The steel in the wheel rims will do it if you put them right over the loop. Although this is not certain. I once had a bike which would trip the sensor at the nearest intersection to my house. And then I had to replace the wheels and the new ones would no longer trip it.
Unfortunately, it’s a lot more complicated than that. You know what’s a much, much worse conductor than iron or steel? Air. And yet, as the column noted, an induction stovetop won’t heat up the air.
While it’s conceivable that the sensor is sensitive enough to detect the few steel bits in your bike, I think it’s unlikely that that’s the explanation. The ones I’ve encountered won’t even detect my bike when I lay it down flat on its side, and my bike is aluminum (even if aluminum isn’t detected as strongly as steel, there’s still some signal from it). I think the more likely explanation is that that particular light is based on some other, completely different, sort of sensor, such as something mounted next to the light that sees (or “sees”, via infrared, sonar, or whatever) a vehicle there.
Unfortunately, those probably won’t work. Most older steel cookware is made from stainless alloys that are not ferromagnetic. Newer, induction-compatible stainless, aluminum, copper, etc cookware is made with a suitable alloy, often in a layer or ply sandwiched inside the outer material. You can test your pots & pans with a magnet to see if induction will heat it.
Yes, Thank you.
Our Revere Ware failed the magnet test. We checked yesterday.
There are “induction adapters” that allow you to use nonferrous cookware on induction cooktops. They are just stainless steel disks that sit between the cooktop and pan. They won’t be as effective as ferrous cookware since heat conduction between the adapter and pan will be slower than directly heating the pan, but at least you won’t have to replace all of your existing cookware.
There’s a pan set that advertises on the geezer me tv that’s aluminum but with some sort of iron disc on the bottom …
Speaking of eddy currents…
When I was a slot mechanic I grew quite familiar with the mechanical coin acceptors – mostly quarters – that our slot machines and pinball games had. Strictly unpowered, they used a number of tests to acceptt a coin, detailed in this 9-minute video. One of the tests involved rolling past a magnet. Not only would this instantly stop any magnetic coins, like an iron washer or Canadian quarter, in copper-based coins – which all US coins but the penny are – it would induce eddy currents which would react with the magnetic field of the magnet and slow the coin down just enough so that when it bounced off an angle a moment later it would be at just the right speed to land in the accept area. Too fast or too slow and it would land on either side and be accepted. That part starts at 4:00 in the video.
The fascinating about those mechanisms is that they just worked. The guy in the video talks about adjusting this or that but I never had to. The biggest maintenance item was the shaft on which the cradle pivots. After years of service it would wear out, cradle would get wobbly, and the coin would fall out or not roll past the magnet at the correct speed to begin with. We had a supply of new shafts so when enough worn out mechanisms had accumulated, I’d drive the shaft out with a pin pinch, insert a new shaft, and upset the end with a larger pin punch that had the tip ground to spread it a bit.
By far the second most item was the bushing of the cradle wearing out and we’d just swap it out. I guess it was harder than the pin was. Nowadays it’s all bill acceptors and grocery receipts, the wusses.
I think it’s fairly certain that the sensors are reacting to the steel in the wheel rims. Otherwise, the case where I changed the wheels on my bike and the sensors stopped detecting it would not have happened. The sensors didn’t change and the rest of my bike didn’t either.
The fact that some sensors never detect bikes, even if you lay the bike down, is not significant. The sensors have a varying sensitivity (which I think can be adjusted) and some are so insensitive they never detect a bike (or even motorcycles, which have lots more steel than a bicycle). Many are sensitive enough to detect bikes if you put the bike wheel in the right location, which is always right above the loop in the ground. Note: not in the center of the loop, but right above the wire making up the loop. In many instances, you can see where that is, because there’s a black circle (roughly 4 or 5 feet in diameter) in the pavement where they dug a trench to install the loop and then filled it with tar.
The rims are an aluminium alloy. Might be steel on a cheap beater bike but not a $1000+ carbon fiber machine.
OK, then the aluminum rims do it. I don’t know what the rims in question were made of but quite possibly aluminum. Or possibly I went from steel to aluminum. The frame was aluminum, since that’s what I’ve been riding for the past 25 years. But the frame is not the important part, since when upright, it doesn’t get close enough to the loop to trip the sensor.
I know we are getting off-topic here but I finally got around to doing a quick google search and it appears the traffic signals are primarily timed or use an induction loop, depending on conditions. So it looks like the small amount of steel in my bicycle’s chain or bottom bracket would be enough to trigger the sensor in the pavement as opposed to physically rolling over the rubber groove, as nothing else on the bike has as much steel. My steel-frame touring bike may be a little better at this, so I will have to do a test!
I’ve seen bicyclists trigger the crosswalk signal, perhaps because their bikes don’t trigger the automatic mechanism.
I’m guessing that I can’t toast a marshmallow on one.
Or can I? If I put a cast iron pan on and turn the element on, will it heat the pan enough for me to toast over it?
Around here I’ve seen buttons on poles much closer to the curb with a bicycle symbol on them, and a separate pedestrian button elsewhere.
If I was looking for one of these, the models that cycle the current on and off on low temps are probably more energy efficient. If the stove maintains a constant temp at lower levels it probably employs a resistor, and those things are like bottlenecks. They do just what their name suggests, they resist the free flow of electrons, which uses more energy than one cycling on and off.
I think they actually have multiple circuits, and turn one or two of them off. It’s much cheaper to make a single circuit and clickety-click it on and off to approximate different heat levels.
The really expensive ones have smaller circuits all over the stovetop. You can put any shape of “pan” on there and the stovetop will sense the shape and turn on the appropriate circuits to heat it. Want.
