REDO....Induction Cooktops & Dont's

Don't be scared off! They're weasel words. All appliances have them. For gas, there's the far more real problem if you disregard the don't wear loose hair or clothing. It takes being very careless to set oneself on fire, but people do it.

With induction, a few drops of water should be no problem, but if you put a wet pot on the glass and crank up the heat, the water can boil or steam while trapped, and reportedly could crack the glass. With your pot before you put it down and there shouldn't be a problem.

As far as I know, the problem with wet fingers on the controls is that the wet prevents the sensors from feeling your fingers. They're touch controls. Even my Gaggenau, which has a knob, uses touch controls for on/off, boost, memory and timer.

I have had my wolf induction since Nov 2008 and other then cracking the glass one time when poorly lifting a cast iron pot and not paying attention.... ( they did replace it) I have not known or worried about those water issues... It took me 1.5 years to decide to try induction.. I was probably the most hesitant person ever and it was the BEST decision. I have 4 kids and a large family.. not a neat cook and it is AWESOME

Can you use the cook top as counter top space?

Sure. Just bear in mind that it is glass, not granite.

so I wouldn't knead bread on it. I would not use it as a chopping block. I wouldn't try cleaning it with sandpaper.

Most people who use their induction cooktops as counter space put a wood baking board over it. If you put metal down on the glass your cooktop could detect it and get upset. Similarly, if you cover some of the controls, it could start beeping. The wood keeps it from getting upset. Mine isn't happy about junk being put on it, but it'll tolerate bowls and tea towels without objecting.

Ajard's story shows you--the thing about the water is weasel words. They tell you that just in case there's a problem you've been warned not to do that.

I put wet pans from sink straight to my bosch cooktop all the time, it just gets hot and evaporates. No pot is really that flat anyway so the water will get out.

What isn't a good thing to do I think, is have a bottles of spice, balsamic vinegar etc, stored on a rack above the cooktop, too easy to drop onto the cooktop.

wet fingers makes it think you touched it in multiple places and will get key error beeps.

In a recent Holmes on Homes episode he installed an induction cooktop for a woman in a wheelchair. At the end he is showing her how safe the cooktop is for her to use. That's a great endorsement of the technology.

I avoid putting my pots down with a wet bottom but it's because the cooktop is pretty slick anyway. Making it wet would just encourage it to slide right off the glass!

Mine beeps if you place anything, ever, over the control panel sensors. Man, that takes some getting used to! I'm glad to have it though. I was dissappointed at first that I couldn't put a larger cutting board on it (one that went from counter edge to the back) but I'm glad that it keeps me from putting a hot pot on top of the electronics and melting them.

I DO use a small cutting board on it though with no problems. I don't worry about scratching the glass (sometimes I contemplate taking an SOS pad to it so that the glass is less pristine!) but wouldn't do certain things. Like chopping garlic? You know how you smash the garlic to get the skin off? That would worry me so I wouldn't do that.

I've never had a glass cooktop before and In my head I don't understand how that glass can hold all that weight with just that part around the edge holding it up!

Has anyone know ANYONE who has cracked their glass without actually dropping something on it? Be it a pan or a clock or??? I did some google searches before I purchased and I couldn't find anyone who said "I was just standing there cooking and the glass fractured" or "I set the hot pot down on it and bam!" or anything like that. It's always related to dropping something.

My daughter just dropped the lid from the Le Creuset 7 quart on the top of my DIVA induction. I heard it and thought - "well, there goes the cooktop". It didn't break, but there is a tiny, less than 1cm spot where the edge hit. It is not exactly a chip, but more a like a graze to the glass. It bugs me, but since it is outside of the heat zone, I will not do anything about it.

I do notice if water boils over and makes it to the controls, or moisture from some other source does the same, the unit either turns off or has a brain spasm and turns itself up. I have to keep an eye on what is cooking. If it skips to a 12, the highest setting, things burn very rapidly. The only time I use a 12 is to get the water to boiling, then I turn it down to a 9 or 10. The induction units are very powerful.

I have to tell you that I love induction and even my husband comments on how glad he is that I got induction.

My original induction cooktop was installed in 1983. I moved in ummm a few years ago. I used it like counterspace. Great place to chop onions (under the hood and light). Good spot to dump groceries because it was usually available. I treat the new one the same. It's a chunk of glass until you turn it on, and then it's a beeping chunk of glass until you put something magnetic on it. O yeah...it's also a good place to put a hot pan.

You know, the more I think about it the more I think the wet pan thing must be bogus. I mean, when a pot boils over its literally a ton of water right there?

I put wet pans on my cooktek all the time. The worse thing it does is spit at me. If it bothers me, I lift the pan, put a paper towel under it and keep cooking.

What happens when the pasta pot boils over like mine did Sunday? The entire cooktop was underwater. No problem with the controls or anything else. Just sopped it up and went on cooking.

My GE Monogram induction cooktop now has a perfectly circular etched scratch on the front right burner. Until this weekend I had been using an induction compatible stainless $43 Tools of the Trade 10 piece set with clear glass lids and have had no problems. For the first time ever I used an old Le Creuset pot b/c I had guests and needed to cook a lot of pasta. The water boiled over when I lost track of it due to the power and speed of the induction and also b/c without a glass cooktop I had no visual cue to alert me. The bottom of this pot has what looks like a slightly rough cast iron circular bottom before the enamel starts on the curve where the sides of the pot begin. The pot is so heavy that I know I didn't move it around on the burner with all that water in it. All I can imagine that happened is that the water that boiled over caused the pot to hydroplane a bit and that it ground out the circular etch or scratch as it settled down again. I almost cried when I realized that I had done this but the silver lining is that I was the one to damage my beautiful induction baby so I wouldn't have hard feelings toward anyone else---sort of like getting that first scratch on a new car. Also, since it is a mirrored/reflective cooktop and the scratch is within the patterned section of the burner it is not as visible as it could have been. Bottom line for me is that I will be much more careful about water on the cooktop in the future.

Flseadog,

That is SO horrible but it's also very interesting. You think the water went under the pan and lifted it up, pushing it across the glass enough to scratch it? MAN.

What a bummer.

Not the glass, but the mirror coating, right?

Flseadog, have you tried to use cooktop cleaner, is it possible it is just deposits that was left on the cooktop?
I don't know about the old LC pots but on the new ones the bottom are finished and smooth.

And on my Bosch if I get the control area wet the controls will show errors and turn off, I guess that is where the boil over protection comes in, it has to hit the controls.

Big problem. I thought about sealing the edge better with some silicon. Mine was down a month from a boilover. The display would just flicker.

I cracked my white ceran glass conventional electric cooktop by pushing too hard while I was browning meat that was partially frozen. The crack ultimately disabled three burners. I believe that there was an installation error that contributed to the cracking-the rubber/foam trim that goes under the edge of a cooktop was never installed, so there was reduced "shock" absorbtion. We replaced that cooktop with an induction range about a month ago. Needless to say, I will not treat this range like the cooktop. What an expensive mistake!