Induction Cooking:
How It Works

What Is "Induction Cooking"?

Here's the Basic Idea

"Cooking" is the application of heat to food. Indoor cooking is almost entirely done either in an oven or on a cooktop of some sort, though occasionally a grill or griddle is used.

Cooktops--which may be part of a range/oven combination or independent built-in units (and which are known outside the U.S.A. as "hobs")--are commonly considered to be broadly divided into gas and electric types, but that is an unfortunate oversimplification.

In reality, there are several very different methods of "electric" heating, which have little in common save that their energy input is electricity. Such methods include, among others, coil elements (the most common and familiar kind of "electric" cooker), halogen heaters, and induction. Further complicating the issue is the sad habit of referring to several very different kinds of electric cookers collectively as "smoothtops," even though there can be wildly different heat sources under those smooth, glassy tops.

As we said, cooking is the application of heat to food. Food being prepared in the home is very rarely if ever cooked on a rangetop except in a cooking vessel of some sort--pot, pan, whatever. Thus, the job of the cooker is not to heat the food but to heat the cooking vessel--which in turn heats and cooks the food. That not only allows the convenient holding of the food--which may be a liquid--it also allows, when we want it, a more gradual or more uniform application of heat to the food by proper design of the cooking vessel.

Cooking has therefore always consisted in generating substantial heat in a way and place that makes it easy to transfer most of that heat to a conveniently placed cooking vessel. Starting from the open fire, mankind has evolved many ways to generate such heat. The two basic methods in modern times have been the chemical and the electrical: one either burns some combustible substance--such as wood, coal, or gas--or one runs an electrical current through a resistance element (that, for instance, is how toasters work), whether in a "coil" or, more recently, inside a halogen-filled bulb.

(Microwaving, an oven-only technology, is a fourth method, wherein the heat also is generated directly in the food itself.)

How does an induction cooker do that?

Put simply, an induction-cooker element (what on a gas stove would be called a "burner") is a powerful, high-frequency electromagnet, with the electromagnetism generated by sophisticated electronics in the "element" under the unit's ceramic surface. When a good-sized piece of magnetic material--such as, for example, a cast-iron skillet--is placed in the magnetic field that the element is generating, the field transfers ("induces") energy into that metal. That transferred energy causes the metal--the cooking vessel--to become hot. By controlling the strength of the electromagnetic field, we can control the amount of heat being generated in the cooking vessel--and we can change that amount instantaneously.

(To be technical, the field generates a loop current--a flow of electricity--within the metal of which the pot or pan is made, and that current flow through the resistance of the metal generates heat, just as current flowing through the resistance element of a conventional electric range's coil generates heat; the difference is that here, the heat is generated directly in the pot or pan itself, not in any part of the cooker.)

How Induction Cooking Works:

1. The element's electronics power a coil that produces a high-frequency electromagnetic field.

2. The field penetrates the metal of the ferrous (magnetic-material) cooking vessel and sets up a circulating electric current, which generates heat. (But see the note below.)

3. The heat generated in the cooking vessel is transferred to the vessel's contents.

4. Nothing outside the vessel is affected by the field--as soon as the vessel is removed from the element, or the element turned off, heat generation stops.

(Image courtesy of Induction Cooking World)

(Note: the process described at #2 above is called an "eddy current"; in fact, most of the heating is from "hysteresis", which means the resistance of the ferrous material to rapid changes in magnetization--but the general idea is the same: the heat is generated in the cookware).

There is thus one point about induction: with current technology, induction cookers require that all your countertop cooking vessels be of a "ferrous" metal (one, such as iron, that will readily sustain a magnetic field). Materials like aluminum, copper, and pyrex are not usable on an induction cooker. But all that means is that you need iron or steel pots and pans. And that is no drawback in absolute terms, for it includes the best kinds of cookware in the world--every top line is full of cookware of all sizes and shapes suitable for use on induction cookers (and virtually all of the lines will boast of it, because induction is so popular with discerning cooks). Nor do you have to go to top-of-the-line names like All-Clad or Le Creuset, for many very reasonably priced cookware lines are also perfectly suited for induction cooking. But if you are considering induction and have a lot invested, literally or emotionally, in non-ferrous cookware, you do need to know the facts. (Check out our page on Induction Cookware.)

Newer technology is coming along that will apparently work with any metal cooking vessel, including copper and aluminum, but that technology--though already being used in a few units of Japanese manufacture--is probably several years away from maturity and from inclusion in most induction cookers. If you are interested in a new cooktop, it is, in our judgement, not worth waiting for that technology.

(The trick seems to be using a significantly high-frequency field, which is able to induce a current in any metal; ceramic and glass, however, are still out of the running for cookware even with this new technology.)

There is also now the first of the new generation of "zoneless" induction cooktops. These essentially make the entire surface of the unit into a cooking area: sensors under the glass detect not only the presence of a pot or pan or whatever, but its size and placement--and then energize only those mini-elements directly under the cooking vessel. You can thus put any size or shape of vessel--from a small, traditional round pot to a gigantic griddle or grill--down anywhere, in any alignment, and the unit will heat it, and only it (or, of course, seveal "its", as may be). This technology has only been around since about 2006, and in fairness it must be said that early reports on the prototypes were not all that one might have hoped for; De Dietrich, which is to say the Fagor Group, led then, but the prototype as distributed for testing had problems remembering where things were if they were moved about any, and also with uniform heating. Presumably, the engineers learned from what they heard, because such units are now in production and available, at least in Europe (we have not seen any in the North American market yet). We also see, though, that Electrolux is into this technology in a substantial way in some of their induction lines, such as AEG. De Dietrich calls it "continuum", AEG calls it "maxi-sense" (as seen at the left). One supposes that soon everyone will have it; we feel it is clearly the future of induction, which in a way is to say the future of cooking, for it won't be so long now before gas for cooking is looked back at in the same way we today look back on coal and wood.

Now Let's Take a Closer Look

(In this part, we use a little math--but don't shudder, it's all just arithmetic!)

First, let's define some terms. Energy is a quantity: it's like a gallon of water. In cooking, we aren't really concerned with actual energy--we want to know at what rate a cooking appliance can supply energy. It's like, say, a garden hose: if it can only produce a dribble of water, it doesn't matter to us that if we let it run day and night we could eventually fill many buckets. What we want to know is how forcefully that hose can spray--how many gallons a minute it can put out--because that's what does useful things for us in some reasonable amount of time.

So, in discussing cooking appliances, we normally talk about energy flow rates, which are just like the water flow rates expressed in "gallons a minute"--that is, we want to be able to know at what rate we can pump heat into the cooking process. For gas, energy content (quantity) is traditionally measured in "British Thermal Units" (BTU), and so the flow rate of gas energy is given in BTU/hour. For electricity, energy content is normally measured as "kilowatt-hours" (kWh) and the flow rate is just kilowatts (kW).

(Let's restate that, because it often confuses people, being sort of "upside down". A kilowatt is not a quantity, it's a rate, like "knots" to measure speed at sea--there are no "knots an hour", knots are the speed, and kilowatts are the electrical energy-flow rate. To measure total energy--as, for instance, your electric-supply company does, to know how much to bill you--we multiply the flow rate, kilowatts, by the time the flow ran, hours, to get "kilowatt-hours" of energy. So BTU/hour and kilowatts are both measures of energy flow rates, not of energy itself.)

The energy in gas and the energy in electricity just happen to be measured in different-sized numbers, but they're measuring the same thing. It's like miles vs. kilometers: we can say a place is about 5 kilometers away, or that it's a little over 3 miles away, but the actual distance we'd have to walk or drive is the same. We can easily convert from miles to kilometers if we know how many of one make up the other. Likewise, we can easily convert from BTU/hour to kilowatts (or vice-versa). There are just about 3,400 BTU to a kWh--or, more exactly, about 3,413. (Keep in mind that a kilowatt is 1,000 watts: 1 kW = 1000 W).

Superficially, then, comparing cooking technologies looks easy: can't we just look at the rated kW or BTU/hour of a cooktop, and simply convert one kind of measure to the other to compare them? Nope. The complication is that the various technologies are not all equally effective at converting their energy content into cooking heat; for example, gas delivers significantly less than half its total energy to the actual cooking process, while induction delivers about 85 to 90 percent of its energy.

That means that if we have a gas cooker capable of putting out X BTU/hour, converting that X to kilowatts does not tell the story--because a lot more of that X is wasted energy that doesn't do any cooking than is the case with induction. To truly compare the cooking power of a gas cooker and an induction cooker, we indeed need to first convert one measure to the other, say BTU/hour to kilowatts; but we then need to slice off from each unit's nominal output the amount that does not get used for cooking.

(Think again of garden hoses: if we have two hoses and each is getting, say, 5 gallons a minute pumped into it by the water tap it's screwed onto, are they the same? Not if one has a pinhole leak while the other has a gaping rip. The amount of water that comes out the nozzle to do whatever we need done will differ drastically from one to the other. Induction cooking has a pinhole leak, maybe 10% to 15% of the raw energy it takes being wasted; gas cooking has the whacking great rip in it, the average unit wasting over 60% of the raw energy it consumes.)

So, to see how induction compares to its only real rival, gas, we have to make the following calculation:

BTU/hour = kW x 3413 x E_ind/E_gas

That last term there--E_ind/E_gas--is simply the ratio of the two methods' real efficiencies: E_ind is the energy efficiency of a typical induction cooker and E_gas is the energy efficiency of a typical quality gas cooker.

The snag comes when we try to find reliable figures for those efficiencies. It is remarkable how much misinformation there is (especially on the internet), largely from well-meaning but ignorant sources who do not understand the issues, or are simply repeating what they read elsewhere (from someone else who does not understand the issues). For example, the energy-efficiency values quoted by various induction-cooker makers range from a low of 83% to a high of 90%, while values given for gas cooking run, depending on the source, from 55% down to as little as 30%, nearly a 2:1 ratio.

Fortunately, in the last few years some standardized data from disinterested sources have become available, so we no longer have to rely on figures from parties with an axe to grind. The U.S. Department of Energy has established that the typical efficiency of induction cooktops is 84%, while that of gas cooktops is 40% (more exactly, 39.9%)--figures right in line with the range of claims made for each, and thus quite believable.

Using those values (and sparing you the in-between steps), we can say that gas-cooker BTU/hour figures equivalent to induction-cooker wattages can be reckoned as:

BTU/hour = kW x 7185

It is worth noting that the testing method that established the induction data used, in essence, a slab of ferrous metal as the "vessel". It reliably established what might be called a "baseline" efficiency, and that is why we use it throughout in evaluating energy equivalencies. It remains as a possibility that particular items of induction equipment--and, for that matter, of cookware--may be a bit more or less efficient than the baseline. There are at least plausible reports that some makes, coupled with some items of cookware, can achieve true efficiences close to 90%. On this site, we do not use that value because we do not yet know of any definite, reliable data, but you should keep it clear in your mind that when we discuss the gas heating-power equivalencies of induction units, we are using what should be considered rather conservative numbers; chances are that many induction units are actually somewhat more powerful (in BTU/hour equivalents) than we set forth.

Perhaps the most useful way to use that datum is to see what good gas-cooker BTU values are and work back to what induction-cooker kW values would have to be to correspond. But what are good gas-cooker BTU values? Here too, opinions will vary. Here are some representative quotations from cooking-focussed Usenet discussion groups:

"Gas: the more standard 9,000 or 10,000 Btu/hr or the high power 15,000 Btu/hr ranges . . . ."

"Yeah sure it is a 15,000 btu cooktop, but I presently own a . . . cooktop that is 12,000 btu. They both seemed to perform about the same which is disappointing."

"In general, I question what you are getting in the 'pro' style stoves other than looks. The better conventional home ranges already offer one or more burners at 12k btu. Adding that last 3k btu by going 'pro' doubles the price for a marginal increase in output."

"Well the look is ok. The extra 3k is nice but would not justify the extra expense. Actually it is a splurge to get any of the pro style ranges."

OK, none of that proves anything, but it looks like we can fairly say that:

• the average home gas-cooker burner is about 10K BTU/hour;
• serious home gas-cooker burners are about 12K BTU/hour; and,
• deluxe home gas-cooker burners are about 15K BTU/hour.

So, based on our calculations above, to correspond to:

• "average" home cooking power, an induction cooker element would have to be about 1400 watts (1.4 kW);
• "serious" home cooking power, an induction cooker element would have to be about 1700 watts (1.7 kW); and,
• "deluxe" home cooking power, an induction cooker element would have to be about 2000 watts (2 kW).

Considering that even the old, now-long-gone, first-generation Sears and GE units each had 1400-watt elements, and that most or all newer models have more firepower yet--some up to as much as 3,500 watts!--induction cooktops clearly have the same (sometimes much more) heat-generating ability as do even the best home gas-cooking units. Note that anything much above 12,000 BTU/hour seems to be generally considered, even by serious home chefs, as overkill, yet that's less than 1,700 watts for an induction element. Our personal experience with an older unit with just 1400-watt elements is that it heats at least as well as the typical home gas-based sort of unit.

(Depending on what and how and for how many you cook, sometimes heavy "firepower" elements can be useful: heating a huge stock-pot of liquids can take a while on anything but the strongest elements. But for most people most of the time, 1.7 or 1.8 kW elements are probably ample; moreover, if you're not "most people", you probably already have a pretty good idea, in numbers, of the firepower you want or need.)

(There is a much more substantial discussion, which we strenuously recommend anyone at all interested in induction-cooking equipment read, on our site page titled Kitchen Electricity 101).

So now that you know how induction works, and how--at least in raw cooking power--it compares with gas, let's go on to examine in more detail all the Pros and Cons of Induction Cooking.