I found the owner manual online and it does in fact say the paired hob cannot be used with a powerboost setting. Have you found this limitation a hindrance or an annoyance? Maybe the cooktop heats up big pots of food fast enough that the power boost is not even needed? On a separate note, the manual on page 18 talks about removing a "magnetic dial" for cleaning. What is the magnetic dial and what does it do???

I'm just a basic cook, certainly not of the caliber of other GWers here. I envy their talent. I used to love to cook and to experiment with recipes. And then I had kids and well, things changed. :) DH wants to take cooking lessons with me so hopefully I'll get to be more adventurous and skilled again. Buying a pan from different lines to try it out is my plan, alex9179. I read good reviews on Farberware's Millenium line and it's reasonably priced so I'll start there. And I plan to ask Santa for a Le Crueset Dutch oven, maybe a red one to go with my scarlet Fiestware dishes. :) And I will definitely check out cookware at the link you included, thanks! Thanks to you, too, sjhockeyfan, for the cookware suggestions. sjhockeyfan and westsider, thanks for the tips about using the touch pad. I've been known to press the keys on my keyboard harder than necessary as if it were an old-fashioned typewriter like the ones I learned to type on. Oops. Interesting, westsider, about the amp requirements. We wouldn't have had an issue since we added an extra panel over a year ago to handle the big power tools my hubby inherited from my dad (both hobby woodworkers). We haven't filled up the new circuit breaker so we have power to spare. Not a bad situation to be in. I compared the kW of the 8666 to the discontinued 5665. They are nearly identical; the only difference I could see was for the middle burner. The 8666 has a higher kW. And yet the overall electrical connection requirement is less. Curious. Well, as long as I can use all 5 burners (not all on boost, I know that much) on the rare occasions when I need to, I'll be happy. Thanks, again, everyone, you've been immensely helpful (even if I did get a little confused there for a bit). sjhockeyfan, I gotta ask. Are you in the Bay area? My DS1 moved there in March and couldn't wait to go to a hockey game. Doesn't care for other sports that much but he loves hockey. I think he likes it mostly for the fights. Like the old joke: I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out. :)

This issue is of interest to me and I recently asked a salesman for the supplier of much of my kitchen equipment to find out what the smallest pan was that would work on the 8-inch hobs of the new 36-inch Wolf cooktop. I believe he called the distributor, Clarke, and they did a test in their demonstration showroom using a 3.5-inch pan (the smallest they had). Reportedly it worked. A better test would be to use an undersized pan that has a known time with a known amount of water to come to a boil on an existing cooktop to see if the Wolf's boil time is similar. It wouldn't do to give up a 2 minute time on a Kenmore Elite's smallest hob for a significantly longer time on a Wolf. I would have to do such an experiment myself. Clarke is an hour from me so my motivation is not yet strong enough to get the data. The issue with undersized pans is: What amount of inductive pan material is the minimum for the cooktop to allow cooking on that hob. One approach that the manufacturer can use to determine pan suitability is to ping the coil circuit with a pulse and determine from the damping rate of the resulting ringing whether enough power would be coupled to safely operate the hob. (The hob coil and a circuit capacitor comprise a tuned circuit; think bouncing your car when the shocks are gone versus when they are new.) Each manufacturer may choose a different value of response based on his design. So, when there is a minimum pan size specified, the value has to be based on some particular "standard" pan working, or the manufacturer's estimate of where to set a limit, efficiency-wise. "PotSense" type configurations can potentially minimize efficiency loss with small pans. kas

I had the non-stainless version of the Bosch 36" installed about a month ago. It looks pretty cool; except for the lines that delineate the hobs, the cooktop appears almost completely black. Those tiny lines that appear to be grey filling the background aren't as light as they look on their web site. For performance, boost is the bomb; boiling water for pasta takes only 3.5 minutes now! The number of settings (.5-10 in half stops) is great and response is good (going from high directly to low or vice versa). The two flex zones work well. Some have complained that they come up in 'combined' setting by default, but I like that. The only reason why you wouldn't want that is if you regularly put something on the front and back of the same side with different settings. Since I almost always only have two things going on the entire cooktop, that isn't an issue. What it means is that I can slap my 2nd pan anywhere I want on the side and I'm good to go (and move it around too). At xmas I had 4 things going at different settings and I didn't have any problems. My most used pans are a dutch oven with a 12" base (my pasta pot) and a 12" omelet pan. When I got the cooktop installed, I was concerned when I found that those 12" bases overlap the side burners. It has turned out to not be a problem. I like having timers that turn off the hobs. I've used that a lot. You can set the cooktop to default to child lock when you turn it off. That's a godsend for someone who has a cat that walks around on the cooktop when its off. (Ahh...for anyone who has that situation...not me...just sayin'). Previously I had a 36" gas on glass 5-burner cooktop. I greatly prefer this cooktop over my old one. A lot of that may be using nice stainless cookware with that I can put in the dishwasher (with watch-it-cook lids!) instead of non-stick. Luckily I learned how to use the stainless properly before getting the cooktop. I think it would have been a mighty frustrating experience had I not. What don't I like? When you want to do something fast, it may not happen so much. To change the temp on a burner, you touch the burner's icon, then touch the setting. After it acknowledges which the burner, acknowledging the setting is fast; what is slow is acknowledging the burner. I don't know if it doesn't respond fast on purpose, if I'm not pressing in exactly the right place, or what. Those burner icons are the only ones I have an issue with responsiveness. That's why I think it may be a personal problem. I would probably prefer a cooktop that has separate power controls for each hob (like the Wolf). Those controls are tinier though, so I might not. You know darned well what you've chosen with this one since the scale is so long (what, 1/2 the length of the cooktop?) and each setting is the size of your finger. You also have to touch the hob icon to see the time left on the timer for that hob. That's annoying. I'd rather have to do that than not have the timer at all or have the timer not shut off the hob.