A few days after I recommended the
Rosewill induction cooktop that I've been using in the office for over three years, it started making odd clicking noising and giving me a brief "E1" message. After a few seconds it would start heating but continued to make the clicking noises as long as it was operating. After removing the casing to see if I could see an obvious cause I just decided it was time for a replacement. I didn't want to spend too much money since this was going to live in my office, so after a brief search I settled on a
NuWave PIC2 Induction Cooktop.
I remember seeing their infomercials on late-night TV and had heard good things about the hardware, but not so good things about buying it directly from them. Since I have Amazon Prime I just ordered it from there for just under $60. The PIC2 is a little less powerful than the Rosewill it's replacing, 1300 watts vs. 1500 watts. For a little more money (about $75) there is the
NuWave PIC Pro, which delivers 1800 watts of power.
Upon opening the box I was pleasantly surprised to find that the PIC2 came with a 9" Duralon ceramic coated non-stick fry pan. I didn't really have a need for another frying pan at the house so it made the trip with the cooktop to live in my office. The cooktop has six preset levels (Low-100°f, Med Low-175°f, Med-275°f, Med-High-375°f, High-425°f and Max/Sear-575°f) but you can use the controls to set the temperature to anything you want in 1° increments up to 575°f. The cooktop is also programmable so you can set it to cook at one temperature for a set amount of time, them automatically lower to another temperature for holding.
So far I've only done one test run, I measured out 1 liter of cold tap water (50°f) and timed how long it took to come to a rolling boil using the Max/Sear setting. This is pretty subjecting since results will vary greatly depending on the quality of the pan being used, and since these stay in my office I'm using the cheapest pans I could find. It took 5 minutes and 45 seconds for the water to go from tap temperature up to a rolling boil. This is actually a little faster than it took the Rosewill cooktop to bring 1 liter of cold tap water up to a rolling boil, but that was in a different pan. Tomorrow will be the first time I use the new cooktop to make lunch, hopefully it'll be as good and last at least as long as the Rosewill did.
