Portable Mini Induction Cooktop 700W 120V Compact Single Burner Hot Plate for RV Travel Camping Dorm and Small Kitchen

This little induction cook top is perfect for RV or tiny house use. This heats evenly instead of in a small crescent shape under the pan. It also reduces power evenly instead of pulsing full power on and off at different duty cycles to emulate lower power the way cheaper inductive burners do. If you set this one to 200 watts it will make a perfect grilled cheese for example without burning. This makes this the best inductive stove you can currently buy for use with inverters and batteries, or indeed smaller generators.I tested it with different power supplies, of note is that it works perfectly fine on modified sine wave inverters. Not that I would ever recommend those, but if they are what you've got, this works. Certainly benefit for an RV or car camping sized appliance.Given that this company produces hardware for commercial use, and in fact this is considered a commercial duty unit for embedding in restaurant tables, I fully expect it to last a very long time. I will return to update this review when it eventually fails as all things do.Another note, my particular unit has very faint reflective branding and print. It's not obvious like in the stock photos or indeed the other reviews. The print is all mirror reflective and the unit appears mostly as a black glass disk. I prefer it this way so I'm happy. Not sure if they are all this way or not. I got mine as a warehouse deal which is likely where the wear on the chrome ring came from at the back edge. Again doesn't bother me and is unrelated to the product as new. Someone who tried it and returned it likely slid a large heavy cast iron across the edge and wore it off. It is plastic. This burner has what appears to be a 90mm fan inside. Unfortunately it does not vary the speed up and down with the power settings. I would prefer if it would run slower at the lower power settings, but that's a very minor enhancement.I put an LED light behind it so that you can see the coil layout under the glass. It is a full copper coil in a guide as claimed by the company. This is a very good thing for the durability and efficiency of this device. It should work well with lots of ferrous metal cookware and will not be as picky as cheaply made induction burners are.I have not put it on a scale but it feels like it weighs about three pounds.I've now used this for a while and cooked a lot of different things with it. This is the best inductive burner I've ever used. Hands down. Not only does it work perfectly with cast iron as you would expect, it also works very well with stainless steel cookware that a magnet can stick to. Most inductive burners are picky and will E1 on you if the pan is not ferric enough. The reason is that the energy dissipates into the pan. If you put a less magnetic pan on an inductive burner the transfer of energy is not efficient and the stove itself heats up. THIS burner even works with 3 series stainless. That is, the really super high quality kind that barely have any pull when you touch a magnet to them. This absolutely shocked me. Mt thinnest stainless mess kit made of 3 series stainless that a magnet will not even come close to sticking to actually works with this thing and it doesn't complain. That's nuts. Yes, you can only boil water or quickly stir something like canned corn in it since the thin metal will almost instantly heat up and burn the food, but the real point is that this induction burner is so well made and has such good driver circuitry that there's just no way you will have any trouble at all with normal cookware.I can tell that the larger BangDun burners would be most impressive indeed going by this little one.I absolutely love this thing. I've been having fun cooking things on it with my small lodge cast iron skillet (the 6.5" wolf one, it's perfect for this!) and larger stainless pots. Cooking crispy yet not overcooked fish is a breeze, perfectly golden pancakes and grilled cheese with no issue keeping the heat exact. Perfectly cooked eggs with very little effort, and no more first egg is perfect but the pan is too hot for the second one. I couldn't be more pleased other than maybe having a variable speed fan. The capacitive buttons are on the cooking surface and by the nature of the cooking vessels they can and will press the buttons themselves. This however was though about too, if all the buttons are covered at once it will ignore it. You can set a large pot right over them and nothing happens. I like the ability to embed this so I wouldn't have it any other way.I was able to trigger an E5 overheat error once, and not by doing any of the cooking I've been doing which includes deep frying on this. No, it was a true torture test. I put my small lodge skillet on it coated in oil and set it to 600. With nothing in it, the goal was to polymerize a coating of oil into the skillet. Seasoning a pan is usually done in an oven at a very high temperature. Not only did the entire pan get to seasoning temperature, but it only gave the error after the second coat and running this way for over 45 minutes.I was able to remove the pan and place it back and it resumed right away meaning that it's not picky like others I've used where it will just not let you cook anymore until the device is completely cool. This one just keeps on trucking.My cast iron slides around on this. The way to deal with that is to get a thin silicone pad and put it on top. The buttons work right through it and the cookware no longer slides. Get the kind where you can see the fiberglass cloth inside of otherwise transparent silicone. This also prevents as much heat from being transferred back to the stove. Given how efficient this thing is with less magnetic cookware the additional millimeter of height means nothing to it.I'll keep updating this over time.TLDR; You've just stumbled upon the best small inductive cooktop EVER. Just buy it, it's perfect.

I got a couple of really small fry pans to use with this and also to see if some pans that have been too small for my current induction plate would work on this smaller one aaaaand ... at least one of these small pans does work (the other 2 I need to try are still packed somewhere). And I'm just old. If I want to make a grilled cheese I don't need a great big pan to do that. So for smaller items or heating something up quick or making ghee ... I am using this regularly.Keeping in mind, unlike conventional gas or electric stoves, induction plates have pan size limits imposed by the size of the induction coil. Most induction coils can't manage a pan smaller than 5" or 6" (measuring across the outer bottom). I have several pans smaller than that. Now I can use them again.

Handy little stove, the preset temp options make it feel like a good option for the "microwave proficient". Good for heating/boiling small quantities, temp doesn't go low enough to slow cook/make yogurt etc. Kuhn Rikon 12-cup "4th burner pot" fits perfectly for brewing tea and boiling stuff and I use Thousand Winds 1.3 liter giant sierra cup for heating food and eating out of directly. I usually bring the water up to temp in a water boiler before adding since it is low-powered. It's quite easy to accidentally slide the pot into the control area and sometimes water drips on the touch buttons causing them to behave erratically. There doesn't appear to be any off button, display just blinks infinitely until you unplug (make sure to let the fan cycle cool it down first). I would say the minor inconveniences are worth it for a burner that is very portable and safer than electric or gas.

Unfortunately, most induction cooktops have two big flaws: they have a small coil and they pulse (or cycle) on and off at a slow rate to 'simulate' low burner temperatures. This cooktop doesn't cycle AND it has, I believe, the largest coil size (that I could find around October of 2022) on Amazon.This cooktop delivers constant energy, no matter what power level you set it to. In other words, if you set it to "1000" it delivers *roughly* 900 watts continuously, if you set it to "400" it'll deliver *roughly* 300 watts continuously. This is different than the other induction cooktops I've used that cycle the power on and off when set to lower power levels. For example, the lowest setting on a different (inferior) cooktop might switch between "scorching hot" for maybe 0.5 seconds and "off" for 2 seconds. If your pan is "responsive" enough (eg. thin enough), your food (or oil, or whatever) will basically heat up instantly and start burning for 0.5 seconds and then do nothing for 2 seconds. It's bad.The way I tested this is I plugged this cooktop into a Kill-A-Watt and watched the real-time power consumption, in watts, as I went through all the power levels. On lesser induction cooktops set to 'low power' the consumed watts would shoot up to, say, 1400 for part of a second and then drop down to nearly nothing for a second or two. This pattern is also observable in the food (it'll bubble or smoke when the power is on and then calm down when the power is off). With this cooktop the consumed power will stay constant, albiet usually around 50 watts below the number on the display. (For instance, the 400 setting will consume *about 350* watts, the 800 setting will consume *about 750* watts.) I'd prefer if the consumed power was closer to the number on the display, but, I takes what I can gets.Regarding the coil size, this matters because the shape and size of the coil will essentially project through some pans, creating a hot spot. The bottom of a typical ~12" frying pan is somewhere in the neighborhood of 9.5 inches. The coil of this cooktop is close to 9.25 inches in diameter and lesser induction cooktops have coils that are closer to 6 inches. I wish it was even larger but this is the largest I could find (most manufacturers don't even disclose the size).Other than that, the cooktop is fine. The construction seems to be good and the shape and size of it are appropriate.Oh yeah, one more thing. The cooling fans are a bit annoying (I wish they were quieter) and stay on after the induction coil is turned off. They don't stay on for *too long* and the noise level is not significantly different from other induction cooktops I've tried. Until I find an induction cooktop with fans that are actually quiet I don't think I'll deduct any stars.