I think the stove is the only appliance that I will refuse to electrify. Cooking on a electric stove is just not the same, especially if you love to cook.
As weird as that looks I’m quite sure I could do that at home.
Modern electric is best for consistency and control. Gas is best for fast heat. (wood) Fire is amazing for smores, great for grilling if you have the time to turn it into a radiant heat source.
Old electric (metal plates) sucks and is terrible.
Even on the traditional gas vs electric debate, the heating power of a gas cooktop isn't guaranteed -- smaller BTU rated stoves take forever to heat with their dinky flames. I once had one that maxed out at around 350F when using a big pan.
"On the air-quality front, at least, the evidence against gas stoves is damning. Although cooking food on any stove produces particulate pollutants, burning gas produces nitrogen dioxide, or NO2,, and sometimes also carbon monoxide, according to Brett Singer, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies indoor air quality. Brief exposures to air with high concentrations of NO2 can lead to coughing and wheezing for people with asthma or other respiratory issues, and prolonged exposure to the gas can contribute to the development of those conditions, according to the EPA. Homes with gas stoves can contain approximately 50 to 400 percent higher concentrations of NO2 than homes with electric stoves, often resulting in levels of indoor air pollution that would be illegal outdoors, according to a recent report by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a sustainability think tank. “NO2 is invisible and odorless, which is one of the reasons it’s gone so unnoticed,” Brady Seals, a lead author on the report, says."
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/10/gas-stov...
I think an IR thermometer that activates the vent whenever the cooktop is over ~115F would accomplish this pretty well, provided the switch had a manual override to force it on if the sensor fails.
A quick search indicates they do exist on some pricier models.
I suppose there could be edge cases where the vent could make a stove fire worse by increasing airflow - wonder if these 'smart' vents have logic to handle these cases.
https://up.codes/viewer/minnesota/mn-mechanical-code-2015/ch...
[EDIT] Code is from 2015 so at least since then.
The air quality concerns over gas stoves are a disingenuous argument to push for change for climate mitigation reasons. Most pollution from cooking is related to burning food not fuel, and electric burners make it far easier to burn food.
Rather than pushing think tank pieces environmental groups should push the industry to create induction ranges that are 1) cheaper and 2) don't create high frequency noise pollution. Current technology has a lot of positive aspects but the high-pitch buzzing is a deal breaker.
If I use the electric kettle there's obviously zero change in air quality.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-hidden-air...
source: https://emfcaution.com/home-appliances-emf-readings/#1_Induc...
You can do what you want, but I'll stick with gas and a vent fan, thanks.
And? You say this like the problem with this is obvious / self-evident.
(Feel free to get technical: I have an EE.)
The author of your source:
> My interest in the topic of EMF radiation is two-fold:
> I have studied Information Science and worked with router communication, Wi-Fi network, and fiber optics communication during the last 5 years. So I consider myself well-educated on parts of the technical aspects of the problem.
> I am married to a wonderful girl who is hyper-sensitive. She can literally feel high levels of EMF radiation on her skin when she is near strong Wi-Fi signals or other sources of electromagnetic fields like induction stoves.
1) It seems like you have to spend a lot to approach even a cheap gas stove, as far as cooking quality; and
2) Even on (say) Reddit threads full of people posting about how great they are, the same people comment a lot about how careful they have to be with the cooktop or how many times they've cracked and ruined(!!!) theirs and had to replace it.
Indeed that’s the reason most places I’ve lived no longer have a gas stove. The cost of adding a gas supply is just too high for it to be viable.
This must be very regional. We get about 3-4 months of hot weather, and 3-4 months of cold, and gas furnaces are still installed in most new homes, because it's much more expensive to heat with electricity. No-one's replacing them with electrical furnaces, when replacing furnaces, certainly—no-one wants the extra expense. Gas stoves are uncommon on lower-end houses, becoming more common as you move up, but gas furnaces are basically standard across the board. Heat pumps are sometimes installed, but I've repeatedly been advised by local HVAC folks that, whatever their claimed efficiency, they're not a great idea in our climate. Certainly it gets too cold here to rely only on them.
I never babied it - even took it camping, used it to cook in the backyard, and some very slow beer brewing with it. It's unreasonably awesome for the low price, and it makes cooking really fast and easy.
I have gas stove, hot water, dryers and heating. The hot water and heating were upgraded to gas fairly recently, from oil (I live in New England, there are a lot of legacy heating systems- oil was actually an upgrade in the 1940s from the original coal heat). There is strong incentive to do this because oil was costing me $3800 / year back when oil hit $5 a gallon, whereas gas costs $700 / year. This upgrade costs $14000 (includeing installation of forced air vents, central A/C and gas water heat tank). The previous upgrade from coal to oil was about reducing waste and increasing convenience. With coal, you had to deal with ash waste and stoking.
A dual-stage electric heat pump would in theory work and have comparable operating cost, but the install cost was like $30000, had questionable reliability and few contractors even knew about it. Geothermal would also work, but my land is tiny and the cost would have been something like $60000. There was even a Honda generator home co-generation plant option available, but again, expensive and no contractors.
What would you do? BTW, my largest utility bill now is actually water, because we are paying for the Boston harbor clean-up in my sewage bill. I'm tempted to illegally use rain water for the toilets... A rooftop solar system is popular around here, but it's not worth it based on my tiny electric bill.
We have to get off of fossil fuels, but it's definitely going to take a government mandate backed with financial incentives to get people to switch.
I'm curious about why that's not allowed
The sewer system in the urban area was largely built out by about 100 years ago as a combined system, where rain water and sewage were in the same sewer pipes. Many people didn't really care about water quality and disease back then, so the fact that the Ohio river was a big stream of shit and chemicals didn't matter.
As other parts of life improved eventually more and more people wanted clean, healthy water and surrounding ecosystems, hence the EPA was created 50 years ago. The EPA got stricter and stricter over the last 50 years, and about 20-30 years ago started cracking down on sewage outflows in to waterways.
As a result, the local waste water treatment utility (owned by local government) has been under a legal decree to fix sewage overflows which occur during storms due to these combined systems. This has meant spending billions on tearing out these pipes and replacing them with separate storm water and sewage lines.
The utility started charging for separate clean water usage and sewer usage so people understood a bit better why their bill went up so much.
I find the difference between instant responding heat sources and radiant coils to be very noticeable, particularly with thin pans and delicate cooking, so: eggs, in particular.
[EDIT] natural gas (not propane) is definitely cheaper to heat with, here, than electric. All the HVAC guys don't even recommend heat pumps to supplement the furnace. They recommend putting the money toward higher-efficiency AC and gas furnace instead. They say they're good on paper but more expensive in practice, in our climate (Midwest). Outright electric heating is crazy expensive (I've had it, with a very new furnace even, and it was terrible, was paying a high premium for mediocre heating).
Of course no one would be running gas lines, that's why we had a big LP tank to play on when I was a kid:
https://www.homeimprovementbase.com/3-easy-steps-to-prepping...
One problem with gas is that so much heat is lost to the rising hot air - in addition to inefficiency, it makes all the pot handles burning hot, so I always need to have mittens ready. Never had the problem when I had electric.
Never had that problem with gas. Not once.
So long as fuel is available (propane, butane, alcohol, white gas), this is an option. Note that white gas should not be used indoors.
I use a tabletop butane burner indoors (Iwatani 35FW) and it has at least 3x the heat and the wok is more stable.
Induction is better in almost every way over gas. There are a few minor things you can't do it with it, like wok cooking or charring peppers etc. But for those instances, there are easy workarounds, I just use my turkey fryer for wok work, and use a handheld blowtorch for charring.