4 Reviews

Controls are too close to the hobs and having a large pan on the front hobs is difficult. Combining zones works poorly. The pan needs a high degree of coverage on all zones. Often its easier to just use a smaller number of zones than optimal than to juggle the pan position. The "slider" for the temperature selection is a poor choice for the user interface. I'd be happier with an up/down option. The auto modes only work with double-zones, but because of the aforementioned trickiness over the pan coverage, forget about putting a small pot on auto-simmer.

Had to replace a 12 year old induction cook top, and our bench top cut out restricted us to just this Franke. The visual design looks great. After using it now for a couple of weeks, it has some frustrating issues. 1. the cook zones are square. These are fine for pots & pans that fit within one square, or slightly over, but if you have a pot or pan that is bigger than one square, but smaller than two squares, then you cannot heat the whole pan. So this cook top excludes the mid size range of pots & pans. There is a sensor at the center of each square, and unless your pot touches this sensor, the square will not activate. So even if your pot is covering 49% of one square, but just not the middle sensor, the square will not heat. 2. The touch pad is overly sensitive. We chop on a glass chopping board. If any of the glass is touching the control pad, it registers a command, but because more than one section of the touch pad is being touched at the same time, the computer gets confused, and does things like apply the child lock, shut down the whole cook top, or create a massive cook zone. You cannot rest anything that is damp, made of glass or metal over the control panel. The same thing happens when wiping with a damp cloth. 3. It is hard to have precise control over the heating level. There is a digital slide bar. Unless you have pencil fingers, touching in the same spot on the slide, can bring up a margin of error of 3 heating levels. It gets worse if your fingers are wet. And sliding your finger along the slide can take up to 10 seconds to get your desired level, at which time the cook top shuts down due to the 10sec rule. Touch the controls continuously for 10sec, and the cook top shuts down. 4. There seems to be inconsistent heat power. One night the veggies will be done in 7 minutes, and on another night they will be underdone, and need another 2 minutes, all other factors being equal, except for what is being cooked on other parts of the cook top. So maybe power drops if another part of the cook top is being used. We are stuck with this cook top, so we are considering purchasing pot sizes to suit the cook top, and some square pans for the same reason. But hey, we did not have to get a new stone bench top, and the cook top looks great.

This cooktop (and I imagine all similar Franke induction cooktops ) is so sensitive to spillage from one pot that its sensor turns off the entire cooktop for a minute. So frustrating when you're cooking a stir-fry...heaven forbid a piece of onion spills out of the pan when you've got things really sizzling , then have to reset a minute later. Makes a chef want to attack it with a meat cleaver.......SOOOOOOOOO FRUSTRATING If you like cooking, avoid Franke induction cooktops.