 what's up everyone welcome to road gear reviews i'm tom from mortons on the move and today i'm taking a look at a piece of portable cooking equipment the ducts top 1800 mc induction cooktop so what this is is basically a portable cooking surface it's a single burner electric cooking device what's great about this unit is it is an induction cooktop and what that means is that the unit itself doesn't actually get hot instead of being a radiant heat source that this actually heats the pot that you're trying to cook food in this actually creates a magnetic field that induces a current into the pot that you're trying to heat and the resistance of the magnetic material in the pot slows that current and causes it to heat up so basically what it's doing is it is heating the pot indirectly without actually touching it at all induction cooktops if you actually hover a pot over top of it and don't actually touch it the pot will still heat up a nice feature about that is you can never burn yourself or accidentally heat this surface this surface will never get hot except for heat from the pan itself getting into it so if you turn it on it doesn't get hot you can't burn yourself you can't put anything on it that's actually going to burn and what's interesting about the induction is you can actually put paper towel down on this surface and then put your pot on top of it and that paper towel will not burn for travelers and RVers it's great to have a portable cooking surface like this in addition to your gas surfaces so that you can cook when you're hooked up to electricity because of its portability you can take this just about anywhere you go and as long as you have a 120 volt 15 amp receptacle you can cook food anywhere this unit's going to work fine on generators a portable generator or even a inverter if you have a solar system or an alternative source of power you can still use this to cook the benefit to cooking on electric over your gas is that a lot of times especially if you're at campground or something the electricity is included in the cost of your stay so you might as well save the money on propane and cook on electric instead this is the unit that we've been using primarily for our electric cooking and it is actually our preferred way to cook we will even use our generator a lot of times to run this when we're out in the middle of nowhere it measures about 11 and 1 quarter inches wide by about 14 inches long and about 3.5 inches tall from the feet to the tallest point when it's sitting level the unit is incredibly easy to operate it basically has one big on off button once it's plugged in push that and it'll fire itself up it's got plus and minus controls here that can adjust either the power which if you're set on the power setting here it has settings 1 through 10 which the documentation says is about 200 watts up to about 1800 watts of power it also has a temperature setting you can actually set the temperature that you want your pot to maintain again with the plus and minus controls it'll read the temperature on the screen here and it will maintain that temperature of the pot which is really great if you don't want something to boil or you want it to just barely boil you can set the temperature you want it to hold that and it will maintain that temperature very nicely the last setting is a timer you can actually set a timer on this so you can set something to cook for a certain amount of time and automatically shut off this unit has an automatic pan detection when you turn it on it's going to beep until you put something on it it's actually not going to turn on at all until you put a pan on it that is induction compatible this does require induction compatible cookware which means that it needs to have a ferrous base at least a stainless steel cookware inherently is not going to work with induction cook tops but many of them these days are putting a magnetic bottom into them so that they can work on induction cook tops the material has to be ferrous and contain some iron and therefore magnetic so aluminum is not going to work on this at all this unit has a plastic base here that has the buttons and the displays on it but the top portion that the pan actually sits on is a nice thick glass it has the rings where your pot is supposed to set and it's supposed to be able to adjust to the pot size meaning it will only supply enough power to heat the right size pot that's on here i've tested this out with a wattmeter and i didn't really see a whole lot of difference in power and different size items but if you use a really small pot it's definitely not going to provide the whole 2000 watts into it just inherent design of an induction cooktop is going to do that because we are usually power constrained and we like to use this on our generator in the middle of nowhere and now a new solar system we have installed we've taken a wattmeter and taken a look at the actual power that this thing requires the lowest settings stated is about 200 watts of power on this but it doesn't actually work that way on the low power settings settings one and two it actually clicks on and off and the lowest power that i've seen it draw is around a thousand watts once you set it at power level three i notice it was around 1200 watts and then as you temp that up all the way to power level 10 i've seen it get almost to 2000 watts of power draw when you first turn it on it's normally set at power level five which is kind of supposed to be in the middle but i would say that's more of a medium high heat setting compared to a conventional electric or a gas range that is something that took a little bit of time to get used to was figuring out the power settings and how it cooks um overall on the high settings this thing is a way faster than gas or electric in my opinion the size of this thing is great too it really fits different size pots and pans really nicely we found that pretty much anything that's induction compatible works really great with it and it's so incredibly fast we used to use a electric kettle to heat water up but this thing heats water so fast that we went to a portable collapsible tea kettle style unit that is induction compatible and we filled this up with water and put it on here and it can boil this entire thing within minutes we've been using this unit for about three years and while we primarily use it in our rv we have actually taken it to houses we had it before we moved into our rv and we use it as basically an extra cooking surface which was great we've also taken it outside we hooked it into the outlets outside and cooked breakfast outside on it the unit is incredibly easy to clean up because this surface doesn't get super hot things will not burn onto it so the glass has actually stayed really clean in the three years that we've owned it and it seems to be very durable this thing bounces around in storage and it hasn't had any issues whatsoever personally this is my favorite way to cook on induction not necessarily this but induction cook tops in general i feel like it's a lot like cooking on gas when you turn the power off the heat is instantly gone it doesn't have that residual heat that you get from a radiant style electric cook top there are a few drawbacks to this unit however uh the first of which is it's a bit noisy if i just turn it on right away here you'll hear a fan kick on and it's it's beeping right now because it's looking for a pot if i take a pot and put it on there you actually might hear a little bit of noise kind of buzzing noise that's something that it definitely is a little bit annoying it really depends on the cookware as to what how much noise it makes but it does make kind of a high pitch buzzing sound and some cookware is a lot noisier than others it probably has something to do with how the metal is laminated in there and what type it is the auto pan detection can be a little bit annoying uh when it's on and there's no pan on there it reads e o and it beeps constantly which is kind of annoying because uh if you're cooking and you have the pan on there and you lift it off to do something for a minute this thing's just going to keep on beeping and it will actually shut down automatically after 60 seconds of beeping like this another drawback is the fan actually stays on for about a minute after you shut it off to help cool down the electronics inside it it's not a big drawback but it's a little bit extra noise the fan draws air in on the bottom pulls it through the electronics and exhausts out the back side of the unit the only problem that we've had with this unit is that running it on high for a very long time we have actually had it overheat it will actually display an air on the screen and just beep until it cools down enough or you unplug the unit and restart it that was using a really large pan and running it on a very high setting for a while but that has been very infrequently that we've actually seen that happen this particular model is probably a little bit thick too it's a little bit tall um which isn't necessarily a big drawback takes up a little bit more space in storage and because it sits a little higher off the counter there's just a little more distance that something could fall off of it in my testing of its power usage i also noticed that this unit draws about 10 to 15 watts at idle when it's just plugged in which i definitely find a drawback um because it's not something that you want to leave plugged in all the time especially if you're running an off-grid solar system or something like that where you really need to conserve energy lastly in the three years that we've owned it um i think we had one pan get really hot and actually touched the bottom part which is plastic down here and there's a little tiny bit of deformation that you can see from where that hot pan touched it so having this uh flush it's all flat flush with the cook surface is kind of a bit of a drawback because you don't want a really searing hot pan to accidentally touch these plastic parts down here overall we love the portability of it it's lightweight it's relatively durable and it's easy to store and it's definitely one of our most used kitchen appliances overall i think this is a very cost effective great portable electric cooking solution this has been my review and thoughts on the duxtop 1800 mc portable induction cooktop thanks for watching road gear reviews and we'll see you next time if you have any questions or comments please leave them below also be sure to subscribe to our channel for weekly uploads of our travel product reviews