Hate to break it to you, but smoothtop radiant cooktops are not trivial to clean, because stuff burns onto them. I mean, they’re not horrible, but you’ll want to get cooktop cleaner and the right kind of pads to clean it.
We had radiant until one of the burners died and it was going to cost most of the cost of a new unit to replace. I read about induction and found a Samsung I liked. Alas, my favorite local appliance place was fighting with Samsung, so I found another shop. They came and measured, agreed it would fit, ordered it, came to install it…and the installer looked at my existing setup and said, “That’s a downdraft.” “Right.” “New one isn’t a downdraft.” “Right, downdraft is useless, I don’t care.” (The existing downdraft WAS useless: if a pot was steaming and the fan was on high, the steam wouldn’t even twitch toward the vent.) “Code requires downdraft, I can’t install this.”
So they took it back and refunded my money. I bought an Avantco single burner and used that, liked it.
A couple of years later I was at my favorite appliance store and they had Samsung again, and I told the sales guy my sad story. “That’s not true!” he told me. “It’s only true for gas!” So I finally got my new cooktop, and like it quite a bit.
There are some design flaws in at least that Samsung:
- It has a nifty magnetic knob that you can put on a control instead of having to use the touch panel–only it’s pretty useless, doesn’t really work.
- It has an app that lets you see what burners are on, but you can’t turn them off remotely! Not being able to turn them on/adjust them remotely I understand, but OFF would be safe. Dumb.
- Like most/all induction cooktops, it has touch controls, which also means that if you drip water on the cooktop, it often shuts off and displays DO, which I take to mean “Dry Off”. I understand why it does this, BUT when it does so, if you’re using the built-in timer, it kills that, too! So you had, say, potatoes boiling, and now you don’t know how much time was left. Dumb.
- The beeps it makes when, for example, it goes into DO, are too quiet. Should be adjustable: if I have the oven on, or water running, I may miss that beep, then suddenly wonder why things aren’t sizzling or boiling. It’s an error condition, it should be clearly announced!
Yes, I realize this isn’t a Samsung gripe forum. But I figured anyone considering induction might want to know about issues like this. I love the induction, don’t get me wrong; I just wish they’d thought this through better. Maybe other brands have done so.
A final note: as others have said, it does change how you cook to some extent. Simplest example is sautéing something, e.g., onions. With a radiant cooktop, you put the pan on the burner, turn it on, throw in the butter/oil, and cut up your onion, tossing it in as you go.
With induction, the butter will burn before you get the onion chopped, so you need to sequence differently. Takes a few tries to get the hang of it.
). In addition, the change in power when you adjust the knob is instant. Even faster than gas, if you can believe it.
