Most of my life I have had residential electric stoves, but until recently, they had “conventional”, flat-coiled burners. All of those – when boiling water, no matter what kind of container or pot I used – made a loud noise during the heating process, at least until the water actually began boiling.
Now I have a flat top, glass-top, electric stove (resistance heat, not induction). No matter what container I use, there is no noise during the heating process. So the noise probably isn’t coming from “boiling water releasing dissolved gasses that violently bubble to the surface” as suggested in one Google/Wikipedia post, since that would be happening in both processes.
What causes this difference in sound?
(I forget how it sounded the few times I had gas stoves.)
what exactly were you hearing? Electric coil burners will make the occasional mechanical sound as the coils and other components thermally expand and contract when heating and cooling. Was that it?
It can be the pot vibrating on the flat top because the pot doesn’t have a perfectly flat bottom or the pot is flexible. Water in the pot is moving as it heats and can easily rock the pot.
Moisture can also get trapped under the pot and can’t escape easily. That happens a lot if you put a pan of cold water on the stove because moisture is precipitating on the cold bottom of the pot.
I get that if the bottom of the pot is damp, perhaps because it was in the sink before I moved it to the stovetop. But I’ve never otherwise heard the noise described in the OP.
I have heard that often. And as I pointed out the water will condense on the bottom of the cold pot easily. I think an uneven bottom of the pot is more likely though.
I think TriPolar has it backwards. I hear noise from conventional (flat coiled) burners, NOT glass-top stoves. Besides, there never has been any noticeable rocking of any pot in either environment. That would have been pretty obvious.
The noise I used to hear from conventional burners is a hissing-type sound, but has no obvious reason or source (no noticeable bubbles). Once the pot is boiling, the noise diminishes, and the expected boiling-water sounds take over.
This has happened for at least 6 different stoves in my long lifetime, so much that I assumed it was an artifact of electric stoves. Different pots, different stoves, different situations.
Dewey_Finn, I doubt that the hundreds or thousands of pots I have had in my lifetime have all been in the sink first, and no, they are not wet on the bottom, ever.
I get a hissing noise from conventional spiral burners whenever the bottom of the pot is wet, and not otherwise. I’ve always assumed it’s the moisture on the bottom of the pot reacting to the hot burner by boiling off (well before anything in the pot will boil.)
I know exactly what you’re talking about because I was thinking about it the other day while boiling water. So I asked the internet and saw below:
Now, since I only have an electric stovetop, and haven’t had a gas stove for years, I can’t remember if I noticed if it happens on both, but it certainy happens on my electric stove. In fact the stove is probably about 60 years old or older, the kind with the “Calrod” burners.
Having once upon a time had an electric coil stovetop, and now glass - I’m going to guess a simple explanation.
The coil gets red-hot and imparts that heat directly to the pot by conduction. The glass top does not get red-hot, it moreso allows radiation heating from an element below the glass. So the bottom of the pot is not getting as much heat as fast as when in contact with a red-hot element (but the stove looks futuristic!). Less heat, smaller bubbles cavitating…
I think this is correct. If you live, as I do, in an advanced society where electric kettles are readily available and widely used, you observe that the noise of boiling water is much louder when a kettle is used than when water is boiled in a pot on the stovetop. In this case, of course, the energy transfer from heating element to water is very rapid, since there is no interposed pot-bottom to slow it.
This analysis would suggest that, for a given quantity of water, rapid boiling is associated with a
louder noise than slower boiling. Which means we need to ask the OP whether her new glass-top stove boils water more slowly than the old spiral elements stove did.
Fun fact: in an extremely advanced society you can, for an extra charge, buy a “quiet kettle” which boils water with much less noise than is usual. This acheived with a coating on the bottom of the kettle, or on a diffuser ring located just over the bottom, which through some very deep magic causes the bubbles to cavitate at a smaller size than they otherwise would.
I think you, I, and @Dewey_Finn could be hearing different sounds.
No matter what make the noise the pot has a lot of contact with the flat top which may be acting like a sounding board and making the sound more apparent.
I’ll throw in a gratuitous statement here: I don’t like flat top stoves. The flat top gets very hot and holds the heat making it difficult to control. If the pot or pan gets too hot it takes a long time for the stove top to cool down and sometime I have to move the pot off the burner. Maybe it’s just the stove I have now, but it also takes a long time to get hot unless I turn it all the way up, but then it easily gets too hot and creates that problem.
Yes. I would amend it to say that a spiral electric element is directly heating maybe 40% of the pot bottom surface it is in contact with, while the glass stove is heating 100% of the pot bottom but less intensely. So the total heat (calories) delivered and resulting boiling time is likely not too different.
In addition: after I wash a cast iron pan, I put it briefly on the stove to dry. So the pan will go on to the stove (wood stove if that’s going, electric stove if not) empty but wet. And I get the same noise from it – on either the electric stove or the wood stove.
I also get the same noise from a kettle of water placed on the wood stove, if the outside of the kettle is wet; but not if it’s dry.
The wood stove is flat top, of course; but also, of course, not electric.
I think some of us are talking about different noises, thus confusing the issue. I believe the noise the OP is talking about is the one referenced in the science article in post #11, and that is the loud noise that water makes just before it boils, variously described as a kind of whistling, shrieking, or whining noise, which disappears as soon as the water reaches a full boil and all you hear is a much quieter bubbling.
This noise has nothing to do with the hiss of a wet pot on a hot burner or the vibration of a pot or its cover. According to the article, of the various processes that water goes through as it’s heated, the loudest is the process of cavitation, which occurs when water near the bottom of the pot is hotter than near the surface, and bubbles forming at the bottom and rising into cooler water collapse by the thousands in what is apparently a pretty energetic process.
I’ve heard this noise with old-style spiral electric burners, and I hear exactly the same noise with the current glass-top stove, and indeed I’ve heard it with every stove I’ve ever had. It’s a sure sign that the water will be boiling in a few more seconds. It’s a mystery to me how anyone could not get this sound when boiling water on a stove. The only circumstance where I never hear it is when boiling water in the microwave, probably because it’s not heated from the bottom and the heating processes would be quite different.