A designer, Greg Beck, has come up with an intriguing prototype of what the stove of the future might look like. Digital Trends reports:
Though it shares the same flush design as other modern ranges, the William [stove] does away with the old concept of circular burners by replacing them with 1,500 individually heated ceramic tiles across the entire surface.
By sensing where you place a pot or pan, the stove intelligently heats up the areas under it, no matter where you happened to place it. Besides accounting for different shapes and sizes of cookware, the design would allow 85 percent of the stovetop for heating, as opposed to just 25 percent on a conventional stovetop, and could support up to 21 unique signatures, or heated items.
There's more at the link. Here's a video showing how the concept would work in practice.
That looks a whole lot more useful than our present stove tops. I hope we'll see it in appliance stores before long.
Peter
8 comments:
Such a great idea! I wonder why no one thought of this before?
They did, Dow-Corning made one with a ceramic top and flat heating elements back in the '70's. Of course the elements weren't little flat tiles that kind of took the shape of the pot, they were just round circles, but the basic idea was close. And the stove was a serious FAIL.
The problem was that the bottom of the pots had to be almost as flat as a surface plate(gauge) in order to maximize the heat transfer. Since nobody was making pots with really flat bottoms, it took forever to boil a pot of watter or whatever.
My mother-in-law had one and it sucked majorly.
My first thought was WANT!
Then I thought about the fact that it's probably a lot like those glass-topped stoves that will scratch if you use unapproved cookware. And then I started to wonder how good the heat control is -- is it as responsive as gas or more like electric, and how many BTUs can it deliver? And then I wondered how you keep it clean.
So I guess I'll stick with gas.
I showed this to my wife and she thought it was a very cool idea.
but.... where do you put the fire?
Peter, I have to echo Anon- I had a glass cook top, it was a ROYAL pain... The concept is nice, but I'll wait for the execution...
My best friend is blind, and she won't buy a stove with a ceramic cooktop because of her lack of sight. While this looks very cool, she would have the same issue with them as she does with current ceramic cooktops: there's no way for her to accurately tell if part of the surface is hot until it's too late. Raised burners give off more heat and are thus easier for those with visual impairments to use without injuring themselves. If they could find a way to combine that technology with something that would make my friend and others feel safe while using them, then yeah, extremely cool.
I would be surprised to see this ever hit the market, just because the electricity required to run such a unit.
Even a current, 4-burner electric stove takes close to the maximum amperage available in a lot of residential circuits -- I can't imagine current houses supporting something that can have so many burners going at such a high heat.
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