Let me tell you we've had little luck with ours lasting. With or without a trivet. Our current one is from LL Bean and the dang thing is just flaking away. Even on the trivet. I thought it had to do with mixing metals, but does not appear to be the case now that it's on a trivet. We are going to return it to LL Bean and get another. If the next one has the same problem, we'll go with a standard cast iron one similar to the first post.
I'm not sure I've heard that term... What I do know is, when the water is soft it feels like the soap and shampoo won't rinse off. And when it's really hard like mine, you get white deposits on everything. Here, we get a white crust ...
My steamer came with the trivet included so I just use it and never really gave it much thought. I guess I just assumed it was to reduce maring on your stove top surface. Maybe also to put a layer of air underneath to prevent the water from getting so hot it boils but just evaporates off...? Kinda like same principle of a double boiler— just with air?
I've tried to boil water on the IS. I even removed the factory center cooktop burner and used the stainless cook top surface underneath. 173* degrees is all I could get. Anybody else able to "boil" water?
Oh yeah, if I remove the center burner and put that tea pot right on the stainless, it will boil pretty easily when the stove is hot. It will boil over if running the stove hard. My center burner is mostly solid so it will even boil when sitting on there but it seems to be a bit slower than direct on the stainless.
If you scroll down in the link you’ll see what it says for the really hard water comparison. Yikes. Maybe since its so dry that your skin oils don’t really regenerate as quickly if you’re dealing with the hard water? Does the crust happen even if the salt is in it?
My pot is just a bit bigger than the center cooktop burner, so it doesn't sit down directly on the stainless steel plate. That's probably why I can't get the pot to boil. Well...that and 2 gallons of water is a lot of water to boil
An air gap is a fantastic insulator. Too much surface area for evaporation is also going to hold you back. Get a smaller pot that will sit metal to metal, and then fill with hot water or pre-boil on the kitchen stove if you are impatient. Cover it or mostly cover (depending on the size of mess you want to clean up) and set it on the stainless with a nice hot fire with the cat working hard. It should boil (over) in no time. If the fire is cruising, I need to keep the lid of my teapot cracked open or it will overboil and spurt out of the spout. So, if you don’t want a lot of loud popping and fizzing noise and water stains left behind, proceed with caution.
I am only aware of one persons family who used a softening machine personally. The mom was a hair stylist so it helped maintain a good store of water for that purpose but no idea if it was for the entire house.... they are interesting machines.
Between the pot on the stove and the humidifier, I'm putting 5 gallows into the air every day......and it's STILL dry in here!mid to high 20% range at most.
Here is my collection....supposedly they don't make these trivets anymore? The winter scene trivets is under the steamer pot. I hate winter.