The case for induction cooking
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
As a scientist (an immunologist) who leads a research lab on lung inflammation including asthma, the cavalier attitude Times columnists have toward scientific references in their articles is appalling.
RMI is a thinktank with an agenda. Not a research institution. And Brady Seals is not a scientist. Note the lack of PhD. She has an MBA and has never worked in science. Nor did she 'author a study'. She authored a REPORT. Which is not peer-reviewed and not published in a reputable journal.
As an immunologist I assure you that scientific evidence does not indicate that 'increase of asthma is on par with living in a home with a smoker'.
And frankly- just walking outdoors in NYC you're exposed to far higher levels of lung-irritating pollutants than you are cooking stir fry on your stove. But that doesn't fit the agenda the Times is pushing with multiple induction stove articles lately all focused on bogus health effects and the (more legitimate) climate concerns.
I'd previously seen reports on the studies about gas stoves being harmful even when off, and wondered about the credibility.
Not for many decades surely. I'm 66 and I haven't used a gas stove that had a pilot light for at least forty years, all have had piezo-electric or mains electric ignition. But then again, I live in Norway now and formerly England not the US.
https://jacksonlab.stanford.edu/publication/methane-and-nox-...
A consumer organisation here studied "rangehoods" and (if memory serves) they found them all to close to useless.
consumer.org.nz - the reports are paywalled and I no longer subscribe, so mēh!
The remote eats a pair of CR2450 cells every three months, so that could have been done better.
Even on the highest settings, I've never seen one that even makes a dent, or moves the column at all. They're snake oil and fashion, nothing more. And that's before talking about the ones that don't have any ductwork, and just blow it back out into the room.
Commercial-grade ones that move ridiculous quantities of air definitely work, and a tiny tiny handful of people have these in their homes. The rest have essentially nothing.
Right under the fan. Yes, they are useless.
Also this isn't biased by "I don't cook". Quite the contrary :)
Is it saturated fats or something? Burgers are definitely a rarity for me, but I cook plenty. It's just generally lean meat and veg/oil/etc.
It has had a range hood with a fan... and zero ductwork. The fan pulls up from under the hood, and blows it straight into my face, out the top of the hood.
I would believe they remove particulates and odors, and that’s about it.
Almost nobody in New York City (where the NYT is based and focuses its coverage) has a vent hood that vents outside the apartment.
Older buildings don't have a hood at all, and new buildings have hoods which circulate air within the apartment, which doesn't really address concerns about accumulation of environmental pollutants.
Thanks. If this bit of context was clear from the get go it would have been a lot easier for those from EUR where we would expect vents outside the apartment to be the norm. ( Not speaking for all EUR, so there may be places this is not the norm )
As a matter of fact this is the first time I hear about vent circulating within the apartment, and to be honest this sounds quite scary.
It is the norm in newer buildings, but there are plenty of older houses or flats blocks in the EU that don’t have a good ventilation system. It’s similarly expensive same in the UK and I cannot say about Norway and Switzerland, but I would think that it is not better in the other non-EU bits of Europe.
This is the problem with most homes that have vent hoods. I’ve yet to be in a home that has a make up air fan.
I live in a rental right now that doesn’t even have a vent. I just open the door and a window and hope that’s sufficient. (But it really isn’t)
Otherwise you might opt for an electric tankless water heater, a heat pump HVAC system, and just an electric dryer.
I've read that the gas industry uses the cooking specifically in advertising and lobying to keep this toehold for the even bigger emissions. [1]
And 2-3% isn't nothing either. Such an easy win. we desperately need to rack up easy points yesterday...
Relatively as in compared to say utility scale production/storage or hell even replacing home heating like you mention.
I wish we could replace our 110 year old giant cast iron steam heater thing. Would have to either replace all the radiators with electric board things (i hate them) or find an electric boiler (which would have to plasma cut apart the old boiler to get it out lol).
Heat pumps sound cool too but all those options have upfront costs which some of my hoa neighbors can't afford. We couldn't get a loan for other repairs we did with longer term than 3 years.
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/06/how-the-foss...
I do wonder if there's a reasonable heat pump retrofit for old buildings with boiler-based heating. Ultimately you're just heating up a liquid and pumping it through everyone's radiator, right? Seems like a sensible product given the number of old buildings with this kind of heating.
Edit: And here it is! https://electrek.co/2022/01/05/these-new-affordable-electric...
I wanted to get an electric car. But not only do my neighbors not want to split cost of a charger station but also I'd have to pay over 10k to upgrade/fix the electricity - or so I was told.
It seems like it could be even simpler than a heat exchange that I think puts pipes into the ground?
Like it's just creating steam. Can't we just scale up an electric tea kettle? Seems like it would be pretty efficient.
Efficiency wise you may be wrong. Carrying electricity is not efficient (you lose energy with distance) while gas (as long as leaks are limited) is a more efficient store of energy from start to end.
The important part to remember is that natural gas infrastructure is always polluting, and tends to leak a fair amount of fuel which is never even used (around me, there are estimated that this is as high as a third of the total usage). That’s all locked in when you use gas, whereas an electric stove can be powered by a mix of sources which change hourly without the owner even having to know about it.
The other thing to consider is that a professionally-managed and monitored power plant is usually better than equipment as maintained by the average person. Lots of people don’t even get their gas appliances checked once a year on average, and you’ll pretty regularly hear about leaks or fires caused by poor maintenance at apartment buildings where you’d think they’d be at least a little more responsible.
There's no such thing as zero-impact. Wind farms have an environmental impact. Building solar-sensitive cells require dirty processes that also create pollution and waste as they don't last forever.
Electricity is overall more plugable, versatile and evolvable than appliances that directly consume hydrocarbons. You can meet your source needs using some combination of grid connection, solar, backup generator, backup batteries, etc... - and you can evolve this source side of things over time without being forced to constantly retrofit the load-side systems in your house.
Often, a necessary part of solutions are 1% here and 1% there. There's not always big, satisfying chunks, or they aren't sufficient.
Also I can make smores when I don't feel like getting a fire going.
I do have an induction plug in hot plate and for actually cooking its really quite good. It boils water faster than all but my 21k btu burner on just 110v, dumps no heat into the room, cools down when I lower the temp as fast as gas, and did I mention it dumps no heat into the room?
As far as air quality taking anything above boiling temperatures inside is super bad for your lungs no matter how you do it. The NO isn't nearly as bad as the particulates created by searing or frying.
But many things that cause electricity to go out (floods, earthquakes... Russian invasion) will put out the gas too
I know it does happen but because the lines are buried it’s at least 2 orders of magnitude less likely.
Gas is obviously far more resilient, though not immune to more extreme problems. I’ve literally never experienced a gas outage, yet power outages are routine almost everywhere I’ve lived.
IME, this is objectively false. I've lived in the Northeast my entire life (40+ years). We have on average 2-3 power failures lasting more than a few seconds per year. I have never in my life experienced a natural gas system failure. The pumps that pressurize the gas are themselves powered by gas, and the delivery is not in any way dependent on the power grid; also, as someone else stated, gas lines are buried well underground.
A generator is a small investment to fix this and many other problems, without causing indoor air pollution.
Yes, really. I personally love the aesthetics of flames on the stove, and this might lead me to choose a gas stove over the alternatives despite minor downsides like being slower to bring water to a boil. On the other hand, the air quality issue seems like a much more significant downside, though I haven’t researched it much. (I haven’t personally ever had the opportunity to choose the type of stove for a place I’ll be living, so it hasn’t come up. Someday.)
I know a lot of older Greeks/Italians are the same way with their gas ovens. There's just something magical about it that turns your time in the kitchen from a chore into something you look forward to.
Metal slats are also nicer to hit your a pan against than flat glass for a variety of useful/sensual reasons.
Doing a super low temp simmer on gas is hard. Double boilers are only something you need with gas. Induction imho and experience is just better all around. What the video for someone putting it far more eloquently then I ever could.
Or how about my 11" cast iron; the induction only heats the middle 7". Half the pan is useless.
In a home context its irrelevant. You're not doing true wok cooking at home anyway, your piddly little small bore home gas feed won't be providing anywhere near the required intensity.
The side burner of a $150 grill does a fine job, but can't find a wider-diameter induction.
As for your cast iron maybe use the correctly sized induction element then? It’s cast iron and it doesn’t spread heat well, that’s how it works. You would have the same issue on a resistive element.
They make induction cooktops for woks (they are basically slightly bowl shaped), I’m not sure how popular they are in Asia, however.
Ikea has the 36" in stock in the US for 950USD, but the 30" would be tolerable at 800 or 700USD if they were available.
As I said watch the video it says it better then I
No.
1. Instant heat off/heat on response. In electric stoves the cook top still remains fairly hot and cooking can happen from residual heat after you turn off the heat. Same issue with turning the heat on. While the gas stove has minimum hearing from the thermal mass after you turn it off
2. Psudeo-grilling ability
3. Cost for gas vs. electricity. In an ideal world the heat output per $ would be exactly the same but there are subsidies, pricing structures, different supporting infrastructure etc.
As the article implies, at the current price point, gas stoves are competing with electric stoves rather than induction stoves. And there are definitely a few benefits.
That being said, It might not be as bad as living with a smoker (as the NYT asserted) but it is bad for you. The YouTuber Climate Town did an excellent video on gas cooking which exposed some very nasty truths of the gas lobbyists and the negative health effects it has on the population.
Citations are in the description: https://youtu.be/hX2aZUav-54
Politicians and their media lackeys in the media need to stop trying to micro-manage peoples' lives.
My induction hob can be connected to 1 phase or 3 phase power, there's a dip switch on the back to switch it over. I'd imagine inside it changes the voltage and frequency to something completely different depending on what power level you set the burner to, so the actual supply voltage isn't that important.
A separate oven and hob usually means the oven isn't at knee height, which is much nicer. Decent apartments and houses in Europe have this, but so does my relative's million dollar house in the US.
dunno about the US but in india we use these. converted to US$, its like $18. they last about 2-5 years with good usage and if you are really unlucky with your spillovers and frayed cables, maybe less but other than that these things are reliable as fuck..
why do you have to buy thousands of dollars worth of equipment?
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/bosch-800-series-4-6-cu-ft-self...
(A) "Healthy, home-cooked Food" >> "whatever stove type"
(B) "induction stoves" > "gas stoves"
The entire world, in general, aspires to rapidly move away from hydrocarbons. To me, that consideration alone would justify the inequality in (B) when you can afford the choice. Other considerations are a nice bonus.
We're already seeing this play out with municipal regulations deemphasizing gas stoves in new construction.
- people with gas stoves need to know the risks to mitigate them. Like paying attention to ventilation, or really ventilate as soon as they put on the stove. All the more so if they don’t have the means or the right to replace their stoves: they’re probably also more vulnerable to health related fees.
- there has been so much advertisement of gas as “fine” that it needs a lot if counterbalance. People are still buying gas stove for new homes for bullshit reasons.
And sorry, I watched the first 30 seconds of that YouTube video and don't see any reason why I'd trust it any more than the times article.
Joking aside, I'm glad he is making these videos in that case. However, I'd say the target audience is teenagers so maybe it's not the best suited for this forum?
There's this weird generational gap on HN where HNers seem to think the generation born in 2000 are teenagers. They're not. They're 22 year olds.
We should not accept any health claims without quantification. "Objectively bad for your health" is not particularly relevant, even if I accept that at face value. For example, in right-hand-drive countries, making left turns is "objectively worse" for your health than making right turns.
^ This is based on a vague memory of a lecture on Risk Communication from Prof David Spiegelhalter around 10 years ago.
The way to stay alive is to reduce a little here and a little there (unless you work as an amatuer bomb technician). Heart disease is a leading cause of death; a 25% improvement would be great. There's not any real relationship between "a bacon sandwich everyday" and "the odd bacon sandwich"; where does anyone talk about the latter?
would love to see an induction stove with a usable UI. everything I have used is designed by a person that never had to cook for more than 1. the automatic off during the slightest spill, and the impossibility to operate buttons with wet/greasy hands, has to be one of the biggest design mistakes in the history of engineering.
my idea of a great time is to invite this engineer to cook with me a 4 course dinner for 8, where everything is timing crucial, and I get to scream at them like Gordon Ramsey the minute the stove switches off and they lost momentum with the heat but can't operate the button because "wet fingers".
the problem isn't induction and consumers cooking with gas, but that we have a culture operating on "ownership and exploitation" of the environment.
It's the same as the gas stoves of my childhood; I'm not sure how it could be simpler. It even has the icons indicating which knob is for which burner. Is your stove postmodern?
I like induction stoves. Easier to clean, and do 90% of what I need doing in a kitchen. Not having to run gas lines is a plus, and for the other 10%, I'm probably working on a grill or using a dedicated burner anyway.
But the UIs are awful.
Stop turning yourself off. Yes, I do intend to cook the thing I put on you for six hours. Just fucking do it.
Give me a knob. Gas stoves use knobs for good reasons. You don't need to invent new UX, just give me a motherfucking knob. A knob without complicated family issues is fine as well.
My stove does not need Bluetooth or WiFi. It's a stove. I expect it to work with minor maintenance for 40+ years. Protocols are going to change a lot between here and there.
I am not installing your app. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Baphomet will call up and tell me he got right with Jesus before I install your app.
There has to be a market for people that want appliances that just... work.
Addendum: there are a few induction stoves with knobs, but they are definitely the exception, rather than the rule:
- https://www.bluestarcooking.com/cooking/cooktops/36-turn-ind...
- https://performwireless.com/7-best-induction-cooktops-with-k... (half of these are not full-size built-ins)
Spilling have to be a gas thing? I experience it maybe once every three months on a induction oven (what I have at home).
I hated the gas oven when I studied in US, impossible to control the temperature accurately and boilover almost every time. Not even any faster.
If you're not spilling, you're not cooking hard enough. :)
Gas does provide easier temperature regulation, as the change is (a) instantaneous; and (b) infinitely fine-grained compared to the average "levels" of an induction stove.
A good gas burner also puts out a more consistent heat pattern, as opposed to the "ring of burning" that is common to most induction cooktops.
But for most things, induction is good enough, and I appreciate the day-to-day versatility of "just wipe it down".
I bet none of the commercial induction cooktops are internet of shit devices.
The other problem to watch out for is poor reliability due to gradual "cooking" of the circuit board -- after all, the knobs are not physically connected to the power electronics; they're just a digital input to a controller, same as for the touch controlled units.
The showroom had this Beko range with knobs and no Wifi or "smart" stuff for ~half the starting price of their (so-called) "pro" ranges: https://www.yaleappliance.com/kitchen/cooking-appliances/ran...
I think I'm going with this GE ("Café") double-oven option for my small kitchen, as long as I can confirm the Wifi stuff is strictly optional and isn't in the failure path: https://www.yaleappliance.com/kitchen/cooking-appliances/ran...
Other options with knobs were from Miele, Fischer and Paykel, and (less expensively) LG. I believe Samsung also sells a range with knobs; see the photo in the article.
To me, induction with physical knobs and buttons would be the best. Other than the stupid touch things, induction is just so much better than gas for almost anything.
https://www.mieleusa.com/e/30-inch-range-hr-1622-3-i-clean-t...
Fortunately we found one with knobs. https://www.aeg.co.uk/kitchen/cooking/cookers/electric-cooke...
It does have auto off on spills, but it's not overly sensitive and only triggers if you really let things boil over. Had it 9 months, can highly recommend this cooker.
That leads to touch controls with all the listed drawbacks, but it's nonetheless what has gained the most support.
For most i suspect the aesthetics of one clean flat surface wins out over alternatives, even though these alternatives are more usable for cooking.
That said, it is not necessarily exclusive, we can have a nice flat surface along with a panel with physical knobs on the side. Even with a minimalist look à la Dieter Rams if needed.
https://www.gaggenau.com/global/appliances/cooktops/400-seri...
UI is typical: buttons to set "heat" and "temp", plus on/off and timer. Good part is than buttons activate mechanical momentary contact switches that have a really solid "clicky" feel.
Overall it's a real pleasure to use, but it has its quirks. The biggest "issue" (not really a gigantic flaw) is the ambiguous controls re: heat and temp. Nominally the heat setting controls wattage, temp supposedly sets limits on temp erature of food. It's just very inconsistent, like setting temp to 160 degrees F doesn't have much to do with actual temperature as measured with a thermometer. But I've gotten used to how it works and very rarely overcook or burn stuff.
In the past I preferred gas, but that's not my first choice now.
I bought an AEG stove last year (similar to [1], but an older model I think). Physical knobs for temperature control, no auto off on spills. Touch interface only for a few convenience features and the extra power mode, which is fine by me. I'm very happy with this stove and like cooking with it just as much as I liked gas when I had it a few years ago.
[1] https://www.aeg.com/kitchen/cooking/cookers/electric-cooker/...
How is it for keeping a constant, low-mid temperature? One of the issues I have with induction is that the heat is applied in bursts rather than as a constant with gas
This means that when frying with some oils, induction will either heat them past their smoke point in the burst or the temperature will be too low in-between bursts
That said, I'm probably an ok cook at best and I don't eat meat so I can't really say how it would work with that. However, I found that at least the gas range I used when I lived in the UK, wasn't really great for low temperatures either, as the flame tended to not self-sustain properly on low settings.
The killer feature for me personally was actually the steambake thing, as I bake bread weekly. It's not quite as good as directly spraying water into the oven, but still works really well. Obviously independent of the induction top though.
Olive oil has indeed been one of the problematic ones for me - to be fair, it might simply come down to my inexperience cooking with induction
I think I will get some additional cast iron cookware when I make the switch. Hopefully it'll be able to retain the heat better between bursts and make the average temperature more stable :-)
I appreciate that you took the time to answer my question. Hope you have a pleasant day
Also, and this might just be me, but they are fun to use because they require a bit of skill to use. This is like how it can be more fun to drive a standard car than an automatic-shift one.
My unit is just single-hob portable induction cooker from Duxtop: 15 heat settings -- think of it like continuous power settings -- and I think? about 10 (cycling) temperature settings.
I'm quite optimistic that a high-end unit such as the one used in the Asian restaurant mentioned in the article would hold constant temps without the annoying recycling -- and believe me, I find the on/off business just as annoying as you find it.
I look forward to a time when I have the room for a full-sized induction cooktop. I think that with a decent induction disk (I think I'll just buy a 3/32" disc of mild steel and avoid the laminated units sold commercially, or even just repurpose a crepe pan) I'll be able to do things like Spanish eggs, where just a portion of the pan must be kept heated.
One thing I've found is that egg pans (small saute pans) with just the right slope for flipping eggs are not easy to find in induction-compatible pans. But I did find one pretty close to perfect, and an induction disc will take allow reuse of my favorite non-induction egg pan.
I'm really sold on induction. It's not best for everything, but I can live with its shortcomings while enjoying its advantages.
I haven't actually seen a stove in the stores that are touch only.
Though, as a student, if I lived in an apartment with a gas hob I don't know if I would have bought a portable induction unit to replace it.
It doesn't really matter much as I mainly linked it as an example, but I experimented a bit with the countries and the specific model isn't on the UK site either (they have other ones with knobs there though). If you want to see the one I linked you can choose "Germany" in the "Choose your Country" page and click "Hausgeräte" (top left) followed by "Standherde" and "Standherde" again (what a weird navigation). In the filters select "Kochfeldart > Induktion". It was the first result left.
Mine has all touch controls but I love it. I think it might be my favourite appliance in the new kitchen.
A big slab of black glass with nothing to trap dirt on.
We had to replace a few old aluminium pans with nice Samuel Groves carbon steel ones but I think it was well worth it.
I haven’t had many boil overs or any switch offs.
It has more than enough power when needed. 230v 40amp dedicated supply and RCD I think but it could be 50amp, can't remember.
I would not go back to gas.
I’m not sure I’d want a plug-in 13amp unit though. Seems a bit weedy compared to a real hob.
The fan and high-pitched pan noise is not my favorite though.
For those who haven't experienced that particular abomination, they had sliding quadrant doors and separate buttons for locking and unlocking the doors as opening and closing the door. Originally the colour of the lights around the buttons was the only clue to the state of the lock (I think these have been redesigned). This resulted in the unintended comedy of someone sat down to do the toilet as the next person came along, pressed the door open button and slowly unveiled the person doing their business to the whole carriage of people. Inevitably resulting in a mashing of buttons from both sides trying to get the door to close again.
Oh. And more than half of published studies that are used to approve drugs cant be replicated. Oops ?
> doctors are educated by sales reps ...
That statement goes to the heart of it: "doctors" aren't educated by sales reps, different doctors are and to different degrees. You can trust different doctors to different degrees, and there is a very wide range - some are highly trustworthy, some the opposite. And you never know for sure and all you can do is observe and apply your best judgment. That's true for everyone, including Moms.
One thing I can observe is that doctors obtain MDs, and I've rarely encountered doctors who didn't have deep expertise in medicine, and I know some about how much study is done at medical schools. I can't be absolutely sure, but that's a strong signal that they know far more than I do.
Saying 'you can't trust anyone' is as serious and reasonable as saying 'you can trust everyone'. The world just isn't that simple, but finding who to trust is almost the most important skill.
The way you would know this to be true is when professional kitchens are defaulting to induction instead of gas. (I think this has started to happen in a few high end places, which is exciting)
I am putting in a new kitchen soon and it will have a gas hob + electric oven because I love cooking and gas is my default. Every electric hob I have ever used has been garbage, and I am not dropping 2 grand to try induction and maybe discover what sound like familiar issues (ha, I am turning myself off now).
Gas always just works. Apply steady heat - perfect cooking experience. Maybe next time.
That is not how you would know that. There are plenty of industries where people stick to the "tried and true" (for various reasons, some of which might even be reasonable) and chose to neglect efficiency gains or long term health of either their employees or customers.
If A then B true
If and only If A then B true
Side note. The high end ones move first as they discover something better. See the proliferation of technological machines in modern professional kitchens. But the trend gets set and the upper mid range starts to follow and then it will be what chefs want to use because it is best.
I am comfortable with the latter at least, as my default would be a 5 ring gas hob! I cannot imagine cooking with fewer than 3 rings. (Say, duck breast, mash, veg is a pretty basic meal)
> Get a standalone induction plate. They're cheap and portable and they let you try it out without a huge expense.
That is actually a good shout, and not something I had considered. Am currently "camping" kitchen'd in the utility room with a microwave and a 2 ring camping gas stove. Will have a gander, Thanks :)
You're allowed to own more than one standalone induction plate. And you're also allowed to position them freely over your work area :)
That's the first time I've heard of that. Is that for kitchens only, or for all rooms?
there is no such thing as "objectively bad". Risk is always measured in relative amounts vs something else.
But people with electric cooking devices can still have high pollutant levels without proper ventilation.
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/resources/documents/residential-cooki...
It's slower, less flexible, makes some styles of sauce making impossible, and probably worst of all - invisible.
Has there been some quantum leap in induction cooking I haven't experienced?
They actually said,
“For children who live in a home with a gas stove, the increased risk of asthma is on par with living in a home with a smoker,” she said.
Every kitchen I’ve ever been in with a gas stove has some sort of ventilation. Open window, fan, hood, etc.
Same for the environment. Let’s look at older style electric coil resistant heat elements. Largely inefficient and the power generated how?
This is mostly propaganda. The
What are normal people suppose to do without expertise on any subject.
Not against induction cooking but It is very common for these type of reporting that for induction cooking to succeed they must get rid of every single gas stove. And make gas stove cooking as evil. Start a movement, conjure a trend, make hype.
What has changed?
I am getting one when I get a new stove, but then again I do not have reticulated gas here.
My mother had one and it was great
This is unfortunately just how the world is. Epistemology is hard, and there are a ton of people out there who make it harder (Three guesses as to whether the author of this article, or any other crappy prestige-publication journalist, thinks they're lying).
It's a scary and confusing world! At some level you just have to internalize that, build the most accurate model that's worth the overhead, and accept that you'll be wrong a lot.
The industries (merchants of doubt) are so active, it's absolutely nontrivial for a well meaning layman not wanting to invest oddles of time to get to good conclusions.
The smoking point is not a problem, the nasty stuff start appearing as couple dozen degrees _above_ the smoking point, so you can use that as an early warning system.
It also contains antioxidants, which bind some of the nasty stuff for a while, so it really is better for you for regular cooking.
Could not disagree more. Olive oil will be spewing smoke and changing flavour well before you get to a sensible temperature for shallow or stir frying. It is very tasty and apparently quite good for you, so it's a great choice for low-temperature cooking, but anywhere smoking point is important, olive oil is not what you're looking for.
I know this because it doesn't happen when I'm boiling.
Sorry, couldn’t resist
The rest of the odor molecule is hyrdrogen, carbon, and oxygen, so likely goes to water and carbon dioxide or monoxide.
These effects are cumulative, it's not some threshold you cross where the other negatives are no longer relevant because you do something far worse.
It's like people who rationalize eating a pint of ice cream before bed because they had mcdonalds and a beer for lunch already. The appropriate action would be to skip dinner and dessert altogether, but they're doing the opposite due to such wrongheaded thinking.
You should really be thinking "hey, my cooking produces a lot of particulates, I wonder if I can clean up the process elsewhere at least"
How about not cooking animal products, i save more emmissions that way than spending $2k on an appliance that will be obsolete or irreparable in 5~6 years.
If you want to make certain forms of energy "illegal" because of some "lung-irritating pollutants", I mean why not start with the unsustainability and cancer risks of these poly type chemicals, no? Especially ones coming in direct contact with your food, and your water supply (a.k.a Dish Washing?)? Never mind the actual environmental damage of manufacturing chemicals like these?
This is a fallacy. Regulations can be improved even without being perfect and your pet peeve not being addressed in a specific discussion does not make the discussion useless. Gas is harmful, as well as some antiadhesive coatings. Saying we should not do anything about either because the other would still be bad is not particularly smart. It is also the contorted logic that lobby groups use when they know they are on the wrong side of a public health issue.
I didn't say we shouldn't do anything about either, but banning natural gases that are found in nature because of "lung-irritating pollutants" is not particularly smart. I'm not in any lobby groups. I care about freedom and energy independence. Some NYT article pushing an agenda of "all electric" and climate change is contorted logic.
Put all of your trust in some on-grid electric power utility company where in some cases are not stable(cough cough PG&E), all the while power grids are huge targets for foreign "attacks", and even a solar EMP (Nuclear bomb? Solar flare?) could render all electronics useless. All the while, you make cooking with natural gas illegal? I suppose at that point, we could rub sticks together and cook by a wood fire (since the dawn of Man)? Or that is illegal now too?
Uh...Yea, no thanks.
It asserts that cooking with gas "has been shown to be catastrophic for the environment." What's the basis for this assertion? They link to another NYT article that cites a study that says, "annual methane emissions from all gas stoves in U.S. homes have a climate impact comparable to the annual carbon dioxide emissions of 500,000 cars." [1]
That might sound like a lot until you realize there are 280 million cars in the U.S. In other words, the total impact of all gas stoves in U.S. homes is equal to 0.18% that of cars.
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/06/thermal-efficiency-c...
> The main discrepancy with these figures is caused when one doesn't take into account that electricity first needs to be produced in power plants which sometimes convert less than a third of the primary energy into electricity
That is, induction stoves are about 90% efficient at converting electricity to useful heat, but your electricity generation may not be depending on where you live. It's the same argument people make against electric cars and heat pumps.
As the grid decarbonises, electric cooking will become far more favourable than combustion cooking in terms of CO2 until eventually, hopefully, it is entirely zero emission.
Indeed the article doesn't seem to focus on what could have been its strongest argument: wood/biomass already IS carbon neutral, provided it's sustainably farmed. That does, however, exclude the fossil fuels used in production and distribution which may be significant or zero depending on source, but are usually quite low, albeit human resource intensive. If you want to go one layer deep you should aggregate up the carbon output of all the labour going into the production system but I digress.
Thermal efficiency only matters if you consider the carbon intensity of the source of the energy.
Besides, the major problem with combustion cooking is the particulates anyway, which are immensely better on an electric stove. And the article seems to consider convenience as an irrelevance rather than the primary motivating factor of essentially all technological development.
An efficient rocket stove outperforms induction if you take account externalities, which is the right thing to do if you are environmentally minded.
The lack of a PhD doesn't make someone "not a scientist". Science is what one does, not what one is.
I have a doctorate from Oxford, but I'm less of a scientist now than I was as an undergraduate student.
yes but someone who has a MBA is definitely NOT a scientist but a salesman.
Isn’t it possible, a sales person is aware of something better than someone having an educational degree over it, esp when selling?
People’s lives take them down many paths. I am a “scientist” insofar as I have done science - and am an author on two publications in a respected journal (Annals of Botany). The research from my MS in Biology continues to get cited in evolutionary biology and population genetics studies years later. I also have an MBA and am a senior sales leader in a cybersecurity scale up (at some point years ago I decided I wanted to make more money than academia could provide and I made a major pivot). I’m still equally comfortable discussing herkogamy and phenotypic integration as I am GTM strategy and compensation models.
MBA graduates are by far used in companies in the Marketing and Sales departments, so interpreting my comment about them being salesmen as "hate on MBAs" is quite funny, because that's precisely how the hiring market sees them.
Sure, there are scientists who happen to also have MBAs. That's a huge exception, so you won't win points by finding someone who happens to have that profile. MBAs should typically not be trusted to talk about Science because:
- unless they happen to have a multiple education background, they have NEVER been exposed to serious science and the scientific method. Blame it on the fact that Science outside of higher studies is badly taught if you'd like.
- their education is mostly about how to understand the market and optimize how to exploit it through market research, targeting, and marketing.
The second point makes them suspicious from the get go on any topic they touch publicly. Are they acting as naive actors trying to debate or advance one's understand of the subject, or acting as MBAs trying to push a specific agenda for other reasons?
Like other communities, sadly, HN is egocentric, thinking what they do is important and that everything else - humanities, social sciences, arts, management, government, etc. - is a waste. The world should be run by hackers, of course. I would guess MBA News is similar.
My dilemma as I catch more and more propaganda: should we support it as it is our side or should we try to expose it as it is not true?
the NYT has always been agenda driven. even for the iraq war they were spreading the WMD bullshit to lead the US into war.
"I have a PhD and I know better" is not a compelling argument.
Why do you think you need a PhD to be a scientist? Many famous scientists, even some distinguished professors, don’t have a PhD. A PhD isn’t even the only type of doctorate!
Examples? I'm really not aware of anyone, so I'm curious.
Professor however, no, except as a honorary title.
I know exactly zero tenured professors who do not have a PhD.
I'd still rather not breathe any harmful agents at all though, when better tech exists.
It's weird that they use their immunologist credentials to specifically attack it being worse than second hand smoke (which doesn't seem particularly controversial) as it seems very commonly accepted that it's bad, which you'd think an immunologist would know. Like if you look up any asthma charity for advice on your child's asthma, they're going to have this in the list of avoidable triggers. Why such venom because a reporter has (though probably hasn't) mildly exaggerated a real threat?
https://www.thoracic.org/patients/patient-resources/resource...
> Anything that burns inside the house will create smoke that can damage your lungs. There are many things you can do to help protect you and your family’s health from air pollution inside your home:
> Use the cleanest burning fuel you can find and afford. Electricity is the cleanest and does not create any household air pollution
I always thought gas was the best for cooking. But I was wrong - induction is. Gas is great for medium-high power cooking, but it falls apart for lower temps, and it's very hard to get it consistent. The only time I really miss gas is when stir frying - you can't really use woks on induction.
It's also wipe clean!
sides stay far too cool.
luckily I don't do it that often so just bought one of those butane table top burners for those cases.
It's amazing, way better than our old gas stove. I'll never go back.
but you need a flat bottom for such a "wok" to sit - otherwise a round bottom wok isn't close enough to heat up evenly.
Blame your induction heater or induction wok.
https://www.amazon.com/Lodge-Pro-Logic-Handles-14-inch-Black...
I can only recommend such tactics for messy cooking; it's indeed the real "killer" feature of induction that even gas can't match.
Edit: pretty sure this is the wok, definitely the correct brand. https://kenhomwoks.com/store/products/ken-hom-excellence-car...
There is no such thing. A round bottom is a defining feature of a wok. If it doesn’t have a round bottom it isn’t a wok by definition. A round bottom is essential to how a wok is used.
I’m not saying that large flat bottom frying pans with high edges aren’t useful, I have one and it’s probably my most used pan, it’s just not a complete replacement for a wok.
This is the wok:
https://kenhomwoks.com/store/products/ken-hom-excellence-car...
It performs one essential function, it needs both a round shape and has to be made of thin sheet steel. You can only have one if you need to place it on a flat induction stove: either it’s thin and flat on the inside, or it’s round on the inside but thick.
> Easy tossing for stir fry is just one feature of a wok. For example, the round bottom causes liquids to pool in the center.
you need the round bottom to be able to scoop up the food and churn it. Try using a spatula on a flat bottom "wok" and flip the food to churn it - it doesn't work very well.
There's also an edge between the flat bottom and the round sides. This causes food to get "stuck" there under high heat - leading to burning. A wok is round all the way, so the spatula scrapes everywhere evenly, and you leave no burnt bits.
A flat bottom "wok" is just a pan with high edges.
The idiom comes for fighting battles with absolutely devastating casualties to capture positions of very low strategic importance. Establishing consensus that woks may only have round bottoms may fulfil the last part, but having people write a few counter-arguments is by no means a devastating loss, it’s just the discussion forum serving its intended purpose.
鑊 (pronounced wok in Cantonese) or 炒锅 or 炒勺 means wok.
> There is no such thing.
Here's[1] Kenji talking about a "flat-bottomed wok". My Chinese friends cook on a flat bottomed wok and call it a wok. So I'm sorry, but your linguistic rigidity is misplaced.
In fact these exist -- if you search for "induction wok burners" you can see some pictures. (I only recently became aware of this after watching this video of a chef who uses induction cooking in a small kitchen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooNzRrHA9VY)
Perhaps in the future there will be cooktops that include a wok depression on the surface, similar to how some gas stoves today include a built-in wok ring.
I would have thought that a bigger drawback would be that you can’t get even heat input while tossing the wok, though I’m not sure how essential that is
See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Induktionskochfeld_S... for what's under the plate. The center silver thing is likely a thermostat/temperature sensor. The electronics may need to be a bit less ignorant to handle a flexible coil, but tracking the tank's resonance isn't even a difficult task; a Royer/Baxandall oscillator could probably be made to work.
You're correct, but times change, and the carbon steel wok over a giant burner isn't very suitable for apartment cooking anyway. There are now works designed for use on induction (with aluminium conduction to achieve a heat gradient), and they work pretty well. Also much healthier for the occupants, not as hot in the kitchen and cheaper to operate.
In countries with 240v/10A sockets a plug in electric wok is fine for home cooking. On 110v/15A it is still better than electric radiative cooking, but not as good as gas.
This perspective drives me crazy. OK, so induction cooktops are good for the environment. But flat bottom woks are not woks, and you can’t do wok cooking on an induction cooktop. The only people who think that you can, are people who completely lack an understanding of wok cooking techniques.
I know for a fact that you are arguing from a position of ignorance here, because it is physically impossible for an induction cooktop to replicate what gas provides a wok, which is hot air, something induction surfaces don’t produce. So I’d recommend that you do at least a small amount of research on the topic before you resort to such low effort (and hilariously inaccurate) ad-homs.
The practical reason is that people have different sized pots and pans. I don't want to put my small sauce pan on a large burner that will waste the majority of its heating surface. Similarly, I need a large surface to heat a big pan.
The aesthetic is that a lot of cooktops are combination stove/oven and thus have to be big enough for the oven bit. Once you already have that surface area, you might as well fill it up to make it seem more substantial. A stovetop with room for 4/5 burners will look like the manufacturer skimped out if it has only 2 burners.
I don't mean this to sound rude, though I know it will, but this is the literal definition of "argument from ignorance."
You don't use more than two burners, so you don't know why a stove needs more than two.
I personally frequently cook with three or all four burners. Further, there are meals where I might use the two small back burners, and meals where I might use the two large front ones.
I guess you could be describing a need for stoves that came with just two burners, for those who couldn't imagine using more. But, seriously, would you have bought a two-burner model if it had been available, knowing that you might have wished for more even one night a year?
There are also down considerations of power (wiring and maximum output) and noise (induction units have fans, which are less noticeable in stovetops), safety (accident risk from cables, tilting, etc) and convenience.
It might work if your everyday usage involves zero to one units. Which is certainly possible, if you don't cook much, but even if you are and you're using other heat sources like a rice cooker, oven, grill, microwave, etc.
Not a terrible idea to have one around when you're limited by your normal capacity, or when you want to simmer a stew at a buffet, or your stovetop breaks or you are redoing your kitchen.
Aor of Indian households when preparing a traditional lunch will have 5-6 items (in the south, particularly in a Brahmin household, you will have one sambhar, one rasam, three vegetable currys, rice, and a fried item usually appalam). This entire meal takes three hours or so to prepare from scratch on my stove (a three burner lpg stove). Two more usable burners will cut this down to about 2 hours
This is not even remotely typical.
> This is not even remotely typical.
Digress!
What is typical?
It is always good to learn about people's lifestyles....
It's hard to make broad generalizations. But having been to all six divisions and having lived in three of them, I feel very confident in saying that a household that cooks three different curries, sambar and rasam for a single meal is very atypical. What GP described sounds closer to a restaurant set course meal and not something a household would cook on a day to day basis.
So, they had 5 burners?
Anyways, my comment was more about the number of dishes. Two curries as in your example is fairly typical. Three curries, a sambar and a rasam like the GP said is definitely not. Chai at lunchtime does sound strange to me but then again, I'm not really familiar with Punjabi culinary preferences.
I could play hockey in it too!
The food is constantly flipped into the air above the wok where it is heated by the extremely hot air.
Of course very few homes in the western world have gas burners powerful enough for that anyway. I actually practice on a turkey fryer.
I am not a cook, but I find it difficult to believe that the heat going by the sides of the pan is cooking the food, rather than the heat going through the pan and heating the air above the pan.
This is because where I've seen someone cooking on a wok, the food barely goes past the edge of the pan.
A sufficiently wok-shaped induction stove will induce the same heat as that going through the pan.
I can’t find a high enough resolution pic on the internet of the modernist cuisine cutaway to actually read the text but here’s the image:
https://images.app.goo.gl/cZWmqecLWTSdxSeX6
Wok Hei translates to “breath of the wok” for a reason. The food is constantly in the air, which allows it to dry out. The food spends most of its time not even touching the wok so no, you can’t do it on induction.
Here’s a good description from the Michelin guide:
https://guide.michelin.com/en/article/dining-out/what-is-wok...
Thank you for treating my ignorance!
Since in order to keep it in the air you have to constantly raise the pot from the cooker, and since induction can't work too far, it is clear why it doesn't work.
And there’s no way most of us in the west would know this. Not many people outside of the kitchen a Chinese restaurant would ever see someone do it right here. Most of us just treat a wok like a funny shaped pan.
I’ve been trying to learn the technique for a few years and I’m not great at it.
In a home context its irrelevant. You're not doing true wok cooking at home anyway, your piddly little small bore home gas feed won't be providing anywhere near the required intensity.
It's mostly a restaurant thing to have burners that powerful.
There are gas hobs that make it easy; I like my cooktop with FlameSelect exactly for this, it has 9 discrete positions and exact flame size for each position.
But with an induction range, or a ceramic glass range, the knob controls temperature, i.e. there's a thermostat somewhere that regulates the power. And this gives you a lot more control, especially at lower temperatures. But it's not unique to induction ranges, any ceramic glass range can do the same, although they have more "lag" than an induction range.
I found a flat-bottomed induction compatible wok on Amazon when I got my induction cook top. I'm not a master stir fry cook, but it woks for me!
BTW the big photo on the top of the article is not induction but vitro-ceramic (the first version of something that would look at glass and not have flames, but this is not induction, just heating of a tingie under the glass plate)
Having used gaz since childhood for 30 years, the move to induction was fantastic. The only drawback is that you cannot cook with the cookware tilted (to pour some liquid into a small puddle and heat it directly, for instance)
Now I honestly only use gas at the moment because I moved in recently enough that I haven't bother to change - but it's getting higher on n my list every day...
How exactly is that dangerous?
It is a nice flat surface in the kitchen, and too many things in my household have been burnt by being placed on it.
They are easier to clean....
It's not 100% exactly the same heat distribution but when you pick your pan off of the fire it's also not getting mots of that heat either.
Somebody can correct me if I'm wrong about this (apparently wok cooking "needs the fire"), but like... I dunno, I've done a lot of stir fries and messing around with pots on an induction thing. The "auto-turn-off" thing only happens for me if I really leave it picked up for a couple minutes, otherwise it just re-engages pretty quickly.
I do not know actually if this is a real concern but would prefer others to chek instead of me :)
As for the "flame" - I feel that the heating with induction is much faster and consistent than gas.
Copper and aluminium capable induction systems exist by varying the frequency. https://na.panasonic.com/us/food-service-systems/commercial-...
Bit harsh to call it a "back water".. Corporate advances in malfeasance often originate there!
Gotta love the pop art too, real inovators
I got a nice collection of copper bottomed pots when my mother bought her induction cooker....
When I was shopping for appliances about half of the salespeople tried to talk me into gas, but a few loved induction and boosted my confidence to take the plunge.
Look at consumer reports ratings for induction cooktops, they universally score 98+ points. The best gas cooktops top out below the worst induction cooktops.
No regrets.
I feel it really depends on the person. For most Americans, induction is great. It's dead simple, repeatable, etc. But, I hate it!
I cook on cast iron. My wife cooks with a stir fry pan or wok. We went from gas to induction and both of us absolutely hated it. It's so hard to cook if you learned in a natural fire environment.
I hate having gas at all, I just wish there was a way to mimic its behavior.
Or our old Samsung washing machine, that wouldn't let you turn it off and on again without listening to the startup and shutdown songs first. (Our newer LG is much better in this regard.)
There's no reason an induction hob can't be run with delta-sigma over it's normal low-resolution PWM to get accurate, high-resolution average power control. 1% power accuracy is easy, 0.1% is a few bucks more per "burner".
[1] actually lists a few more, was looking for something bigger than 60cm (23inch??) wide.
[1] https://geizhals.de/?cat=hkochf&xf=4220_11~4220_4~4220_5~422...
Should be more useful for sharing with a primarily-non-German audience. (The site itself is awesome, though; a very effective parametric price comparison site made by people that actually understand technology and know how important details are. It's owned by the publisher behind "c't", the big European/German non-tabloid computer magazine.)
https://geizhals.de/?cat=hherdset&xf=1959_Induktion~8421_60~...
I almost bought this after much research but ended up doing a range instead.
It's much easier to find a range with knobs for the cooktop so I won't bother linking to one.
And the controls aren't all terrible. We have a cheap electric Ikea hob (non-induction), and the controls are decent. It has digits from 0-9 for each heater, so you can set every heater to the right power with a single touch.
If you spill something it starts beeping, and you have about 10 seconds to wipe the controls with a rag, or it turns off. It's annoying the first time it happens, but it's not a big deal in practice.
I use this hob everyday to cook for 5 people, so it's not like sensor controls are useless.
It also has some advantages, like individual timers for each heater. And the little one can't reach the controls and mess with them.
[1] https://www.gaggenau.com/global/products-list/cooktops/400-s...?
That's why, for a european like me, an article like this one seems totally extraneous to hacker news front page
Having read this article I noticed that they aren't all like this.
If you are comparing electric capacitances of electric circuits vs the thermal capacitance of a macroscopic object, 1 Hz might be a high enough frequency for doing pwm.
Yes, this is correct. What parent is describing is generally referred to as bang-bang control [1].
Which leads to the question : which ones do not have a whine? Does the breville? Or which? It’s not something any reviews I’ve seen talk about
You may want to check out those that apparently can handle non-magnetic cookware; those apparently run on higher frequencies to make up for the weaker magnetic effect.
What "PWM" doesn't define is the fundamental frequency. It could be 0.1 Hz or 10 MHz. Just because the fundamental frequency is slow doesn't make it not PWM.
If I put it on full power, then it's a continuous blast of energy and it never clicks off. That's great for boiling water but not much else.
If I put it on 70%, it goes on full power for 7 seconds, then stops for 3, then back on for 7 etc etc.
But also few here use gas. It's mostly ceramic hobs
I'm actually amazed how much people love induction here, but I guess that's also because it's mostly compared to gas?
Oh and if any of your pots or pans get warped, they become completely unusable!
Drop anything heavy on it, and the cook top breaks.
I once waited for 20 minutes for a small pot of water to boil on a ceramic cook top.
The old fashion coil burners are better than the stupid glass top ones.
The temperature does cycle on and off usually based on a thermometer, so it does hold the selected temperature. I don't get why that's a drawback for you? The cooktop will literally be kept to your selected temperature.
Also the induction cooktops I know use the same kind of glass or ceramic plate on top, so you have the same advantages/disadvantages in regards to scratching, cleaning and breaking it.
Induction is greatly superior to electric heating plates, ceramic or even metal, as it is much faster and more energy efficient. Whenever you use it you never want to go back.
I have used induction a couple of times when cooking at my parents house and in a friends kitchen and I happily stay with my ceramic cooktop. Induction is much quicker and more energy efficient, but I just like that I literally control the heat on a fixed size cookfield rather than controlling the strength of the current, where effective heat will depend on the size of the pan.
It will probably change soon though. A lot of laws are being proposed to not add new gas hookups for new construction. Induction will have to become the higher end default for electric ranges.
They are just 3-phase because the utility demands 10+ kW loads to be 3-phase loads, and they often exceed that slightly. Check out the install guide on e.g. some IKEA built-in models, specifically regarding the wiring instructions.
And US residential does have 240V single-phase available.
No, there are plenty of consumer models. But they aren't as popular because the US has significantly more abundant, domestically produced, and (largely, because of that and not taking climate seriously) cheaper natural gas, and has only recently started in some localities having residential electric-only rules for new construction.
The only induction stoves I can find are very high end models. I'm thinking about it, but for the cost I can install gas (including plumbing) and save money.
Even on the high end there is often on model with induction so if you want some other option as well you are stuck.
IKEA in Sweden where I live has induction stoves for as cheap as $300, and I would assume that similar prices will become available in the U.S in the future.
I was interested in these about 15 years ago when I bought a house. They want a dedicated circuit with a 240V outlet and 40 or 50 amp breaker. My house has a gas range, so I don't already have a 240V outlet there, and I've only got 100 amp service at the panel - which claims 100 amps is the max it's rated for. I decided it was not worth the hassle.
My house was built 6 years ago but is already outdated in this respect. Replacing the panel is a pain as it requires shutting of electrical service for the day and an inspection from the city when they switch it back on. At least our meter and outdoor wire to the grid are already 200A…I hope.
A 150A panel should accommodate both your induction stove and EV charger. The stove's 50A rating assumes you are running all burners are running simultaneously, which is rare. You need 200A if you going fully electric (for hot water, HVAC, oven and clothes dryer).
I expect that proper adapters from NEMA 240V to Schuko are legal to operate? If so, you'd be cheaper off just importing these (104.867.94).
Yeah, I know I'm comparing against walk-in store products. Still.
Had a cast-iron pan on “hi” or “powerboost”. It heated up so fast it cracked. It was like a gunshot, scared the bejeezsus outta me. Surprisingly, it did not shatter the oven top.
Advice: don’t buy Samsung. Their products are always garbage. The stove’s convection no longer works. The dishwasher doesn’t clean well and plastic bits have disintegrated. The fridge has an icing-up problem. Every Samsung product is shit. Spend the extra dosh, get something from a better manufacturer.
There’s actually a large learning curve. With a normal stove of any sort, you set a power level. Different stoves have different degrees of responsiveness, differing levels of UI annoyance (knobs at one end; phone apps at the other), and different abilities to work well at low power, but they do fundamentally the same thing. The Control Freak knob does not control power; it controls _tempererature_. To boil pasta, you set it to 240 (F) or so. To carmelize onions, something like 330 will do it, and the onions won’t burn. Want to keep your stew warm? Set it to 160 and ignore it. If you put someone who hasn’t used one before in front of one, they get rather confused until they get the hang of it. If you out someone used to it in front of a normal stove, they’re disappointed.
The idea we had was that we'd use it for Cantonese hot pot, and just put it away in its case for storage the rest of the time.
We were dead wrong. It takes up a lot of counter space in our apartment kitchen, but since we unboxed it it has never moved from the counter for the last 3 years.
It has replaced our hob for 80% of cooking (in general, we only use the hob when we need to cook two things at once), and when it's not in use for other things, we leave a kettle on top of it.
It's also industrially specced so we can actually leave it on forever -- when we have a stew we want to eat tomorrow, sometimes we just leave it at 65°C until we want to eat it the next day.
It's so amazing I wish it came in a 4 hob configuration and we can replace our stovetops completely (GE has something similar, but we've had terrible experiences with GE appliances).
Despite ostensibly knowing about its responsiveness before I still ended up with slightly underdone food for the first week - if you turn off the stove, it will get cold almost immediately, no/little residual heat to make use of.
It also comes with the vaguely flashy feature of letting you run one stove plate with twice the energy by temporarily disabling its neighbor. Since the dial goes up to 9.5 regularly, I call the power boost setting "19" and relish in the knowledge that I'm 8 steps ahead of Spinal Tap.
I have a glass top range now and it sucks. Problem is most of the good induction units in the US are built in cooktops. Good ranges (combined cooktop+oven) are $$$$.
Build one yourself, that's what I did when I bought my house in the Netherlands somewhere in the 90's. I wanted induction and a hot-air oven but did not want to pay for the privilege. I built a heavy wooden frame sized to fit the oven and the induction cooker, made a drawer for oven utensils in the bottom and a hard-wood ring around the hole for the induction cooker. Wooded sides make of glued floor boards. Once the hardware arrived I could simply drop and slide it in place, wire it up to the connection box I made on the back and plug it in - voila, an induction range with hot-air oven on the somewhat-less-expensive. I sold the house 5 years later and moved to Sweden where I now cook on a wood-burning stove, from the future to the past. I like the past better, it also fits my rather dynamic cooking style - sliding and banging heavy cast-iron pans around is far less precarious on a cast-iron stove.
For example: 50A for the heat pump, 50A to charge your car, 50A for the range, 30A for the dryer, 30A for the water heater = 210A (all my examples are for 240V) + various lights and other things. Homes in the US are most commonly wired for 100, 150, or 200A.
So they'll run the range at 30A instead, but that means you can't use all the burners at the same time at full power.
If we are actually going to fully electrify the home 200A or more service is going to have to become the starting point. Residential panels > 200A in the US are rare (from what I read most power companies won't even supply such service), and that might need to change.
Our (five-zone) induction hob uses all three phases, it's connected using a 5-core cable.
See previous discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20798298
So unless you leave pans and pots on the hobs when you're not cooking, you're good.
As for knobs, I'm willing to bet that there are some induction stoves with knobs.
The buttons are those little plastic overlays on simple button, so super easy to clean, usable when dirty... and definitely dirt cheap.
American appliance designers should really try just copying good foreign products one of these days. Y'all are in million dollar homes with appliance setups worse than student appartments in many places
Granted, you can still benefit from the precise temperature setting and the ease of cleaning, but don't expect it to be an apples-to-apples comparison.
Note -- electric hobs and ovens are often wired into far far chunkier circuits and the high efficiency of induction is a big boon. It's wonderful to cook on -- all the responsiveness of gas, none of the pm2.5. It's just a shame that per kWh, electricity is a lot more expensive.
I'd want an induction cooktop and a gas oven! The gas oven solely so I can do the broil thing and get a good sear from direct flame.
Everyone's cooking styles and needs are different, I guess. It's never been an issue for me. If I leave the oven door ajar, the broiler will stay on and do it's job. An electric oven works far better than gas for baking however which is something we do regularly.
A low end range has 16K BTU for the oven, plus 4 10K burners = 56,000 BTU = 16.5kWatt.
But the 50A outlet can only deliver 50 * 240 * 80% = 9,600 watt.
It also helped me find out that my kitchen counter outlets share the circuit with my fridge. The breaker quickly tripped when I was making toast, boiling water, and the fridge compressor cycled on!
The issue with the portable ones is the quality differential. You’ve got extremely cheap ones that are more plate warmers than cooking appliances and you e got the control freak that is a piece of future tech. But if you get ones that a caterer would use they tend to do the job.
When I was in college, I wanted to be able to make pasta in my dorm room. The dining hall was fine, but it was my first time away from home, and I missed cooking pasta.
The rules said that hotplates weren't allowed in dorms, so I bought a portable induction cooker for $60 off Amazon. It can't be a hotplate if it doesn't get hot! (And I didn't exactly ask permission.)
For $60, it was great. It was small and light and plugged into a normal outlet, but could boil water in about the same time as a normal stove.
If my apartment didn't already come with a gas stove, I could easily forego a standard range in favor of a couple of these portable cookers. I've never used a "real" induction range, but $1,000 seems awfully expensive compared to $60 per burner...
Look on Home Depot or Lowes website. Full cooktop w oven is a totally separate market than gluing four hot plates together. Induction has been a high-end thing for a long time, so there aren’t bargain basement induction ranges. Stuff for sale in the US is competing with mid to high end gas.
Interestingly, only my landline broadband connection blocks them (Aussie Broadband), not my mobile provider (Telstra, Optus)!
EDIT: contacted Aussie since it looks like they've forgotten to unblock it.
EDIT: Not related to blocking - turns out archive.today returns invalid IP when queries by Cloudflare DNS resolvers (which I use): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDNS_Client_Subnet#Controversy...
Archive.today's maintainer decided they didn't want to deal with it, so they intentionally return incorrect DNS results to Cloudflare IPs. Cloudflare's CEO has stated they could just detect and override it, but that would be essentially MITMing DNS, which felt like an overreach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
There is also probably a statistics abuse here with the "emissions while not in use" is more likely large rare leakage incidents rather than median kinds of events. Keeping in mind that the amount of methane lost to the atmosphere from petroleum production is absolutely enormous, undercounted, and would certainly dwarf any gas leaks from your kitchen.
But this is the kind of "bad for you" thing which appeals to many people that want to do good and are easily sold ideas by others who don't know what they're really talking about but are good at getting attention.
“Probably”
“Don’t know what they’re really talking about”
Do you have evidence for these counter claims?
There's plenty of evidence out there that fine particulate has a significant impact on long term health.
You can easily measure the impacts of cooking by buying a particle counter and making some stirfry or burning some cookies in the oven. I have, it's easy to measure PM2.5 air quality in your apartment worse than the worse city in the world after a bit of pan frying which if you don't actively do quite a bit will linger for hours.
You'd have to come up with a model of nitrogen oxides produced by gas stoves and their long term health effects and compare them to fine particles in poorly ventilated / filtered air in homes.
That out of the way, here are the positives from my perspective: * induction boils a pot of water dramatically faster
* the pots, in general, heat up much faster and reach cooking temperatures VERY fast (as in, under two minutes)
* the surface itself only heats up as a result of the pan itself back-heating the surface of the cooktop.
* fixed, known heat settings for specific temperatures.
* almost instant pan response to temperature setting changes.
Here are the downsides from my perspective: * No fine control of the "heat". I have eight temperature settings ranging from 140F to 460F. That's a wide range with only ten steps, so I frequently wish I had more fine control of the settings, especially at the lower end. The steps are 140F, 212F, 260F, 300F, 350F, 400F, 425F, and 460F.
* Fan noise. The unit has a built-in fan that is very noticeable.
* It's much easier to burn sauces, because the heat right at the cooking surface seems to be much hotter because it hasn't radiated throughout the whole pan yet. (Please feel free to just say "git gud" at my poor skills.) I don't really know how to articulate this well, but I find myself adjusting for a certain level of boiling, but being surprised at how hot the bottom of the pan actually is, which leads to a burned sauce.
* Only works with certain pans. Most of my cookware is newer and designed to work with induction stoves, but I have a complete set of expensive stainless cookware that I inherited from my mother, and it doesn't work with the induction burner. Works great with cast iron and enameled cast iron, and I have a nonstick aluminum pan that has an iron plate on the bottom, so it works fine. I also have an all-clad stainless frying pan that is triple-layer, and one of those layers is iron, so it works well also. Any non-magnetic pans will not work (copper, aluminum, and older stainless pans).
I use my induction burner when I am cooking something for a long time outside, when I am boiling pasta or making lighter soups, and for deep frying.
I use my conventional electric stove when I am cooking meat, sauces, or thicker stews.
If you ever wish to 'upgrade', what you can do is change a plug in your kitchen from the typical NEMA 5-{15,20} to a NEMA 6-{15,20} and then wire it in the panel to 240V, as there are 'commercial' induction cookers available:
* https://eurodib.com/products/commercial-induction-cooker/?cu...
* https://www.amazon.com/Eurodib-IHE3097-P2-Commercial-Inducti...
Not $50, but still.
Considering a custom dual fuel setup. Since I’m limited by a 125AMP panel and we are almost maxed out between an electric heat pump, washer/dryer and maybe an EV.
We are done with our gas stove top, it is just so much harder to keep clean than an induction stove top. And it boils water a lot faster.
Usually any discussion about induction stoves seems to wholly revolve around European-centric cuisines, which is why I'm surprised to see this article quote a positive experience from a self-described "Kind of Chinese" restaurant. I genuinely wonder how they manage it and what I'm missing.
I wish there was more granular heat control aka faster on/off switching/temperature modulation, some stoves are really bad which makes frying especially complicated as the heat comes in pulses of seconds.
Btw. for my new apartment I was wondering if there are ways to avoid scratches on the induction glass plate and turns out there are protective silicone mats, which also help against slipping. Anyone tried those yet?
Random Amazon link of what I mean: https://www.amazon.com/Induction-Cooktop-Mat-Fiberglass-Prot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Smoke_point_of_cookin...
I gave induction a solid trial run and in the end, it didn’t cut it. The stupid controls design made it even worse.
Also, gas is not dangerous from fumes at all if you have an externally vented hood, which you should have with ANY cooktop, as cooking fumes are worse for health than the byproducts of a blue flame.
Whoever wrote this article doesn’t know what they’re talking about and clearly doesn’t gourmet cook regularly.
Anyone else's may vary, but my experience differed from this:
1 I found induction to produce a very even heat - much more even than a gas stove, where there's a heat spike wherever any individual gas jet hits. Quite noticeable with cast iron on a gas stove.
2. Yes, certainly induction needs specific kinds of cookware. All mine work fine.
3 What "professional" cooking techniques don't work?
4 Agree on controls, but that goes for most modern consumer devices, unfortunately...
5 Saying the author "clearly doesn't gourmet cook regularly" is very elitist and a non-constructive criticism.
I wonder if perhaps your induction was a bad model? Or are you confident it wasn't a halogen stove?
That's a real concern, there are some subpar induction tops out there that give induction bad rep.
Look in cooking forums, it’s well understood at this point that radiant is the most even, induction is the least even, and gas is in the middle. But gas has the advantage of working with any cookware (including warped or wobbly/spun pans) and can be used in tilted/lifted cooking techniques that don’t work on induction or radiant and are common in gourmet cooking done in the French tradition.
I really wanted induction to work for me. It’s so much safer and more energy efficient (e.g. cheaper) than other options, but it just sucked in the US. Even EU brands sold in US use subpar designs and the quality cooktops sold in EU are not available here.
If you want to know conclusively how even your cooktop is do a flour scorch test or use a thermal imaging device. I know from scorch test that induction was significantly worse (and from behavior while cooking). Try using cast iron on induction and you’ll hate life.
I've experienced the uneven heat (liquid boiling right over the coil, cold next to it), shitty duty-cycle pulsing (no way of getting a proper low flame) and actually insuficient power when e.g. deep frying (it would throttle back when too hot and temperature actually dropped).
And terrible capacitive controls.
I've moved places and my kitchen now vents straight outside, so the choice is clear for me: gas.
I like how it cooks, but hate using it.
I don't believe the claims about burning natural gas being the causal factor here either. I rather think that culprit is aerosolized oil, and houses with gas ranges are simply more likely to cook with oil at temperatures hot enough to aerosolize it. I think this conclusion is reasonable at least because people who like cooking also are more likely to be more comfortable with cooking at higher temperature, and also are more likely to prioritize cooking with gas when considering homes.
The most salient argument against gas is not that it's worse than induction. In fact, I think it's pretty obvious that they are complimentary, and that gas is more universal. Instead, it is that piping natural gas to houses requires maintaining enormous amounts of infrastructure.
I will happily purchase a stove that contains some induction and some gas, and even prioritize the induction whenever I can. But the argument that induction is "better" is made by people who do not spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Induction cooking has existed for a long time. Restaurants have largely not made the switch for a reason.
Being able to select a target temperature would be awesome for cooking, my induction stove couldn't do that.
> Electric ovens are garbage
What, why? All ovens I have ever seen outside of pizza places are electric. Why should a thing that just needs to get hot at the sides be bad if it gets hot by electricity? That's nonsensical.
> In fact, I think it's pretty obvious that they are complimentary, and that gas is more universal.
Not a fact at all. As I see it, there is simply no positive of gas compared to induction, not a single one. Thus there is nothing complementary about it. You are just used to it - or seen broader, it's simply one more technological area where the US seems to be stuck in the past.
As to the non-universality of induction. Many cooking techniques require you to be pretty active with your pan. Perhaps to toss the contents to stir, perhaps to collect hot oil that you are spooning over your fish to brown the top. Many techniques depend on the pan having different temperature at different spots. In particular they require you to use a pan whose geometry is fundamentally incompatible with your induction surface. Induction cooktops do some things better than gas ranges, no question, but they do not do everything better, and there are some things that they don't do at all.
Burning things is not always bad. Smoke is basically always bad, aerosolized oils are usually bad, but the product of combusting natural gas is almost entirely carbon dioxide and water vapor. Vent hoods are for oil particulate, and oil particulate contains all sorts of nasty shit for your lungs.
I agree with the AQI aspect: get a good range hood that is vented to the outside (not just recirculating).
I am afraid of losing my gas broiler if I go to an induction system. That is very nice to have.
However, I don't get why everyone says gas is harder to clean. Last time I owned a glass cooktop I spent forever cleaning it, and it never looked perfect. Gas cooktops are easy peasy, remove grate, wipe up. Glass cooktop: Get special scrubber, note it doesn't work. Spray on magic glass cooktop spray, wipe clean, no luck. Get out a "glass cooktop" straight edge razor and spend 15+ minutes scrapping it off, slip a bit and now you have a permanent scratch.
Glass cooktops suck.
In terms of speed of changing temperature, gas and induction are pretty identical here, with the exception of those super sweet Chinese gas stove setups with the foot pedal to control the gas flow. Those things are awesome, but it is perfectly possible to hook that same pedal up to an IC that controls the induction element.
There's your error. That spray-on stuff sucks. It does not work as advertised.
What you need is the stuff that is largely solid and dry, comes in a jar and which has a sand-like feel to it. Sorry, I don't know the name or brands of that stuff in the US, but it probably exists there as well (the German name of the stuff I use translates to English into something like "cleaning stone"). You take a sponge, put some water on it, rub some of the sand-like substance out of the jar and scrub the junk from the cooktop with that water-sand-solution. The cleaning agent works like sandpaper and is thus much more effective against dried and/or burned-on residue than chemical-only solutions. You only need the razor tool for the really hard cases.
I usually clean my glass cooktop in about 60 seconds this way, and it is actually clean afterwards (ok, maybe add 30 seconds for an additional wipe with glass cleaner to get that pristine "just-installed" look). With the gas ones, even though I love cooking on them when I sometimes find one in a holiday home (because it surely does satisfy that primal urge to tame and use fire), I hate the cleaning, it takes forever because removing the grates and cleaning those takes a few minutes already, and forget about them ever looking like new again. And the cooktop itself also never actually feels "clean" except after a one-hour cleaning marathon because there are so many little edges especially around the burners in which the dirt will inevitably hide during casual cleaning, while the glass one is just a big slab of plain glass, with no place for dirt to hide and accumulate.
If you try out induction, you’d realize it’s superior to gas in a lot of ways. The reason it’s not adopted is that induction cooktops are expensive and you have to throw out any nonconductive pans. Your comment about restaurants is more tuned to this than gas being superior - high end restaurants are starting to use induction more bc of the degree of control. Alinea uses induction. Low to mid restaurants are buying the cheapest thing they can, and that’s usually the gas range they inherited.
It's curious to me that you would say that, since electric ovens are generally preferred for their more even and consistent heating. For a gas stove to maintain a certain heat, it has to be continuously cycling a gas element that necessarily only burns at one temperature. Also, electric ovens don't impart extra moisture to the cooking cavity.
The "high" setting on my broiler gets meat burnt in 1-2 minutes. What more do you need?
Could you explain more about how you find it "incapable of broiling"? I'm wondering if you might be using it wrong. You may have to preheat for a couple minutes, and may have to leave the door slightly open to prevent the thermostat from cycling. Or maybe I've never fully utilized a gas broiler and don't realize what I'm missing.
Admittedly, induction isn't 100% efficient, but it's very efficient! A gas flame heats up everything around it, whereas induction only heats up your cookware. The surface of an induction stove without any cookware is cool to the touch; in other cases, it's warm only due to the heat radiated back from your cookware.
I have done the math... Induction is 84% efficient, and gas is 40% efficient. So for most people, gas is still cheaper, unless you live in an area with very cheap hydroelectric.
Note that the 84% number is for a prototype model... 77% is for an on-the-market model, and it is beaten in efficiency by conventional electric for cookware matched in size to the heating ring.
Also, while gas is 'just a flame', the heat mostly rises, and right above it is the pan. Noticing that the pan, the hob, and the room feel warm/hot afterwards can be deceptive because the specific heat capacity of metal is 8x lower than that of the water in the food you're cooking, so you'd likely underestimate the efficiency.
On the other hand, if induction cooking lowers the air conditioning bills in the summer, it may pay for itself, compared to gas.
My local utility company is set to introduce a major rate hike for both electric and gas, but the per-unit of energy for gas is still far cheaper. Electric is getting so bad it might make sense to swap out my electric dryer for a gas one, even though it’s perfectly functional.
We’re never going to get anywhere in the case against global warming with BS statements like this…
Which is great for safety. Yes it gets hot if a pot has been boiling for a while, but it's a far cry from regular resistive ceramic tops.
Just bringing some water to the boil is not enough to make it more than uncomfortably hot. Try touching a resistive heater top after doing that...
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/06/thermal-efficiency-c...
Induction cooks by themselves are very efficient in converting energy to heat (90% efficiency, according another claim in the article).
Our induction cooktop fried its driver circuitry last year and we were stuck cooking off a camp stove for weeks while waiting for a part from Germany. Old school cooking methods are less high tech and more repairable.
The truth of the matter is that any country would be in a more secure position relying on resources that are regenerable, can be produced locally, and whose network can cope with a higher measure of decentralization. They make both the grid/network and the country itself more resilient regardless of "policy".
As I said, you can't make your own gas and an outage for the wholly centralized gas distribution system can have dire consequences that would be lessened or even eliminated for setups like rooftop solar and heat-pump.
Compressor stations break down, suppliers fail to deliver gas, mercaptan might not be available, control systems are subject to cyber attack. My point is simply that any energy delivery system has weaknesses.
In a home the two systems generally serve different purposes so I am not sure the value of having both is as high as you suggest. My gas furnace/hot water heater won’t turn on, for good reason, without electricity. The only thing that works when the power is out is my stove top (not the oven) if I manually ignite it. They would work if I used a generator but that is third supply and it shouldn’t be lost that the output of the generator is electricity. That generator could itself be powered by natural gas but that is not common.
I would never risk that on any other stove type.
I had an induction hob unit fitted in my kitchen ten years ago (replacing gas) and loved it for the instant controllability (although not the controls themselves, as covered elsewhere here). But last year I had an ICD implanted after an episode of cardiac fibrillation, and was advised by the NHS arrhythmia nurses not to use the hob (or at least to keep an arms length away from active hobs). So because I love cooking I had it replaced with a ceramic unit, which is much less satisfactory. It's made by the same company (NEF) that made the old induction hob and in fact has identical controls and physical footprint. But it's less responsive than induction (or gas) because of the residual heat and harder to clean than induction because the surface gets scorchingly hot which can burn spills on.
So having used gas, induction and ceramic, I'd definitely pick induction as my favourite, except for the one small problem that can stop my ICD sensing imminent sudden cardiac death or (unlikely) reset my ICD which would trigger an annoying warning buzzer inside my chest (but that's a whole different topic)
Just like car enthusiasts would rather drive a 1960s Mustang than a safer, more efficient 2020s Camry or N64 fans would rather play with original hardware on a CRT than an emulator with 60fps, 4k native rendering on a 90" OLED.
The hob is big enough to fit a large pan but only heats a 10cm circle in the middle. (And I have tried it with many induction-safe pots and pans.)
Rather than physical buttons, it has touch sensors that react to moisture. So a few drops of water spilling out of the pot cause it to turn off or stop working.
Some use silicon pads (shown in one image in the article) to prevent inadvertent scratching. I don’t trust those—they can melt at 400+F and you’ll never get that off the stove. I use LoMi cloth (Nomex-like?). They’re not going to melt.
To me, the limits of induction (no lifting, shuttling, shifting) are worth it for precise temperature control, less ambient heat (huge exhaust blower not needed), and the neat and clean look. My wife disliked the “patina” on our gas range. Not a problem any more.
The fact that they don't pollute your home as much, and that installation is cheaper are just extra cherries on top.
If you spill something, on an induction stove you just wipe it with a cloth. It doesn't even burn onto the stove.
What more arguments do you need?
It turns itself off and I cannot turn it back on again. This happens on a daily basis.
Worst product I own.
One more thing about how it is great. Since it heats the pan directly instead of the air underneath the pan, you can boil water for pasta without heating up the kitchen. Now, many of you have A/C to keep your kitchen comfortable, but then you are heating up the kitchen with the stove and then cooling it down with the A/C ...
My friends are not convinced. I get responses anywhere from no way to it's ok for me maybe but they really just love the feel of cooking on gas. These are supposedly environmentalists, too.
I quite like it. I don’t miss gas. I’m not a chef but I do a fair amount of cooking and even an entry-level cooktop will serve most well. Best part for me is easy on and easy off. The surface heats up very quickly and cools down fast enough that I can reuse the cooktop as part of the counter. A major bonus for tight kitchen spaces.
For me I was sold on the speed and my wife honestly liked the fact that it never burned on food, she also liked the safety aspect of the stovetop never being hot, but none of those really matter if the replacement motherboard dies after 3 months on a $4000 range.
The last time i checked, the waiting list was about a month long, which certainly speaks to the interest in the idea.
As long as my rangeware doesn't warp, I'm all for more even heating! It didn't occur to me until very recently that a reason why pans might warp on an induction hob is that they can now heat up fast enough to thermal shock on the way up, not just on the way down (by, e.g., taking the pan you just seared meat off in and dunking it in cold dishwater)
Copper doesn’t work, but cast iron, carbon steel, stainless steel all do.
We switched to induction about a decade ago, had to replace one cheap skillet.
* https://www.amazon.com/Utopia-Kitchen-Nonstick-Frying-Pan/dp...
A twelve-piece set of non-stick pots and pans for $130:
* https://www.amazon.com/Induction-Kitchen-Cookware-Sets-Nonst...
Or a ten-piece stainless steal set for $200:
* https://www.amazon.com/Calphalon-Classic-10-Piece-Cookware-S...
Would you consider any of these "expensive"?
Somebody in my family has a cardic pacemaker.
Edit to add: I'm not pro gas cooking, just cannot use induction cooking. It's just not an option accessible to everyone.
Worth being aware. https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga...
The largest one I could find is the Max Burton 6600 which claims a 9" induction disk but the middle 3 inches of the disk is not energized.
I suppose for a 15 amp plug there's only so much area it can safely heat.
Maybe built-in ones can be bigger?
In winter, when people don't open their windows the pollution will accumulate.
Induction cooking is not just better because of less pollution at home, it's cheaper than gas cooking and is easy on the power grid, many solar installations can power it directly.
Can’t find them anywhere. Particularly one with a double oven. Going to install the gas line because there are way more options available.
All I can say is I tried a $60 unit, a $75 unit and a $120 unit and they suck. All of them pulse on and off at lower power settings.
Looking at Vollrath's line, their 59300 Mirage Cadet hob at $350 has only 20 power settings, and the 59500P Mirage Pro at $680 has 100 levels (but with not-great reviews...).
[1] https://www.houzz.com/discussions/5590893/induction-cooktops...
Electronic temperature control using induction plus the quick-cool benefit of a stovetop pressure cooker. I love that a hot cooker at full pressure can be moved to the sink and cooled with tap water so it can be safely opened in less than a minute. Can't really do that with an instapot, gotta wait.
Induction hobs cut out a loss leader for gas: gas stoves. Once you have gas in your home it makes sense to install the main moneymaker: a gas furnace for heating. It's how they upsell.
Induction hobs are great in the fight against global warming.
So, I'd say it's only helpful if you are getting a new stove anyway.
It rocks.
I just removed the stupid efficiency comment. Not worth the agita, and I'm probably mistaken.
With induction stoves pretty much all the electricity is converted to heat in the bottom of the pan which is exactly what you want. A minor portion is lost elsewhere in the circuitry but not much in the grand scheme of things.
Efficiency refers to the ration between what you put in towards a goal and how much of it actually turned into that goal. Things that produce rhat with electricity tend to be 100% efficient because any waste usually happens to be heat.
An induction stove certain shouldn't have lower efficiency compared to a regular electric stove so maybe check if it's not a local issue.
My electrical bill is (a fair bit) higher than with the old electric stove, though. That's interesting.
I still love it, and have no intentions of giving it up.
Yet about half of the electricity in NY is generated with natural gas[1], so most of the "benefits" this article touts, especially pollution, don't really exist. The other half comes from nuclear/hydro combined and renewables accounting for a tad. Same for electric car owners who think they're helping the environment. Nope, you just shifted the problem to where you don't directly see it but they contribute just as much. Probably more with the all of the inefficiencies added up from each steps of going from natural gas->steam->turbine->transmission lines->multiple transformers->charging car battery.
You're right in that from a strict energy perspective, burning gas to cook food is more efficient than converting energy to electricity and then utilizing it to cook food [1], but that only addresses one small part of the downsides of cooking with gas. Among other things, these are the things that come to mind right away:
- Induction has the potential to be emissionless, gas can never achieve that. At its best, gas can be carbon-neutral if it is not fossil-sourced. - Induction has zero local emissions, while gas is not great for indoor air quality. - Induction can't leak lethal gasses into the home where it exists - Induction is much less likely to cause an indoor fire and burn down the home where it's installed
>Same for electric car owners who think they're helping the environment. Nope, you just shifted the problem to where you don't directly see it but they contribute just as much. Probably more with the all of the inefficiencies added up from each steps of going from natural gas+steam+turbine→transmission lines-+multiple transformerscharging car battery.
The concern of direct energy efficiency is still the same as for induction vs gas, but to imply that it would be worse for the environment is abject nonsense. EVs perform better from an environmental perspective in all but the worst grids in the world (basically 100% coal power), and only get better as grids become carbon-free, while ICEs remain awful.
I'll agree that EVs are not the solution to our transportation-energy concerns, though. The solution is bicycles and trains, and transitioning away entirely from the car, which in all its forms is terrible from an energy-efficiency perspective.
[1] https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/06/thermal-efficiency-c...