Induction cooktop repair

Nothing burns, so the diagnosis changes

An induction cooktop makes heat in the pan, not on the glass. A coil under the surface generates an alternating magnetic field, and the pan’s own steel resists it and gets hot. The glass warms up only because the pan is sitting on it. That is why the surface cools so quickly and why a spill on an induction top wipes off instead of baking on.

Diagnostically, it means most of the classic cooktop symptoms are gone. There is no flame to be uneven, no igniter to click, no burner cap to seat. What replaces them is a smaller list of electrical and thermal problems, plus one category that is not a fault at all — the cooktop doing exactly what it should with cookware that cannot work on it.

Pan detection is usually the cookware

By far the most common call is a pan that used to work and now does not, or a new pan that never worked. Induction needs a ferrous base with real contact area under the element. Three things break that:

A base that has warped. Pans bow upward in the middle after enough thermal cycling, and once the centre lifts, the coupling drops off. The pan may still sit flat enough to look fine on the counter.

A base that is only partly magnetic. Some clad pans have a thin magnetic disc sandwiched in the middle of the base, and once it is worn or delaminated the coupling becomes marginal — the element cycles on and off as detection comes and goes.

A pan that is simply too small for the ring it is on. Detection has a minimum diameter. Move a small saucepan to a smaller element and it usually wakes up.

The two-minute test costs nothing: press a refrigerator magnet against the base. It should grab hard, and it should grab across the whole bottom, not just in the centre.

Heat under the glass is the real enemy

Everything clever about an induction cooktop lives in a thin space between the glass and the cabinet below, and it is cooled by moving air across it. That is the part installers get wrong most often. If a drawer front, a filler panel or a stack of baking trays blocks the airflow path, the cooktop will keep working — it simply pulls its own power back so the electronics stay inside their limits. Owners describe this as an element that loses its heat halfway through cooking. It is the appliance protecting itself.

Before we condemn a power board, we check what the airflow underneath is actually doing. In more than a few kitchens the fix is emptying a drawer.

Storms, boards and this part of Florida

Induction cooktops are power electronics. This area sees roughly 68 thunderstorm days a year, and a surge that a resistive appliance would shrug off can take out an inverter board or its control side. The frustrating part is that surge damage rarely presents as a dead cooktop. It presents as one element that works intermittently, a display that lights but does not respond, or a cooktop that runs fine for twenty minutes and then quits. We check the supply, then the boards, in that order.

Salt air is less of a factor here than it is on a gas appliance — there are fewer exposed fasteners and no burner bases to corrode — but coastal kitchens still see corrosion at the terminal block and on the chassis under the glass.

What a visit looks like

We are an independent repair company, not part of any manufacturer network, and we will tell you plainly when the answer is cookware or ventilation rather than a part. The visit is a $129 flat diagnostic, credited toward the repair, with a written estimate before anything is ordered. Genuine OEM parts, labor warranted 90 days, parts warranted 365 days.