r/ImpulseLabs

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I'm the Founder and CEO of Impulse Labs, the battery-integrated induction cooktop.

For anyone who hasn't seen it, the Impulse Cooktop has a 3 kWh LFP battery built in, which lets it hit up to 10,000W peak per burner (sub-40-second boils) while plugging into a standard 120V outlet. The battery also means it keeps cooking through a power outage and can charge when electricity is cheapest or cleanest.

We know this community knows induction better than almost anyone, so we'd rather get grilled here than anywhere else. Ask me anything about the engineering, the battery chemistry and safety, why we went this route instead of just hardwiring, or the general cookware and performance.

I'll be here Thursday, June 25 from 1-5pm PT!

- Do I need to silicone caulk the edges? In case some oils/water seep in, is it bad for the battery?

- I have a 240V/40A connection for an existing induction cooktop. Impulse spec says 240V/10-30A - what does the range of amps mean? Why does it need the 30A, I thought it charges only at 8.3A max?

- Does it already feed power back to my panel and other devices? Or is this a future OTA update?

I generally haven’t had very good results with using temperature mode. If I try to hold a simmer by setting the temp to near the boiling temp of water at my altitude, I’ll either get the water not moving at all or violently boiling. After a while, I noticed that what was happening seemed to be correlated with what burner I was using so I decided to test it.

Protocol: preheat an enamel cast-iron sauce pan (like Le Creuset) by boiling water in it for 15 minutes so that the pan is evenly heated through and would be heated to the same level through all the tests. Empty saucepan and put 2 cups of new water in; heat at 2.5 kW until a rolling boil. Turn power down to 500 W, set timer for three minutes. After three minutes, water is barely producing bubbles and measures about 200° on my Thermapen. Check the temperature on the screen. Repeat with new water for next burner, and then for good measure do them all again.

Here’s what the temperature said on the screen for each burner at the end of my test:

Front L: 213°/212°
Front R: 192°/194°
Back L: 227°/226°
Back R: 219°/220°

Has anyone else seen this kind of huge variation in sensor performance across the different burners?

Which one of these is closest to how the sensor should be reading? I would expect the bottom of the pan to be hotter than what I’m measuring for the water inside it, but how much hotter would one expect for well-preheated cast iron?

(And for info, I did email support about this a couple of days ago but they haven’t responded yet, so I wanted to see if anyone else ever faced this)

I have an extended family situation where multiple people like to cook and everyone prefers hot meals. It would not be unusual to have a day where my cooktop sees a couple quarts of steel cut oatmeal, four or five omelettes, a pot of pasta or soup, a couple grilled sandwiches, a full kettle of water for tea (sometimes two), two 12” pans of sauteed chicken, a pot of rice and one for steamed veg. Can the battery keep up with that kind of volume? Has anyone put it through those kind of paces long term?