It’s interesting that the focus is on porcelain as a cooking surface but misses the biggest reasons for it displacing engineered quartz or granite for countertops. There’s a few factors at play here leading to the prominence of porcelain.
For the induction cooktops, you can cut porcelain slabs to 6mm compared to your 3cm (sometimes 2cm) quartz and granite. This is also why you can use it for walls and floors. The thinner materials allow the magnets to actually function.
The manufacturing process for engineered quartz is now being interwoven with silicosis through the legal system, leading to manufacturers marketing “low silica” quartz at a cost premium. This premium is closing the cost gap with porcelain. This is the main economic and legal reason as jurisdictions- Australia and maybe soon California look to ban these products forcing the market towards natural stones.
If you’re then selecting from natural stones, porcelain is essentially used as printer paper for whatever stone pattern is desired, and given that people tend to want things that look like marble, this “ink” is essentially free for the manufacturing process, making the porcelain look like marble more than quartz or granite.
Engineered quartz is also not a great exterior material, again yielding to porcelain.
Engineered quartz looks like natural stone because it has depth and translucency, and each piece is somewhat unique because it is made by hand sprinkling various powders into a mass that gets pressed and cured. This is also why it sells for as much as natural stone. Porcelain may be physically superior but it does look like "printer paper".
Had a new kitchen and bathroom installed last year. Most surfaces (kitchen counter, shower and general bath room) all Dekton or one of Cosentino’s other lines.
I was apprehensive: it is expensive and “not real stone”.
Super happy with it. Spilling red wine, putting sizzling hot pans on it, accidentally dropping big pans on it. Dekton brushes it off.
Fortunately when I had to have my kitchen redone after a fire my brother already had it in his kitchen(s?). Which gave both me and my designer confidence that I would like it at scale that she was a bit nervous about.
"Dropping big pans on it" is actually the weak point of Dekton. If you hit it hard it can chip away. Otherwise, the material is more or less indestructible.
Exactly why we changed it to natural stone at the last minute. Otherwise Dekton seemed pretty awesome. But we needed something literally indestructible, even if its thicker than Dekton ;)
"Go into debt" seems like a terrible idea compared to just making due what's already there. My kid puts rocks on the counter. The old laminate doesn't shrug it off, but I sure do.
If it's not an investment, don't go into debt. And a premium finish is not an investment, unfortunately. If you sell soon, you won't recover the cost. And if you sell down the line, it will be out of fashion regardless of how well it physically held up.
By all means splurge on yourself if that's what you want! Just don't justify it by framing it as an investment that you should be taking on debt for.
The article misses an important bit of context (imo) that low thermal expansion glasses like CERAN have been around for ages and anyone who’s used an induction or a glass top stove would be familiar. However you can now get completely hidden stoves that look like stone countertops. If you’re not in the market for a kitchen, or know anyone people who recently remodeled it’s reasonable to not know they exist. I don’t know anyone with one, and everyone in our town still has gas. The author doesn’t explain which one they were buying, but it seems like the latter?
Normal induction glass top stoves are a unit that drops into the countertop so of course you get the glass included (because at the very least, it has the decal for the cook zones and controller built in). The invisible ones only come with the burners so you can custom fit the top. Looks like you can get them off AliExpress even. It seems like this is the point of confusion - the author thought he could go down to a glazing shop to buy some tough glass..?
I suggest go and watch Huygens Optics series about CERAN:
I thought the benchmark for pricey induction cooktops was Impulse (I love mine but even at the preorder + tax credit price it was a splurge).
But then I realized there’s probably a kitchen equivalent of audiophile gear, where you pay through the nose for something lesser nerds wouldn’t even notice (maybe every nerdy niche has an equivalent of audiophile gear?).
>Dekton cause atoms in the particles of kaolinite and quartz to diffuse across the boundaries where they touch, turning the entire thing into what amounts to a single solid mass
I'm no materials scentist, is this a physically accurate description?
Was anybody disappointed that he didn't mention the price of that cooktop? He had all of that leadup with the price of normal glass ($30/ft^2), but never told us what he paid for the fancy porcelain.
> the surface could not be tempered glass […] a sheet of which costs maybe $30 per square foot, but a special, newly created material called Dekton that cost five times as much
I know there is a difference between expensive and Expensive, but is there an induction cooktop that isn't pricey?
I went with a basic Frigidaire model, and sure ~$1500 is not unaffordable. It's just a lot for what it is, because the market is still pricing induction as some bespoke premium option.
Ikea will sell you an induction cooktop for about 300 Euros. The price scales pretty well from 220-850 Euros depending on the size and number of burners. Prices should come down once the US catches up to the rest of the global market.
Yeah, the low cost basis and high markup is my gripe. If there were $1500 worth of specialty parts in there, I wouldn't be complaining. But appliance sellers have gotten really good at equating "physically big" to "high priced". As for the US "catching up", well, about that...
That must be a result of where you live. Had look at the web pages of the biggest Norwegian retailer of kitchen electronics, Elkjøp.
You can get weird brand name induction cooktops for less that 300 USD, and well known brands like Electrolux and Simens for slightly more.
There is also the ten times more expensive offerings, if that is what you want.
That we have no tradition for gas cooking here, could perhaps make a difference.
This could have done without the "I am a kitchen equipment nerd, you can stop rolling your eyes" immediately followed by "I thought induction tops used tempered glass but they don't??" intro undermining the rest of the article.
It's like a bit like someone opening their article with "I am a bit of a PC building nerd, stop rolling your eyes, so anyway I thought you could just plug an enterprise NVMe drive into any motherboard but it turns out you can't??"
Looks like Dekton is primarily a countertop material and the reason the cooktop doesn't come with the normal top is it's designed to be hidden under a countertop for trendy minimalist kitchen design reasons. Which also goes against the "kitchen equipment nerd" framing since the hidden induction cooktops seem to be worse in several ways than the normal visible ones.
Honestly most often it isn’t actual kitchen nerd stuff but just hyper consumerism under thin guise of “it’s my hobby”, “I am a kitchen/bathroom/garage/phone nerd”. Just an excuse for powerful chemical sensation of buying
I have caught myself in this many times, mesmerised by shining advertisements that promise when I buy this super duper kitchen appliance or material, my life will be finally complete.
The worst thing is that it indeed works and you are indeed in heaven for the first two weeks of usage but the thrill fades fast.
To keep up the dopamine you must keep looking for ways to increase your revenue just to make more purchases that feel so good.
Of course this is unsustainable usually so you decide that fuck it, what a dead end, let’s read the books from the library instead.
That tension nowadays between becoming prey to marketing and living authentically I can feel it all the time. Everyone wants to sell me some kind of identity.
In my opinion books are the true cure for it all. When you read the books, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, for completely free, you no longer consume. Government probably hates that.
If everyone did this economy would collapse immediately.
From the Cosentino site it appears it doesn't like thermal shock. It's best to avoid placing hot items directly from the microwave onto Dekton surfaces.
For the induction cooktops, you can cut porcelain slabs to 6mm compared to your 3cm (sometimes 2cm) quartz and granite. This is also why you can use it for walls and floors. The thinner materials allow the magnets to actually function.
The manufacturing process for engineered quartz is now being interwoven with silicosis through the legal system, leading to manufacturers marketing “low silica” quartz at a cost premium. This premium is closing the cost gap with porcelain. This is the main economic and legal reason as jurisdictions- Australia and maybe soon California look to ban these products forcing the market towards natural stones.
If you’re then selecting from natural stones, porcelain is essentially used as printer paper for whatever stone pattern is desired, and given that people tend to want things that look like marble, this “ink” is essentially free for the manufacturing process, making the porcelain look like marble more than quartz or granite.
Engineered quartz is also not a great exterior material, again yielding to porcelain.
I was apprehensive: it is expensive and “not real stone”.
Super happy with it. Spilling red wine, putting sizzling hot pans on it, accidentally dropping big pans on it. Dekton brushes it off.
Go into debt if you have to.
You're either using your bathroom wrong, or have a vastly more interesting sex life than I do.
(Yeah, I missed the kitchen counter on first reading)
If it's not an investment, don't go into debt. And a premium finish is not an investment, unfortunately. If you sell soon, you won't recover the cost. And if you sell down the line, it will be out of fashion regardless of how well it physically held up.
By all means splurge on yourself if that's what you want! Just don't justify it by framing it as an investment that you should be taking on debt for.
Normal induction glass top stoves are a unit that drops into the countertop so of course you get the glass included (because at the very least, it has the decal for the cook zones and controller built in). The invisible ones only come with the burners so you can custom fit the top. Looks like you can get them off AliExpress even. It seems like this is the point of confusion - the author thought he could go down to a glazing shop to buy some tough glass..?
I suggest go and watch Huygens Optics series about CERAN:
https://youtu.be/qi8jmEbWsxU
* https://assetstools.cosentino.com/api/v1/bynder/doc/221CDFBE...
I'm no materials scentist, is this a physically accurate description?
Seems like he’s giving a ballpark of 150 here.
I went with a basic Frigidaire model, and sure ~$1500 is not unaffordable. It's just a lot for what it is, because the market is still pricing induction as some bespoke premium option.
https://www.ikea.com/ie/en/cat/induction-hobs-20813/
It's like a bit like someone opening their article with "I am a bit of a PC building nerd, stop rolling your eyes, so anyway I thought you could just plug an enterprise NVMe drive into any motherboard but it turns out you can't??"
I have caught myself in this many times, mesmerised by shining advertisements that promise when I buy this super duper kitchen appliance or material, my life will be finally complete.
The worst thing is that it indeed works and you are indeed in heaven for the first two weeks of usage but the thrill fades fast.
To keep up the dopamine you must keep looking for ways to increase your revenue just to make more purchases that feel so good.
Of course this is unsustainable usually so you decide that fuck it, what a dead end, let’s read the books from the library instead.
That tension nowadays between becoming prey to marketing and living authentically I can feel it all the time. Everyone wants to sell me some kind of identity.
In my opinion books are the true cure for it all. When you read the books, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, for completely free, you no longer consume. Government probably hates that.
If everyone did this economy would collapse immediately.