in the kitchen and then could be wired up to provide multiple uses.
Or maybe add a couple of sockets to that induction hob, that let you use it as a UPS for your fridge? Boiling water in 40 seconds might be fun, but doesn't strike me as a killer feature. Only time I've ever wanted a more powerful hob myself, is when I've got my wok out.
They mentioned adding a built-in outlet so that you could then have something else be on battery backup as well (fridge being the obvious application). I'm not sure if they ended up adding that for this version or not.
The temp measure is also a little confusing, but I'm guessing it's measuring the outer temp of the pan. That's definitely pretty good and comparable to a how an oven sets temp. I think it would actually be pretty amazing to include probes and set the temp based on the water or oil in your pot. In that case this would be functional as a sous vide cooker.