Pre-heating ovens
I am thinking about a recent conversation stating that pre-heating being the limiting time factor in making dinner. I am getting ready to replace the GE electric oven that was not new when I bought this house 15 years ago. After reading the hotline discussion I timed mine and it goes from cold to 350 degrees in about 5 minutes. Is that unusual? Should I be ask about that before I buy a new GE electric range?
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Most sites agree that induction cooktops are particularly fast at heating up and cooling down. At least one site claims the following times to boil two quarts of water: induction 2 minutes, gas 5 minutes, conventional electric 10 minutes.
I've lived in places with gas burners, old-school electric coils, and ceramic-top electric; the fact that gas is about twice as fast as electric (in bringing water to a boil) appears to be within the ballpark of my experience.
Heck, for my customary breakfast egg, I usually turn the stove on to preheat the pan, jump in the shower, and ten minutes later, I'm ready to fry an egg. I would love to be able to just turn on an induction range and have the pan ready to go in a couple of minutes.
The implication that if induction stove elements are more energy efficient is that more power might be available to the conventional oven elements in a combo cooktop-oven unit. I could boil water faster *and* I could preheat my oven faster.
This makes me more interested in replacing my current range, even though it's functioning as well as the way as the day I moved in.
The car thing is well known. California auto emissions standards are very strict; it has been this way for decades to combat smog.
Since I have a combination 4-burner cooktop + oven, all the heating elements are being supplied from one electrical circuit (50 amps, probably 3-wire 240V). The design of the appliance is such that even if I turn everything all, it won't exceed the 10.5 KW rating (about 44 amps) for safety reasons. That means the oven elements must give up some of its power capacity to the burners.
A standalone electric oven would have its own dedicated circuit and thus be able to have elements that can use up all of the circuit's (safe) capacity, since there are no elements with which it needs to share. All 44 amps are at the oven elements' disposal.
In other houses that I've lived in with electric ovens, those also had about the same pre-heating speed, so 350 degrees in five minutes is unusual in my experience.
The caveat is that I was using one of the large stove elements which of course adds heat to the appliance. My guess is that a cold oven with cold stove elements will take about 35 minutes to reach 400 degrees.
I did use the self-cleaning cycle recently and it took almost an hour to get to that temperature (550 degrees I believe).
It sure would be nice to have an oven that preheated faster.
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Just curious - do you use a separate oven thermometer to verify when the oven has reached temperature? At first I thought my oven was reaching temperature when the gas initially cycled off, but I was wrong. My oven takes about 25 minutes to go from cold to 350F!