Ddrueding, my first question is, how come you need a stove? A stove is a fixture - it's part of the building, like the kitchen sink.
Stereodude is 100% correct. You need gas cooking to get off the electricity grid. The good news is that a cooktop can be supplied from a pair of 9kg (20lb) propane bottles for months at a time, so you can throw them in your car and take them to a refilling station.
On the other hand, there's no point in a gas oven - they're expensive and a PITA to use.
Electric cooktops are a problem for "off-grid" because of the huge current they can pull down, albeit for short periods of time. To my surprise, they're actually more efficient than gas at transferring energy into the cookware (and therefore the food) - provided the cookware base is
flat. So if you have cheap, bent cookware, go for gas. :roll:
Over the years, we've had to contend with many different cooktops (and ovens), about half of which were gas ('natural' and propane). Gas was so obviously better, we made sure that's what went into the house we built. The worst of the electrics were those damn cast iron hobs - the least efficient and by far the slowest to heat up and cool down, an absolute abomination.
Our current place has a gas line in the street; however, it would cost a small fortune to run the pipes and install a gas cooktop, so we looked at alternatives. We found ...
induction.
Precise control over power (11 digital power levels - some have 21), zero lag (even marginally less than gas) and incredibly fast. You can boil a couple of cups in water in less than 30 seconds, yet melt chocolate slowly, and you can do it every time without fail.
Unlike conventional glass-ceramic cooktops with radiant elements, the surface doesn't get hot all over. My party trick is to boil water for a minute, remove the pan and place my hand on the cooktop where the pan was standing. It works because the only heat in the surface is what it has absorbed from the pan, not the other way around. Similarly, the surface cools down in at most a few minutes, compared to 45 minutes for a radiant element unit.
All this means that food spills just don't stick. Also, you can't get near conventional glass-ceramic cooktops for *at least* half an hour after you've finished cooking. With induction, you can lift the pan and wipe it up with a paper towel, then replace the pan and continue cooking!
Energy transfer efficiency is up to 90%. I'll vouch for it, you can hardly feel any heat at all when working near the stove, which is weird but literally cool.
To sum up, induction cooking is completely awesome - we'd never go back to gas, and I'd give it the highest recommendation of
anything I've ever owned. But it's still capable of drawing 30A @ 240V, so current models are just not suitable for battery/solar cell operation.
