Our free induction cooker

Our new Stylux induction cooker, free with 2 year subscription of Simply Her magazine.

Just the other day, Dear1 and Dear2 walked past this Guardian store and saw this wonderful induction cooker. Dear1 had always wanted an induction cooker and a larger steamboat pot becos our mini steamboat is really too small for the both of us. Hehe…

This Stylux induction cooker is a free gift that came with any 2 years subscription of of Simply Her magazine. And since we both liked Simply Her magazine quite a lot during our last subscription period, we started seriously considering this promotion.

Back track a bit, we bought a 1 year subscription of Simply Her magazine for $40 in 2007. When that subscription ended, we switched to a 1 year subscription of National Geographic (NG) magazine which was on promotion of $57 (free 1 fleece jacket) in 2008. And now with NG ending soon, it was the perfect time to start on a new magazine subscription.

Let’s consider the subscription package now. The price for 2 years subscription (24 issues) of Simply Her is $80, so it seems that the price did not increase over the past year. A cheap induction cooker easily will cost around $65-$80. So the Simply Her subscription package does sound like a good deal. Until now, our mini steamboat is working fine so I suppose the quality of Stylux products are at least passable. The induction cooker will come with a 1 year warranty.

Ok, that settles it, let’s buy that magazine and that free induction cooker.

So we paid for the subscription at Guardian using our Maybank credit card which gives us an additional 5% rebate, hence our subscription is going to cost just $76. :D

One complain I had about the subscription form was that we were required to fill in our credit card details on the subscription form despite having already paid the full amount over the counter at Guardian. I don’t understand why they still need my credit card details if I have already paid! So now, just have to check my bill and make sure they do not double-charge me for the subscription.

We brought the induction cooker home and eagerly opened it up for testing. It turns out that the included cooking pot is of rather poor quality and made of really thin metal. In fact, there were several deep scratches on the underside of the pot and the dents made by the scratches could been seen from the topside of the pot. Totally unacceptable. We brought the whole box back to Guardian for an exchange and the kind staff at Guardian promptly gave us a 1-to-1 exchange without further questions. Thumbs up for good service.

We tested our the induction cooker over the last weekend by having a twosome steamboat dinner. The induction cooker cooks really fast and our soup was boiling in no time. However, I thought the power was a bit too overwhelming and our boiling soup kept spewing soup all over the dinner table. To overcome this, we set the ‘Hot Pot’ default power wattage from 1800W to 800W instead.

Overall, it was decent enough considering that it was free. We’ll probably get a sturdier steamboat pot to replace the free one. And probably get a induction-compatible saucepan to do some stir-frying as well.

-Dear1