Meanwhile San Francisco startup Impulse Labs has been quietly working away on the first cooktop I've seen that has made me say to myself: One day I'll have one of those. Impulse started shipping 30-in (76-cm) units in August, and recently opened preorders for a 36-in (91-cm) format it says it will ship in January.

The Impulse is a battery-assisted induction design that shares much with the Copper Charlie stove that also became available across the US in August. Like the Charlie, the Impulse is powered directly by a lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) battery, and like the Charlie's, the Impulse's battery can deliver a lot more current to its four induction elements than it pulls from the standard household electrical socket that charges it.

Therefore, again like the Charlie, the Impulse can replace a gas or electric cooktop in most dwellings, with no more changes to the building's wiring than you'd need if you wheeled in a new fridge.

The direct parallels end there though, because Impulse has gone a lot further than Copper in exploiting the heat-transfer opportunities modern battery tech brings to cooking. You can guess it's done something special from its having priced its four-element cooktop at US$6,000 – no less than Copper has been asking for the Charlie, a complete stove that comes with a much bigger battery and an impressively specified convection oven.

Whereas Copper has built a plug-in alternative to premium mains-supplied induction ranges, Impulse has designed its plug-in cooktop to outperform every other cooktop of any kind – and by a big margin.

The headline number is the power output available from each Impulse element: 10 kW. That's more than three times as much as the 2.8-kW elements that come with a Charlie – and that allow the Charlie to match (or better, since it has four of them) high-end mains-direct induction competitors.

Why would you want 10 kW? Because it will bring a pot of water or a heavy skillet to your desired temperature a lot faster than 3 kW. And five times faster than you're likely to achieve with a big domestic gas burner, Impulse says – claiming that 1 liter (1 quart) of water will be bubbling in just 40 seconds.