I'm the trouble starter, punkin' instigator.

[venta]

Having recently spent a little time investigating new cookers, I am curious to know your opinion on the ignition buttons on gas hobs. Your answer is unlikely to affect my cooker-purchasing actions, but having discovered in the pub last night what an unexpectedly polarising question this is, I'm now curious...

[Poll #2060995]

Comments

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

My landlord has an electric hob, I get no say in it. My parents have the separate button ignition kind, I prefer the combined kind but they're both ok.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I was confused by your response since the first two options were meant to be mutually exclusive :) I did mean to include a "both are fine" option but apparently forgot.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I am quite capable of wanting two hobs simultaneously. :D

[zotz]

Put me down for "Both are fine" also. And "This is seriously something people care about?" and "I tried one of those induction hobs recently. Seemed nice."

[venta.livejournal.com]

I care principally because I usually have a pan in one hand, light the gas with the other, check it's lit properly, and put the pan down. So combined knobbage means easy one-handed ignition.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

I have non-combined ignition, and simply put the pan down first and then light the gas underneath it. It doesn't seem to be a problem at all.

Also, your pavlova in the other post looks lovely! Your choux wreath looked lovely too - apologies for omitting to comment on it at the time.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I wasn't complaining that two-handed ignition was a terrible thing :) merely that I am grumpy stick-in-the-mud and if i do a thing one way, I would like to continue doing it that way unless there is a compelling reason to change!

(Plus thank you, and please don't feel you have to comment on things!)

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

Ceramic hob. I'm in a shared house and can't be fucked with something that can't be easily cleaned.

I did have a gas hob when I moved in, but I got rid of it for the ceramic. Gas blokey who took it out informed me it was actually dangerous and had probably been poisoning me.

I dislike gas hobs, possibly from Home economics lessons at school. We were each assigned a cooker and not allowed to change from it for 3 years. Every time I was occupied away from "my" cooker, one of the bullies would turn on the gas of one of the hobs and the studio would fill with gas. I'd get screamed at by the teacher, again, and again, and again, for being a careless shit intent on poisoning/killing everyone. This is possibly another reason why I'm less keen on them for a shared house, I've had housemates who've gone out and left the hobs on.

I don't care what people say, they're stupid things. All the ones I have been forced to use had only two settings - red hot lava melt-metal in a circle and leave the centre cold or cut out and start hissing gas.

Gah.

I'm the fear addicted, danger illustrated.

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

Im in rented accommodation so I don't get the choice, but would rather have the first option. I've only used a induction hob once, and found it very confusing; I think you have to have the right pans, too, which seems annoying.

Did you know the drummer of the band your title is from now makes scents and moustache wax?

[venta.livejournal.com]

One kudo to you, though at present I am taking the moustache wax on trust!

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

Would I lie to you|?

[lathany.livejournal.com]

I have never met the other kind and may change my views if it turns out to be safer.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I don't mind as long as the damn thing actually ignites. I love gas hobs though for my "make it up as you go along and try not to set anything on fire" method of cooking.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Yes! This one.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

This.

[shermarama]

I don't care either way on gas hobs as long as they light some way or another (igniter accessories of most kinds are fine, preferably the big long clicky ones but even a random empty old lighter is good, for the challenge of still having non-singed finger hair afterwards) but having had a one-ring portable induction hob in a place that otherwise only had shitty ceramic hobs, I am pretty enthusiastic about them. They give heat as controllable as a gas hob, bring things to the boil significantly quicker, are the best of all possible hob worlds to clean and don't involve flammable gases. (I would cite that they can't be left on as an advantage, except that means you can't take the pan off for some incidental reason without switching them off or having them complain, so overall that's not really a benefit.)

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

Combined gas and ignition every time. I went years ago, with work hat on, to a demo of the earliest induction hobs and was deeply unimpressed, and not only because I would have to sling my beloved pans. Modern gas hobs are not hard to clean - less than five minutes once a week.

[venta.livejournal.com]

less than five minutes once a week

That depends how messy the cooks are :-)

I had been assuming that induction hobs had moved on, as various people have been telling me how great they are.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I used a swanky expensive new induction hob for cooking a Christmas dinner at my brother's house. It was better than I thought in that it works pretty well for heating up and cooling down fast when you want it compared to other electric cookers I've used, but still not as responsive as gas.

It was even worse than I thought in terms of UI. The controls are touch-sensitive but not very sensitive, are completely devoid of any tactile indication or feedback (the control panel is completely flush and is under a single pane of glass that also covers the rings). They were also very poor in usability terms. For instance, there is a + button and a - button, and sometimes but not always you have to press the button of the ring you want to adjust before pressing the + or - button. There was also a degree of modality to the interface that I didn't fully grasp: there's a fast-heat mode that heats up very fast, but it's not obvious from the display how to trigger that, how to stop it or - indeed - that it even exists. It was easy to mistake numbers (indicating ring on on a scale from 1-9) from other indications (notably P which I think was the rapid-heat mode, and H and h, which I think meant 'off but still very hot' and 'off but still quite hot' - though again I'm not sure) on the seven-segment LED displays. Sometimes but not always there was an annoying 80s-style beep in response to detected buttonpresses. It's also not easy to quickly check that it is turned off, because of the H and h signs and other little LED dots that I didn't fully understand the significance of. I never fully understood whether it had an 'off' and 'on mode distinct from when there was heat going on or not.

The killer for me was that all this interface gubbins means that there must be code running it, and all code has bugs. I expect to do a lot of informal tech support for my extended family over the Christmas break, which often involves power-cycling. This was the first time I had to do it to a cooker. At one point my sister-in-law was in some distress because the controls were all flashing red, it was beeping away, and unresponsive to user input. Turning it off and on again at the main isolation switch fixed it.

I really don't want a cooker with that much UI frustration.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, that confirms the prejudices I had, but thought might be outdated, so I am happy to read it ;)

I had been assuming those buttonless-button things would be great, because easy to clean, but saying that triggered a huge rant from a friend. Mostly along the lines of jabbing repeatedly at the button wouldn't turn it on, but the lightest brush of a sleeve when you weren't intending it will turn it on every time.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

It was definitely easy to clean. But I concur with your friend's view.

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

Mum was right!

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Ooh, and Prodigy's Firestarter, yay!

[lnr]

We went ceramic for a) ease of cleaning and b) ability to site on the opposite side of the kitchen to the gas supply without enormous headaches. I'm fine with halogen rather than induction because when you cook on cast iron pans it really doens't make much difference how responsive the *hob* is because the pan itself takes ages to warm up and cool down - and I've got used to it. But I do like then when I have them available. I've never much cared how they're lit provided it's not "lots of cursing, where's the matches gone?". I've used induction hobs a couple of times in holiday cottages and found them fine to cook on once you get round the idiosyncrasies of getting them to actually turn on.

Electric fan oven all the way though!

[stegzy.livejournal.com]

I live in an area of Northamptonshire without mains gas (yes such places still exist in 21st Century UK; running water gets turned on next week) and having lived in areas of the UK where gas was practically plumbed into everything I was apprehensive about living without gas. Thing is, I don't miss it with my fancy new induction hob, nor do I worry about having left the gas on when I go out.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

One of our dogs managed to use the turn and push to ignite to attempt to burn down the house by turning on a ring with a saucepan on it.
More often, obviously, they turn on the gas without igniting it (by more often I mean 'it happens every year or two').
Also I managed somehow to put a box with a new pair of trainers in on the hob and turn and ignite and slightly singe the said new trainers. The precise sequence of events remains unclear to me, I maintain that I managed to push and turn by accident using the box, but M thinks I absent mindedly thought 'I've put something on the hob, I'd better light it'.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I'd like to mock the idea of putting something on the hob and lighting it, but that strikes me as exactly the sort of thing humans do.

Not very long ago I lit the hob and put the kettle on to make tea. I pottered off to get the milk before my brain politely pointed out that we have an electric kettle that plugs into the wall and is made of plastic. This is especially odd, because I've never lived in a house with any form of kettle other than a plug-in-the-wall one :(

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

[x] The ignition has never worked, so I'm not sure. Separate maybe.