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If you aren't using induction, it's also slow, slow to heat, slow to cool.

Yes you can get used to turning the heat up 5 minutes before you want hot. A down 5 minutes before your food is done. But it's a pain.

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Induction is the trick. It's nearly as fast as gas.
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Sure, but it imposes its own limitations as the previous poster pointed out. There is no 1:1 swap-out for cooking that doesn't require either changing out your cookware or settling for a frustrating and slow cooking experience.

Also (this is a US perspective - perhaps Japan's labor costs are different?), running new heavy duty (240v, high-amperage) power cabling from the main breaker box to your kitchen is another huge cost barrier to electrification - this could easily cost many thousands of dollars. Which is why even places like California, which are happy to add costly burdens to homeowners in the name of "green," are only trying to push electrification in new builds.

It's true though that in a new build, if you have a roof chock full of solar panels and a big battery, getting a heat pump furnace, induction cooking, and all the rest of the electric appliances is super economical and awesome.

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Japan has a very different real estate market. Homes are typically built to order, you buy it on a 35 year loan and then live it until you die, then the next person buys the land, tears the house down and builds their own dream home to order. So houses depreciate like cars. Land only gains value in specific downtown areas since the country is depopulating.

It's common to do a "full renovation" where the house is torn down to the frame and the rooms rebuilt. Instead of people DIY maintaining their house (they're too busy with work or whatever), they'll just do one of these after 10-20 years to modernize it. When you do this it's easy to have it converted to all-electric at the same time.

For the 180 m2 (1900 sq ft) house we bought used, the full renovation cost us $120k. This included literally ripping everything out down to the base concrete walls, re-arranging rooms, and re-building everything - walls, floors, ceilings, kitchen, all exterior/roofing, all plumbing/fixtures including installing a heat pump water heater, electrical including lights and an induction stove, cat 6a, tearing out the old rock garden, etc etc etc.

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That is super cool. Unimaginable budget from a US perspective. I think in California I could struggle to stay under that $120k budget on just one kitchen renovation, and I don't mean a luxury kitchen with Viking appliances. Just the normal Home Depot grade stuff. If you added a single bathroom to the invoice there's no way it would stay under.
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We agree. New buildings can be designed and built with induction stoves without destroying precious Japanese cooking culture, just as gas (and wood for that matter) has been replaced elsewhere. And medium term Japan does not lack the resources to convert legacy buildings, either.
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Induction is faster than gas.

I had an issue when I first got induction where I'd warp my pans because I turned the stove up to max and the metal would get so hot so fast the bottom of the pan would bend.

Oops. Lesson learned.

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Yup. I did the exact same thing, except I split a cast iron pan, and shattered the induction cooktop.
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