Comment on Let us end the stovetop war with the real chanp
herrvogel@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoThe problem is not with the controls fundamentally, it’s with the low quality controls. A glass touch surface has merit: it’s extremely easy to clean and keep clean, you’re never gonna get boiling pasta juice in there and corrode the contacts or whatever. It’s just that the manufacturers use the worst, most pathetic sensors that stop working as soon as the surface gets slightly moist. My own induction stovetop is pretty bad in that regard, but my parents’ significantly more expensive one is perfectly fine. The control part of the glass surface never gets very hot either.
Point is, it’s pretty good when done right. But they often don’t do it right.
Knobs belong on the front of the stove, under the ledge of the range/counter where you can’t spill anything on anyway.
Induction already wins cleanliness by a mile through not burning in whatever lands on the cooktop. No need to make knobs worse to make them easier to clean, when they don’t get dirty in the first place.
You mean in the space where I have a drawer full of cooking utensils and herbs? Because my induction top is only as high as my countertop. I much rather have the touch buttons than lose that space.
I will say I specifically bought an AEG because it has a slider. I can set it to 1 from 10 with one button press.
There’s nothing worse than having to press the minus-button 10 times when your pot is cooking over.
As long as the knobs aren’t behind the burners I’m happy. Every time I have to reach behind a boiling pot to turn it to simmer I just hear “bad design” in the voice of the audio book narrator for The Design of Everyday Things
I agree with induction where it can sense whether there is a pan but always thought the opposite with gas. Why do those burner knobs need to be reachable by toddlers?
But some of the new front knob designs get ruined by steam from the oven opening getting inside.
Why the hell that happens I do not know, but they moved the electronic parts there and steam ruins them.
Just discovered one place my induction burner is worse for cleanness. Since it’s a glass top there’s no place for boilers to go, except down the side of the range.
Compared to my previous gas stove that had sealed burners that were recessed to catch boilovers
No, touch screens are always shit compared to knobs. You might have even worse touch screens but that’s just like even worse!
One stray globule, and suddenly your stove is set to 700°
Another error and that’s in Celsius 😁
Wouldn’t that be fun, a button on the stove to convert the units.
“Honey did you touch the f/c button?”
“No why?”
*me looking at burnt pan, oh no reason"
A bunch of new stoves have a pizza setting that’s in that range.
You have to be careful though, they’re not all actually insulated for that range, so the electronics actually cook and fail.
If you do buy one the self clean usually works better due to the higher heat range, but all the appliance sales reps said to never use it anyways.
Typically what happens is that the range detects liquid on the buttons, alerts, and stops accepting input until the liquid has been cleaned up.
Another problem that would never happen with knobs!
But I never want to try and find the right place to touch a flat surface when I’m in the middle of basting meat and my pot is boiling over.
Analog style dials (they’re digital now) are easy to reach without looking, which keeps your focus on the task. Muscle memory is super important for flow.
It’s an inductive stove, the pots heat up instead of the surface.
That doesn’t prevent my pots from boiling over.
I tried this once at an Airbnb and it was really annoying to change temperature while cooking, which is one of the things indication is good for
Knobs are definitely better for a stove. Even the best capacitive touch sensor won’t work if you’ve got an oven mitt on, or you need to make a quick adjustment without taking your eyes off the food
I’ve seen really rough “analogue” control designs. Like, an oven with knobs and touch buttons, so you can set temperature more easily with a knob, but some more specific settings are set through touch input. Overall idea sounds good, until you try do something with it - then it quickly becomes a convoluted mess, because rather than separately choosing which directions to heat, manufacturers decided to make a list of all possible combinations to scroll through. 🌝
Do your parents have cats? Ours have turned the stove on during the night by walking across it. Now we have to “lock” the controls every night, and then “hold for 3 seconds” before we can unlock. The more sensitive the controls, the worse this all gets.
Knobs, dude. If you will it it is no dream.
Easy to wipe true, but what if instead of a capacitor button we can have a magnetic control board with magnetic push keys?
It would be fully removable, attachment magnet snaps it into place and then it’s essentially a button with a magnet physically travelling up and down.
The I really hate the capacitor buttons since if you get pasta that boils over it fucks with the buttons pretty fast and the “off button” is just not good for quickly turning it off when flooded. It’s same for pan cooking sauce that splashes a bit, wiping the surface moist rag can have mixed results, paper towels become a requirement. There’s just a lot to not like.
A standard knob, as long as it’s not designed by an idiot, can be very simple by having a piece of heat resistant non corrosive material stuck out of the stove top and the button having a 1cm gap under it. Just make the pin chonky and you can drop a pan on it without anything happening. Lift the button off and it becomes still very easy to clean.
Neff has that, they come with a magnetic disc you use to control everything. Only drawback is you can only control one thing at a time.
Glad somebody is onto it, now they just need to make the the rest of the buttons into a pad and I’ll have my idealised version.
The other drawback is that I could buy 10 IKEA stovetops for the same price lol
Not really… if you buy a same sized filed its maybe 30 percent.
Ikea just offers a lot of smaller ones too.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here but mine has an app for that
That’s worse. Don’t make me pull my phone out of my pocket to change temp. Absolutely embarrassing that this idea got to production.
Some newer stoves now put the control panel separate, and you can e.g. build it into the edge of the countertop.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
The problem is give me a damned knob.
The highest quality touchscreen on earth that works perfectly not matter what is on my hands and never makes a mistake would still be shittier than a simple fucking knob.