Induction? No No No No No No. I don't know how many times I need to say it but please don't choose induction. It uses electro-magnetisation to heat food. I have a 21 year old daughter who has had a pacemaker since she was 4 years old. Magnets stop pacemakers. My daughter cannot live without her pacemaker and I'm sure there are many older people in the same boat. Induction hobs are not safe, they are potentially deadly. I can see the benefits of induction but manufacturers need to bring out more 'mixed' hobs (2 induction, 2 normal) to allow all the members of the family to use them. Just because it might not be relevant now, can you predict the future? What if one of your parents came round to babysit and needed to use the hob? We need to get the message out there. More and more people every year are fitted with medical devices that are affected by magnetic pulses but there doesn't seem to be any recognition from manufacturers. An induction hob could KILL my daughter, what could it do to your family member?

Technically, no you don’t actually - you can have an extractor elsewhere in the room - as long as it extracts 60litres per second ( for a uk property)

Hmm, I might be wrong but my understanding is that a recirculating extractor doesn't get rid of steam, only grease and smells. It's confusing - I read lots about it and didn't find many definitive answers - but my understanding was that if we had a recirculating-only cooktop extractor, we would also benefit from a wall mounted expelair type extractor too, which we didn't want. Hence we went for an exhaust air model as we wanted ours to do the whole job. The bit where it ducts out has a system whereby it only opens when its extracting - and the ducting is several metres long so there's no sense of cold air coming up through the hob top, even on these recent very cold, windy and frosty days. I can only say that in my experience, if you want an island hob exhaust air model (as opposed to recirculating), there are costs which are additional to the cost of the hob itself - ie the ducting pipes and the work that goes into planning and executing the ducting under the floor and out to the open air. The position of the ducting has to be millimetre perfect at quite an early stage of the build so we had a lot of head scratching and very careful work to make sure that our kitchen plan and the position of the ducting were exactly aligned. We've paid our builder a day rate so there's definitely been an extra, if slightly undefinable, cost there. Perhaps in some cases it's very straightforward but in ours it wasn't, and as I said the ducting itself isn't cheap (around £100/m) - so in a direct comparison between a recirculating and a ducting version of the same cooktop (where the cooktops themselves cost exactly the same) the ducting one was a more expensive option for us, but one we're glad we went for. I should say we're in a 1930s house, which, although we're doing our best to make it energy efficient, is never going to be airtight like a passiv haus. So for us the benefit of getting rid of steam outweighs any potential small energy loss through the ducting to the outside. Of course everything I've said above may be rubbish... I'm just a girl trying to do a renovation with conflicting advice from all sides... :)

I’m an avid cook and had a massive kitchen with two hobs which were never enough so I bought three plug-in induction hobs. I found that I used these much more than the normal hobs as I could cook in different parts of the kitchen as well as outside. I’m now having a house renovated and decided not to have a hob at all as I have limited workspace so I’ll be using my plug-in hobs for all my cooking which suits me just fine. My project manager and the kitchen fitter think this is completely off the wall but it’s something that’ll work for me so I’m going with it. I would hate to have a kitchen with limited workspace and what we would have with a normal hob would be pretty minuscule. It’s not for everyone but the plug-in hobs have been a complete game changer for me and I love the fact that I can stick them in a drawer when I’m done with them