But it will hurt you with a smooth top electric range.

That concave pot bottom is fine for a gas range. Most pots tend to have a bit of a dish to them, so the center of the pot may stand off by as much as 1/4 inch. Or take the pot and touch the edge of your counter top. Check this fact by taking one of your pots and hold a ruler across the diameter (underneath the pot). You need good contact over the bottoms to get good heat transfer, and good heat transfer is essential for cooking.

One other important point - a smooth top range like this cooks most efficiently with flat bottomed pots. So you may think the stove is not working properly, when it actually is working as it is designed. Note that an electric range will cook more slowly than a gas range. The temperature sensor recognizes this fact, and that there is no need to leave the burner on.Īll of this is different for a gas range, where it is the amount of gas that is fed to the burner to control the heat. However, if you leave a pot off of the burner, they will overheat if they stay on permanently. (Neither gas stoves nor flat-top electric stoves are covered here.) The drip pans can always be removed easily, often by tipping the burner element up slightly and pulling parallel to the stove top on the higher side until it disconnects. With the heat control set to an intermediate value, the burner will kick on and off repeatedly to maintain a goal temperature. Traditional electric stoves have a drip pan under each burner. With the burner set to high, normally they stay on almost all the time, heating the pot on top of it to boil water. So they turn on and off to maintain a goal. The 'burners' on an electric range have TWO settings - off and on.

Hotpoint stove burner