Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

The title is a bold statement considering how much ventilation varies. Yes, I'm aware he references this, but it's flip: "Yes, if you have a colossal jet-powered A+ grade hood with a fan that vents outside. With an average range hood, maybe not." or put differently - I don't know and don't have data either way.

Climate change is real. We MUST eliminate the burning of fossil fuels. But once again, the more I dug into this article, the more it feels like the desire for outcomes guiding how the data is presented. And the problem with that is it provides fuel for climate deniers and anyone else opposed to the outcome the researcher is hoping for. They're discrediting themselves, their peers and furthering the harm they're trying to mitigate.

A few additional thoughts: I recently and grudgingly switched to electric, and I actually like the cheap-ass electric stove I'm using. It boils water faster than gas, but it's not as precise, and I'll take the speed over precision. Also, range hoods vary wildly from non-existent, to the side or back hood which is useless to an overhead hood which is spectacular, as evidenced by zero smoke when searing foods.

I recently did a deep dive into buying a range hood that would improve air quality in my house.

I discovered the following things:

1. The highest end range hood sold in stores, is not that good at cleaning out air borne pollutants.

2. Nearly every range hood on the market is designed for style over usefulness. You need a large open cavity to capture particles before they are expelled, the larger the empty area in the hood, the better. Modern hoods are flat and stylish.

3. Odds are you need a makeup air system that forces replacement air into the house at the same rate it is being expelled. Without this, your range hood is basically trying to "vacuum" the air out of your house. (This doesn't apply to older poorly insulated leaky houses)

4. Range hoods need to extend over the sides and front of the cook top by a large amount. Some range hoods don't even extend out over the entire front of the cook top!

5. For noise levels, ideally you want an exterior mounted fan. The 2 high end kitchen stores I went to both worked hard to talk me out of even thinking of an exterior fan.

Doing all of these things, or even just the top 4, requires a custom system that is a fair bit of money. The $200 home depot special doesn't cut it. Even the $2000 ultra-deluxe system from dedicated kitchen store won't help improve indoor air quality that much.

Doing it properly actually costs less than the highest end pre-build vent hoods you can buy, which is likely why even the nicest stores try to talk you out of a custom build.

I never got why people care about boiling water so fast. It comes up too when people talk about induction stoves. I mean, you are cooking, not waiting and watching for the water to boil. You are probably working on sauce for your pasta while the water is waiting to boil anyhow, or could find a hundred other tasks just in the kitchen alone to occupy yourself while this entirely parallel process continues in the background. I don't care that water takes 4 minutes or 14 minutes to boil, I'm spending the same 30 seconds hands on time with the pot of water in either case.

> I mean, you are cooking, not waiting and watching for the water to boil.

Of course not. It'll never boil if you watch it.

Boiling is a proxy for gets-hot-fast which is useful.

But like how useful is that even? That's what I take issue with. All this cost for a pan to heat up 2 mins faster. So many products in this world exist to simply to add a crumb of convenience and imo something like a pan heating up slightly faster is one of them. It's like, did we need to spend this engineering effort (which is a finite skilled resource) making something 5% more convenient? Did I really need to spend all that money on 5%? On something that I already don't think much of at all? That I didn't even consider a problem until a tech blog or whatever wrote an article about it? Capitalism is truly a bizarre system.

I don’t know, there’s a lot of boring old dishes where boiling the water basically all wait time.

Like if I’m making real boring pasta:

1. Xm to boil 2. 10m to cook pasta 3. 3m to microwave meatballs 4. 1m30s to microwave sauce

The meatballs and the sauce both fit within the pasta cook time, so boil time is all wait.

You don't have to wait for the water to boil before adding the pasta. Add it to the cold water; it will work just fine.

If you take the time to sit on your hands its on you, but I can find no shortage of tasks at home, I could literally be doing chores constantly and still have things to do. I would go off and do stuff like wipe out the sink or take out the compost if I really had no prep work in front of me but something on the stove.

Incidentally, boiling-water taps can fix this by having a (thermos) store of hot water all the time.

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