I bought one of these and took delivery last week. It's a UK model, badged "Sage Commercial" and it has an extra power setting, Max, which delivers 2400 watts.
Given that you can buy an induction hob on Amazon UK for £45 I would never have spent 20 times as much but it was a present and the giver specifically wanted me to have something extravagant.
This device stands or falls on the ability to measure and maintain temperature with great accuracy and to a lesser extent to deliver consistent power without pulsing.
While experimenting I found some strange behaviour - in some situations it seemed to get hotter than I would expect - I could see oil shimmering when the temperature was set to 130C for example.
So I did an experiment, first with water in a saucepan, when I used Pan Control but also had the probe in. I'd previously checked the probe against a separate thermometer and they were very close. I set a target temperature of 90C. What I expected to see is for both temperatures to rise, with the water temperature lagging behind the pan temperature, and equalising or nearly so at the end.
That's what I saw at first but while the pan temperature reached 90C and stayed there, the water temperature continued to rise until it reached 93C.
I tried the same thing with a cast iron frying pan and this time the water reached 100C and boiled fiercely so the pan must have been over 100C, yet the display said 90C.
Today I repeated the experiment with oil to remove the limiting caused by the boiling point of water.
Here's what I saw:
This was at the peak of the overshoot. I waited 20 minutes until a steady state was reached and though the pan temperature was 90C the oil temperature was 98C.
I tried again on Slow and this time it wasn't so pronounced. This was after waiting 20 minutes for a steady state:
Unless I've totally misunderstood the laws of physics, something is wrong here. The liquid can't be hotter than the container which is heating it.
Since I've checked the probe and I know it's accurate, the only answer that I can come up with is that the pan sensor is significantly under-reading the pan temperature, and by an amount which depends on the pan construction.
This is rather alarming. If I was shallow frying, such as making an omelette, there's no way I would be able to check the pan temperature was correct - I don't have an IR thermometer.
I'd be interested to know if anyone else has seen this as right now it's hard to see a reason not to return it.
