Switching to an Induction Hob with AO.com

With a young family at home, our kitchen is one of the busiest (and unfortunately one of the smallest!) rooms in our home. From scrabbling for our breakfasts in the morning before the school run madness begins, to preparing our packed lunches and snacks, and everything in between – from whipping up quick and easy weekday dinners to preparing a full on Sunday roast.

With such a small space to work with, it can feel like we all want to be in the same place at the same time, and one thing I worry about most as a parent is safety. Neve is getting to that curious toddler stage where everything needs to be touched, prodded or poked, and I have started to become very conscious of her little fingers getting into cupboards, rummaging through the chemical products under the sink or getting too close to the boiling hot oven or hob.

Thanks to AO.com, we recently swapped our traditional electric hob for an induction hob – the Neff T36FB41XOG 59cm Induction Hob to be precise, which has helped reduce some of the potential dangers of a kitchen with young children. Not only do induction hobs have a number of benefits in terms of safety and efficiency, they have made cooking our favourite meals much much quicker, and anything which means less time slaving away in the kitchen for me is a huge positive! If you’re thinking of making the switch from electric or gas to induction, here’s what you need to know.

About the Neff T36FB41XOG Induction Hob

The Neff T36FB41XOG Induction Hob is a standard four zone induction hob, which uses electro magnets as opposed to gas or electric to heat your food. Unlike many kitchen hobs, the Neff T36FB41XOG Induction Hob doesn’t require hard wiring and simply plugs into a 13 amp socket, making it incredibly easy to install. Whilst AO.com do offer installation, Mike opted to fit ours himself, and it took just a matter of minutes to remove the old one and slot the new one into place. (What took longer was vacuuming up all the crumbs from behind our oven – gross!)

The Neff T36FB41XOG Induction Hob is a sleek and attractive design with a levelled edge, and looks clean and modern in our kitchen. It has an easy touch to change control panel (which is lockable to avoid accidently changing settings in the middle of cooking) and even an LED timer, allowing you to set a specified duration, after which the hob will automatically switch off and sound an alarm when your food is ready.

For faster cooking the Neff T36FB41XOG Induction Hob even comes with a boost button, which sends an additional surge of power to heat things extremely quickly.

The Neff T36FB41XOG Induction Hob comes with a 2 year manufacturer guarantee and retails at £349.

What are the benefits of induction hobs?

Speed

The Neff T36FB41XOG Induction Hob takes far less time to cook than our traditional electric hob. The way induction hobs work is very clever – unlike gas and electric hobs which heat up the hobs surface first, induction hobs use electro magnets to heat the contents of the pan. The heat goes straight to the source, and the food heats up MUCH faster, with simple tasks such as bringing water to the boil to make pasta take a matter of seconds rather than minutes. On average, induction hobs are anticipated to heat food 20-50% faster than gas and electric.

When cooking our morning bacon sarnie last weekend, Mike noted that the bacon cooked significantly faster (around 3.5 minutes!) and with the boost button, we were back sat on the soda stuffing our faces before we had even fully woken up!

Reduced Energy Consumption

Gas hobs in particular can make your kitchen very warm, using more energy which is wasted on heating the hobs surface and hence your surroundings rather than your food. In the summer months when it is roasting outside, the very last thing you want is to be sweating buckets whilst you cook. The Neff T36FB41XOG Induction Hob is very energy efficient, with the heat going straight to your food, meaning you need it on for far less tie than a traditional electric hob. I recently switched energy suppliers after my bills went through the roof, but hopefully this will help reduce them even further.

Improved Safety

The Neff T36FB41XOG Induction Hob is packed full of innovative features that make cooking much safer with a young family around. Firstly, with no gas, there is no risk of gas leaks or grease fires. Using the touch control panel, you can quickly and easily turn off the heat and the pan’s response is immediate. As soon as the heat is turned off and the pan removed, the ring is warm (not hot) to the touch, meaning that if a child (or adult) was to touch the surface it would not scold them, whereas my old electric hob must certainly would. Our previous electric hob stayed hot for quite some time, and I personally have been known to burn myself on a fairly regular basis!

More precise cooking

With the Neff T36FB41XOG Induction Hob control panel, wannabe chefs like Mike can have far greater control over their cooking, with the ability to change the heat far more accurately (and instantly) than with a traditional hob. This makes everything from searing a steak to simmering a sauce far easier to manage.

Easier to clean

With much more control over the temperature, we have found that the Neff T36FB41XOG Induction Hob makes it far less likely to misjudge your cooking and as such, end up cleaning just the odd spatter of food rather than a stubborn ingrained burnt pasta sauce spill. As the surface of the  Neff T36FB41XOG Induction Hob is less hot, food is far less likely to become burnt on to the surface, so far less scrubbing for me!

Things to be aware of…

Induction hobs do tend to be a bit more of an initial investment than a traditional gas or electric hob, but for me, the benefits of the Neff T36FB41XOG Induction Hob completely outweigh the additional cost.

When purchasing an induction hob, you may want to factor in the cost of some additional kitchenware, as depending on the age and type of products, not all of them may work on an induction hob (the ones with magnetic spots will). We found that the majority of our pots and pans did work, however our casserole dish and wok did not. I simply saw this as an excuse to go shopping (I don’t take much encouragement!) but it can be an additional expense.

With this particular induction hob, my only real criticism is the noise, as the buttons on the Neff T36FB41XOG Induction Hob control panel are a little on the loud side for my liking.

Overall, having used the Neff T36FB41XOG Induction Hob for a number of weeks now, we are both really impressed. Cooking has become much less of chore, much quicker and I have had additional peace of mid that there is far less chance of the girls coming to any harm if they were to escape my watchful eye for a moment too long. I am far from being a domestic goddess, but anything that helps make life a bit easier gets my vote!

You can see the full range of induction hobs on the AO website here.

*This is a collaborative post*