I have an entirely different reaction. I do not see why GE's response should be surprising. The manual for the induction ranges clearly says that minimum pan size for the six-inch burner is 4.75" and the minimum pan size for the two 8 inch burners is 5.75." If they put that in the manual, why should a customer service rep say something different in what will be a public posting on their web-site? And look at it from the perspective of the GE customer service reps. My4thGarden is looking at spending $2900 for a GE Profile slide-in induction range or $2600 for the freestanding one. A decent and serviceable smoothop electric range can be had for half of that from GE or, for that matter, from LG which is the subject of My4thGarden's other thread. No issues with using small pans on those stoves, although there certainly will be waste heat around the edges of the small pans. When someone says that they cannot afford to replace the present battery of small diameter cookware and doesn't want to, it makes a lot of sense to say to them: "why don't you consider a different stove that seems better suited to what and how you like to cook?" Plus, you may buy the induction stove and find that your particular small pans don't work. That leads to hassles with returns and refunds. If you work for a company, would you want to start that process? Now, it may very well be possible to use pans with slightly smaller diameters if they have enough ferrous mass in the base. Induction burners have sensors to identify pan size and ferrous mass -- too little of either and the burner will not activate. Trouble is, there is no way to find out how GE engineers programmed the sensors. All we know is that GE engineers have identified minimum pan sizes that can reasonably be expected to work. GE customer services reps are is not going to tell you, "don't pay any attention to the manual, you can do X____ instead." berner43's post shows that pans with diameters 10% less than minimum specified diameters work, at least on the mid and large burners and assuming that My4thGarden's pans have similar ferrous bases. Timdeb's post shows about the same for the 6-inch burner. If that relationship holds for the smallest diameter burner, as well, then even My4thGarden's 4.25" pans might work on the GE's smallest (6") burner. Or might not. Again, we do not know how GE programmed the sensors for the burner. Maybe the bases of My4thGarden's smallest pans won't have sufficient ferrous material in the base to be recognized. Also , bear in mind that a smaller pan is using smaller amounts of energy. If you cover, say, 70% of the burner, you will be only getting 70% of the power. (That is not exact but it will do for this dicussion.) Depending on what you are cooking in those little pans, that may or may no be considered optimum. If I'm manufacturing and selling stoves, and I'm training customer representatives, m I going to have them telling customers that they should use my stove for less than optimum conditions and then want to deal with warranty complaints from customers who may or may not understand what "less than optimum" means? What if the customer is using pans with "less than optimum" ferrous content and the pans don't work? Do I really want to have my engineers testing every possible line of cookware and then publish advice on less than optimum use? If I have to manage that kind of situation, I will be thinking I don't want that expense or headache. The unfortunate reality is that the only way to know is to run a test with the particular pans on an actual GE induction stove as berner43 and timdeb did. Can't find a GE to test your pans on? Then, it seems to me to make a good deal of sense for GE to recommend options other than induction for My4thGarden. "Buying and trying" is an option, of course, but only if you can buy from a vendor like Costco which has an absolute satisfaction guarantee: "I don't like it" is enough for Costco to take it back after a month or so. No restocking fee, either. Those kinds of guarantees are hard to find these days. The only induction range that Costco sells is the Maytag freestanding range and it only carries them in the online sales department. The Maytag is far less costly than the GE (about $1500, delivered). It has twin 6" burners in front with a 9" and an 11" burner in the back. Maytag/Whirlpool has not published minimum recommended pan sizes but apparently have marked them on the cooktop. My recollection from the one I saw last fall when I was stove shopping was that the six inch burners would take pans down to at least 4.75" and the nine-inch burner would handle a 7" pan. (But that was months ago and the memory is faulty on such details.) Virtually every brand of induction on the market will operate pans slightly smaller than the minimum recommended diameter. (Heck, I recall a post from a year ago where somebody here reported using a 5.5" diamter pan on the 11" burner of a Samsung induction range.) Anyway, the Maytag/Whirlpool burner arrangement, with twin 6" burners in front, seems well suited to My4thGarden's cooking preferences. Of course, there is the apparently lame "Aqualift" oven self-cleaning method which may be an issue. (This issue will not matter if you are somebody who avoids running self-cleaning cycles and, if you do, at least you don't need to worry about the self cleaning cycle toasting the control boards.) I noticed a Maytag on display recently when helping a friend shop for a stove. Might have been our local Lowe's or Home Depot that had one on display and mIght have been the identical Whirlpool model. I live in a very rural state, so maybe one of the big box stores in My4thGarden's area might have one, too. Worth looking at. This post was edited by JWVideo on Thu, May 23, 13 at 16:06

I saw this only after I responded to a similar question at the end of the other thread on "Induction Question." http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/appl/msg0708501023840.html?24613 I'll just summarize. You can move large pans onto small hobs just as you can on any other kind of stove. And, you will have the same kinds of considerations that you have when putting a large pan on a small burner or any other kind of stove. Obviously, a small burner puts out less heat that a large one, so performance drops off in that sense. You should be able to avoid one problem that occurs with oversize pans on radiant smoothtops, Oversize pans on smoothtop radiant burners can confuse the sensors that regulate heat cycling and result in large pans not being able to boil water or result in taking an extremely long time to bring water to a boil. Induction does not use those kinds of sensors. See this link for a more detailed recent disucssion of this subject: http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/appl/msg0708501023840.html?24613

With conventional flat circular coil hobs, the heated zone is over the coil windings, and should be symmetrical about the coil center (it more or less has to be). The coil center should be aligned with the surface markings, but might not be and this can be checked by watching boiling water patterns. Correction requires cooktop disassembly and coil adjustment. Heating will be indirect above the very center of the coil due to fewer field lines there. The toroidal field above the coil will cause a ring shaped heating of the pan base extending from a bit away from the center to the edge of the coil, which may extend to the pan base edge, but might be smaller than the pan. If larger, then edge heating might reveal some added heating there as the farther radial field lines have to intersect the inductive material at the edge of the pan. Detection of the heating pattern somewhat depends on the pan base construction. Thin 400 series stainless steel without copper or aluminum layers will most easily reveal the field pattern; heavy layers will spread the heat and make the field structure difficult to deduce.

The induction coil under the glass is typically spiral wound, and the field lines from this coil in air will be toroidal (donut) shaped, with the plane of the coil lying in the plane of the middle of the toroid. When an inductive material is brought to the coil, the field lines distort trying to enter the material, and so when a suitable pan is set on the coil, the lines all enter and exit the material over the coil. Pan bottom area that is inside the inner radius of the coil is not directly heated, nor is that part of the pan outside the outer radius of the coil. Heating of these areas depends on transverse thermal conduction by the pan base or the contents of the pan, not electromagnetic effects. If one has a layered pan with inductive stainless steel at the bottom, and a sandwiched copper layer in the center of adequate thickness, then heat will spread outward and inward. Aluminum will also provide this effect, but not quite as well. Silver, sapphire, and diamond would also work, but are less suitable for various, possibly obvious, reasons. The "1-inch over rule" only functionally applies when there are sensitive electronics under the glass in some area and having a hot pan overlap that area is a risk due to heat flow from the pan to the glass and thence the electronics. This can be partially ameliorated by using silicone or other pads under the pan to reduce heat feedback to the glass. Cast iron has good inductive heating, but less than ideal thermal conduction, so such pans need to be treated as having a delay time to even heating. They also benefit if made deliberately thick so that when a steak is thrown on for searing, the heat removed from the iron is a small fraction of that available so the temperature doesn't drop too far. 400 series stainless steel (inductive) can function as a thin base for pots when the object is heating liquids which quickly spread their input heat through the liquid. Care must be taken with certain liquids such as soups and milk that the convection spreading not be too low allowing the heating at the bottom to burn the liquid. So, a 14-inch pan over a 6-inch gas jet array vs. a 6-inch coil will have similar thermal pan heating patterns, except that the gas jet combustion products have to expand outwards providing a bit wider heating pattern than the induction coil. Nonetheless, you likely won't beat induction when trying to boil water because most induction hobs have a higher rate of heat transfer than counterpart gas burners. My induction cooktop's largest hob is 10 inches, leaving a 2-inch unheated radius around a 14-inch pan. If uniform heating rate were needed, I would have to ensure that I had a high quality pan base that could thermally equalize the entire 14 inches. Are there any 14-inch gas burners commonly available on high performance pro-style cooktops? 100k+ BTUh Asian cooking restaurant burners might have such a spread, although typically a wok has to be liftable and have a cool zone. I think you could live with a 10-inch hob, but I would plan on spacers and having a thick copper layer in the base. A few eggs dropped into the pan at different radii from the center might reveal from their frying rates any significant differences in effective heat flow over the base.