Citation needed please for the health effects being bogus. NOx emissions from gas stoves seem to be consistently reported as quite high indeed. For example:
https://jacksonlab.stanford.edu/publication/methane-and-nox-...
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.