I measured the pollution from my gas stove
distilled.earth
distilled.earth
I bought a meter and started monitoring after reading an article similar to this one.
My next stove will probably be induction, but just be aware that not ALL gas stoves are problematic if set up correctly and burning cleanly.
Definitely get a meter to make sure, though.
Edit: since lots of people asked, I got a uHoo sensor from Amazon. It measures basically everything and cost $300.
I'd argue >99.9% of people would have no clue if the stove was otherwise functioning normally
Which meter? (I'm asking because I have a bad experience with a device from Aliexpress that turned out to produce fake air quality measurements. Though it did not claim to measure the NO2 pollution which the article talks about.)
edit: the uHoo seems to be an expensive device that promises to measure a bunch of stuff, but it cannot be calibrated. I would not trust it.
the carbon monoxide can kill you pretty fucking dead tho
Measured at the downpipe with the sniffer in the lambda sensor hole it shows no (or almost no) CO and a bit more NOx than you'd really want, but after the cat there's no measurable NOx either. The tailpipe emits basically just warm carbon dioxide and water vapour.
What is the downside to this? Obviously availability and ease of filling is part of it, but any other downsides?
In theory the engine makes a bit less power flat out, but I never drive flat out. It's quieter, runs cooler and cleaner, and has a bit more low end torque because propane burns with a bigger slower bang.
The final insult is single-family home construction and remodel can elect to use gas if they want.
Who elects your city leaders? This is your own fault. If your city liked to model its policies after Russian policies, or Saudi Arabian policies, would that be those countries' fault?
California cities don’t, since their choice now is between “approve enough new housing voluntarily” or “lose the ability to reject new housing entirely”.
Builder's remedy expansion under the Housing Crisis Act of 2019 has changed the landscape fundamentally.
I'd imagine also that these things take years. First for the law to take effect, since that can't be immediate, and then for any enforcement of it to go through the courts.
Most bay area cities need to build more than they are, but I know that new construction in Berkeley is not zero. One of the last times I was there, I saw some new apartments going up.
I don't have a beef with California for mandating this. I do prefer gas stoves. I can get over it.
Modern induction stoves are much better (even better than gas, I hear, though I haven't used them extensively yet.)
One thing to consider is that quality of the pans and pots. Nowadays while they are all induction friendly, some provide a better heat distribution than other.
If asking my dad, the main benefit he sees is the control.
The most frustating thing I tried to cook was good, crispy hashbrowns. Believe me, I tried everything and the results were always soggy, greasy horror. When I switched to induction (and replaced all my non-ferrous pans) the results were perfect everytime.
I'm in the same boat and have found glass top actually produces more heat than a previous gas range. This isn't surprising at all numerically but people seem to automatically assume gas ranges are hotter even though you can literally just compare the numbers. Distribution is roughly the same or even better - gas tends to heat in a ring (where the flames are) whereas my glass top electric heats the entire circle. This is true even for wok cooking (although I have a flat-bottomed wok).
Responsiveness to inputs is a real problem, there's a significant lag to temperature changes. Although, this is already something every cook has to deal with - different pans heat at different rates, and the amount of food in the pan is a factor too. You kind of just learn to account for it.
Surprisingly the last point has been the worst for me - I'm always worried about putting pans down softly, and still have a few scratches. Cleaning is really easy for stuff that will wipe off, and near impossible for everything else. Spills with sugar/starch content need to be cleaned immediately or they'll be burned in forever. You can sort of scrape stuff off with a razor blade but you risk scratching the surface. I'm not sure why, given that glass ought to be harder than metal, but it happens nonetheless. With older coil/gas stoves you had drip pans or could line underneath the hob with foil, and just throw the foil away when it got dirty.
But cooking-wise, no issues.
Cleaning I’ve had no scratches using bar keepers friends to make a paste and scrape off, ymmv.
Came across this mother Jones article [1] on the success of the gas branding to promote gas stoves which was fascinating.
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/06/how-the-foss...
New induction units are more powerful than gas, respond more quickly, and have temperature based controls. So you can blast and boil a quart of water more quickly, or set it to temperature and it will quickly approach it and maintain it, no more melted pots.
With induction the heat (or lack of) is literally inside the pot/pan. So it's already ahead of any combustion outside the pot/pan. Granted not much, but still it's not behind.
Also crazy easier to clean, nice flat surface, and there's not much heat outside the pot/pan to cook stuff on.
However, no politician will ever try to make landlords and homeowners angry by forcing retrofit, whatever they do it will only apply to new properties. I doubt there is anything other than government forcing them will make my landlord install new induction stove or solar panels, and may landlord is actually nice...
While my CO2 spikes during cooking on gas, fortunately NO2 remains low. 5-15 ppb range. My gas furnace is in the basement, several floors away from my apartment.
[EDIT] Nebraska Furniture Mart, which has a much bigger selection than Ikea:
Cheapest induction range: $1,493 (sale price, claims full retail is more than $800 higher)
Cheapest gas range: $529 (also a sale price, claims full retail is $139 higher)
You can get like countertop stuff that is 120V and lots cheaper.
Here in Japan, IH stoves aren't that expensive, but they're just stovetops with 2 or 3 burners. There's no such thing as a "range" here, and while ovens are becoming much more common, they're the size of a microwave oven, and usually combined with one. You can also get portable single-burner IH stovetops for less than USD$100.
I see this in other things in America: you're forced to spend tons of money on stuff you don't need because that's all that's available, frequently because there's an assumption that you have a big family. So everyone whines about housing being expensive, but there's no option for a tiny 1-person apartment because building codes don't allow it.
I'm probably not the norm, but I'm actually seeking out a double oven for this very reason. I have to borrow the neighbor's oven during big feasts because we can't fit in.
> I'm probably not the norm, but I'm actually seeking out a double oven for this very reason. I have to borrow the neighbor's oven during big feasts because we can't fit in.
Double ovens are really, really nice, especially if you favor certain kinds of cooking or cook for large numbers more than a couple times a year.
[EDIT]
It is true that I almost never use more than two burners at once, but OTOH once you've committed to a certain size (and that size is nice, for being able to fit e.g. much larger sheet pans in the oven—IDK how you'd roast veggies for five in those tiny apartment-size ovens, without multiple batches) I, again, doubt it's adding much to the cost to go with 4 or 5 burners instead of 2 or 3, if the thing's already big enough to fit that many.
* meaning “not a countertop plug-in hob”
Many homes already have 240 plugs behind stove and dryer installations. And even if you don't already have one you just need to stick a new breaker in the panel and run a wire using both phases together instead of a neutral or ground.
https://www.samsung.com/us/home-appliances/ranges/electric/6...?
Also, hiring an electrician to install a power outlet for the induction stovetop could be at least $500, if not $1,000+.
Where I am, this is illegal!
I unintentionally bought a "smart" gas range. I hooked it up to turn on my oven fan any time the burners are on, and for some minutes after they're off. I t think all ovens should have this feature, built in.
It has to be underlined how - in practice - the actual need for such provisions was at the time perhaps a little exaggerated (as windows were usually leaky) but with the increasing use of air-tight windows (but not usually mechanical ventilation of the house) the intake and exhaust are actually needed.
There is no such thing as a clean burning gas stove. Even when not in use, they leak methane, and the majority of methane they leak is when they are not in use.
All gas stoves and ovens, regardless of cost or age, put levels of pollutants into indoor air that are greater than what is safe [1]. A $15k Wolf range is no better than a $1500 range.
The solutions are to either introduce a lot of ventilation, or switch to non combustion cooking.
Also, even a properly tuned range will emit all sorts of things that are much worse than methane.
And I'm measuring my NO2 and it's within safe levels. So should I believe you or my own lying eyes?
Granted, a lot of this may be due to other effects (e.g, ventilation) and I agree my next stovetop won't be gas.
But clearly some setups are less problematic than others and it's not the case that everyone is poisoning themselves unless they go buy an electric tomorrow.
That's a question only you can answer.
> But clearly some setups are less problematic than others and it's not the case that everyone is poisoning themselves unless they go buy an electric tomorrow
I didn't say everyone should go electric tomorrow. But people are exposing themselves to (IMO high) indoor air pollution by using gas stoves without running an extractor fan and opening windows.
A lot of people (everyone I know at least) only run the extractor to get rid of food smells, not for natural gas combustion byproducts, which is a mistake.
Even if you assume that 100% of the gas loss in the time between when I turn it on, and it goes whoosh and burns all that fuel is wasted (say up to a full second) I would then have to leave the stove on for less than 100 seconds at full blast or double that if I turn the flow down by 1/2 for that gas to equal 1% of the gas used during the cycle.
Anyway, compared with the volume of methane in human flatulence, I would be worried more about how good the bathroom ventilation is than how much of unburnt methane manages to avoid being burned and also sucked out the fume hood.
So, I too am skeptical about these home air sensors, I have one of the egg ones, that claims to measure PPM (CO2/etc). Yet it was spiking every morning, and at first I thought it was my wife putting on perfume, but it happens even when she isn't home in the morning... After watching it and what happens in my house, I suspect its largely measuring the humidity in the air from the shower.
Doing nothing but turning the shower on causes it to spike a few mins later and then gradually go down for the rest of the day. I guess I didn't think that the majority of the PPM "pollution" in my house is actually just water droplets. Thats a lot different than all the fly-ash or whatever they want you to think is the problem. (edit: just to be clear, I'm not denying indoor pollution, only that the sensor I have, while marketed as such, isn't actually measuring pollution if most of what its measuring is mist from the showerhead).
Not so. In the abstract, they say that over three-fourths of their 1% estimate was from when the appliance is not in use ("steady-state-off"). See Figure 5.
>the sensor... isn't actually measuring pollution if most of what its measuring is mist from the showerhead
It's possible your sensor is actually measuring particulate aerosols created when the water droplets evaporate, leaving behind tiny particles due to dissolved solids.[1] The effect is similar to the "salt spray" aerosols formed by ocean wave action.
The long residence time you report ("gradually go down for the rest of the day") makes this almost guaranteed, since tiny airborne water droplets will evaporate in under one minute at a typical indoor humidity of 50%.[2]
Hope this helps!
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17195485/
[2] (see Table 2) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10867-020-09562-5...
Is that stuff actually harmful?
If so, what could you even do about shower mist (at scale, as a reasonable thing to make a policy applying to all 7bn of us)?
And doesn't it still sound like the gas stove does not stand out as some special problem?
Or at least that, no article based on this source of data can be said to justify that conclusion.
Maybe the stove is doing something so much worse than farts and showers that it's worth giving up the utility and efficiency*, but this source of data does not show it.
* Efficiency including other gas appliances, ie, a gas clothes dryer is more efficient and interestingly, less fire risk than electric, but mostly the utility. Nothing else comes close to cooking with gas, it is simply by far the best tool for the job, and that is not an insignificant dismissable item.
A regular electric dryer is 100% energy efficient, just like an electric resistance space heater. A heat-pump electric dryer can be 2-300% "efficient" (really COP) because it uses a heat pump.
A gas dryer is strictly less than 100% efficient - because like with any combustion device, some portion of the fuel is unburned and is sent out the exhaust/flue. Even the most expensive gas condensing modulating furnaces are only in the 90-97% combustion efficiency range.
Gas dryers are usually more time efficient though. They achieve such high temperatures (thanks to combustion) that they dry clothes 50% faster. And because gas is cheaper than electricity, they are cheaper to operate. The operational energy cost advantage vanishes when compared to heat pump electric dryers, however.
Yes heat pumps are more complicated. Likewise LEDs are more complicated than incandescent bulbs. Condensing furnaces are more complex than gravity furnaces. And nothing is simpler than a clothesline.
Higher efficiency usually involves higher complexity (EVs being an exception, although batteries themselves are pretty complex at tiny scales).
What's also great about heat pump and other condensing type dryers is that they are ventless. With a regular vented dryer, each time you run it you exhaust several thousand cubic feet of indoor conditioned air, which gets replaced by outdoor unconditioned (hot, cold, or dirty) air due to the depressurization of your house.
One way or another, you pay for reconditioning that air.
Depending on how much you do laundry, your local climate, and the price of energy, a ventless dryer (which can only be electric, naturally) can save you a lot in energy costs by avoiding that air exchange.
Using a heat pump returns much of what is lost, but on balance in most places its sorta a wash. To be specific you have to look at the whole picture including the energy source, which requires actually picking a location/city and a particular product. And even saying maybe 100% of your power comes from PV+Wind (yah righ, haha) if you really want to lower the footprint the best plan is just to hang your cloths outside.
So, they have a couple leaky stoves in the equation and they extrapolate the data. But they never bother to determine what was leaking, which is actually a fairly simple thing to do since there are commercial leak detectors that are quite sensitive (https://www.southerncrossinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/...) to at home units that detect NG/propane/etc.
Plus there were quite a number of other WTF moments in the document that don't match with my understanding of current install practices around NG heaters/etc.
Not the least of which, is that if 1% of the usage (which is a lot!) is leaking that will easily show up on peoples meters and be something that can be smelled. Which granted most people don't run outside and check their meter in the morning after having turned off all their gas consumers but people do smell gas. I've known at least one person who ended up ripping up a bunch of the piping in their attic because it was leaking, but i'm guessing its more likely someone forgot about an old appliance with an actual pilot light or the data was categorized improperly.
Lets just say, that if you were honestly trying to run this study, don't you think you would want to go investigate some of the outliers to at least note that the top couple cases were broken valves, or rusted piping, or just debris in the gas line damaging/keeping the valve from closing (which is why modern gas codes require sediment traps) fully?
I should definitely fix my vent hood though.
How exactly does a gas stove leak methane (or anything else) when it's turned off, so there's no gas flowing?
And when discussing policy and things at scale, you factor in the total picture where 80% of the individual examples will be one or more of: damaged, installed wrong, 35 years old, used incorrectly, cheaply designed, cheaply made, etc etc, not the perfect ideal lab example.
To be clear, I am firmly in the 'keep gas stoves' camp because they simply work the best for that job, the alternatives are not actually alternatives, and I don't think any of these articles actually show that they are harmful, or at least stand out from any other source of of stuff in the air.
But of course they leak. That isn't even remotely a remarkable claim. 'off' in the real world only ever means 'mostly off'.
The uHoo was tested some time ago and found to not be that great, but not for NO2 (which wasn’t tested)
http://www.aqmd.gov/aq-spec/sensordetail/uhoo
Indeed, as far as I can tell uHoo’s own website does not list an NO2 sensor as part of the equipment, despite listing it as a pollutant it reports:
https://getuhoo.com/blog/business/performance-precision-and-...
So if you find the "uHoo doesn't measure NO2 anyway" argument compelling, then really we're all just talking about nothing.
My limited research suggests the most affordable and reliable gaseous measurements like NO2 want a metal oxide sensor, which you don’t see on consumer grade equipment but is available affordably from commercial sources. It’s more hassle though so I gave up on measuring NO2 for now. Particulates seem to be readily measured with suitable accuracy by consumer grade equipment.
If a device can tell you something is maybe poisonous, a positive result is going to lead to very different behaviour than a negative one, even if they’re equally likely to be accurate. This is especially true when your priors (ie research with accurate devices and knowledge of combustion) lead you to expect (prior to measurement) that it will indeed be poisonous.
If people want a air quality sensor that can upload data to the cloud (by default) or your local graphana, including source for an exporter, I'd check out airthings, their units are basically turnkey and can, but don't require) use a cloud.
I'm definitely shopping for an induction stove soon.
It appears that the monitor in this article is a uHoo meter that can also measure NO2. The uHoo uses the SGX Sensortech MICS-2714 as NO2 sensors. It is a low cost metal oxide sensor and has a couple of significant issues. It is extremely suspectible to interfering gases like CO, Ethanol, Hydrogen, Amonia [1] and also gives highly different results based on humidity and temperature [2]. So just normal temperature and humidity fluctualtions will give greatly different results.
Like other TVOC sensors, often the measurements correlate somehow with the gases but the absolute measurements are often by magnitudes wrong. If absolute measurements -as highlighted in the article- are important than the sensor needs to be calibrated exactly for this environment. This calibration requirement is even mentioned in the official specs [2]:
IS CALIBRATION NEEDED, AND HOW OFTEN? It depends on the application, and on the required precision. Several factors tend to reduce the measurement accuracy e.g. production dispersion on base resistance (Ro) and sensitivity (S), temperature, humidity, the presence of interfering gases, ageing of the sensor, and on-time. Calibration is needed when the required accuracy cannot be obtained due to one or more of the factors listed above. This is the case for most applications where an absolute gas measurement is needed.
This problem with absolute measurements on MOX sensors (most TVOC sensors) has been recognised by the large sensors manufacturers like Sensirion and Bosch and the newer generation of these sensors do NOT provide absolute measurements anymore but an INDEX which defines if air quality is improving or getting worse.
In our open source air quality kits [3], we offer the Sensirion SGP41 as an option which is a much more modern sensor and offers an Index for TVOC and NOx. It still suffers from some of above issues like cross-interference of other gases but at least it does not give false absolute values. It can be very useful for detecting spikes but as outlined above the results need to be really understood with the knowledge of the limitations of these sensors in mind.
[1] https://www.sgxsensortech.com/content/uploads/2014/08/0278_D...
[2] https://www.sgxsensortech.com/content/uploads/2014/08/AN2-%E...
New building codes call for mechanical ventilation, but not nearly enough to compensate for the byproducts of combustion appliances or other sources of indoor air pollution.
The best solution (an airtight house with 24/7 whole house mechanical ventilation with heat/humidity recovery) is sadly still the stuff of high end green homes.
If you cook with a gas stove, you should open windows and run your extractor fan at max when cooking.
Absent replacement air, stove extractor fans (like any extractor fans) cause an airtight house to experience negative pressure and reduce the effectiveness of the fans.
That's why shortly after moving in, I had the garbage ventilator replaced with an ERV. Based on my research I selected a Renewaire EV-Premium L, a variable speed unit which does up to 280 CFM. That's a ton of fresh air, even for a 4300 sqft house. But importantly it preserves some of the temperature and humidity when exchanging the air, so it's a lot more efficient than a plain mechanical ventilator.
I have it wired into my Ecobee thermostat. It runs at its configurable low speed 24/7, and the Ecobee puts it in boost mode (full output) for 10-15 minutes per hour.
This setup did cost some money of course, but the $2000 cost was pretty minor in the context of a new home. With this setup, we never see a buildup of CO2, VOCs, etc indoors. Definitely worth it when we're both working from home and spending most of our time there. And although we have a gas cooktop, I never see any indoor air quality issues so long as we're running the hood while cooking.
I hope indoor air quality becomes a bigger priority for homes, offices, and schools. The building codes in this area haven't yet caught up to the need for improved ventilation to account for how much better sealed up modern buildings are.
The ERV was easy to tap into our existing central air system (which is where the crappy ventilator was connected) but if you don't have central air then it's going to be challenging to ensure quality air throughout your home.
The HRV core will drop the humidity of the incoming air stream, at least that is what it does at my house (and it's been extremely wet of late in northern California).
Later on I looked into ERV systems for ventilation, which threw me down path of looking at dew point as when introducing a lot of outside air, humidity becomes an issue. now I'm convinced plenty of older buildings actually considered a lot of these things, I saw many cottages in NZ angled properly to receive the ideal amount of solar gains in different seasons which naturally ventilated and are pleasing to be in. very rare, but they do exist, and as result only a very small heatpump is required to minimally push the comfort envelope one way or another.
I guess what I am saying is don't fight the nature if you can, and architecture it properly. failing that, airtight + mechanical ventilation is going to be expensive and probably impossible to hit good air quality (6ACH+)...
> I guess what I am saying is don't fight the nature if you can, and architecture it properly.
Oversized steam heaters are exactly fighting nature, are they not? Really, every building system is a fight against nature. The idea is to exploit properties of materials and the forces of nature when you can to get closer to whatever your chosen optimum is without having to fight nature so hard.
It's not even that hard build to near PassivHaus standards for airtightness these days with regular materials (I did it). It does take an intention to focus on airtightness, which most production builders don't have.
> failing that, airtight + mechanical ventilation is going to be expensive and probably impossible to hit good air quality (6ACH+)...
3ACH is plenty for good indoor air quality. I got close to that once with a whole house ventilating fan that cost $300. HRV/ERV are more expensive, but they also do heat recovery and air filtration, and provide consistent air quality everywhere.
I would imagine that today's natural gas stoves are cleaner than in the past, natural gas appliance don't seem to be driving the increase in asthma either.
My point is that the data isn't clear what is driving the increase in asthma.
Aside from the few caveats, I can't imagine going without. Bringing water or oil to temperature is easily 3-5x faster on my 5kW element. Waiting for a semi-direct flame to heat your pot is so primitive by comparison.
Then, there is the cleaning aspect. My induction cooktop takes 15 seconds to wipe down. My last gas range had some parts go through dishwasher, with others getting toothbrush-in-sink treatment. Unless you like cooking on a dirty range, this adds up fast.
That's not to say you can't get an induction pan searing hot (small pans can actually get much hotter than ones over gas), but you have to work at it. Generally the pan is no hotter than its contents.
I put a paper towel between my cast iron deep fryer and my cooktop to keep it from leaving those weird oily rings behind.
That said... the ridiculous power does have 1 downside relative to safety. If you are heating oil on an induction cooktop, please set a contingency timer somewhere to remind you to turn it off. In the amount of time it takes a gas range to get oil dangerously-smoking, induction has already ignited it and its been a raging inferno for at least 2 minutes.
U.S. safety agency to consider ban on gas stoves amid health fears - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34310218 - Jan 2023 (114 comments)
Also related:
Gas stoves are more hazardous than we’ve been led to believe (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31630946 - June 2022 (122 comments)
What a gas stove ban means for restaurants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31603850 - June 2022 (592 comments)
My best estimate is gas stoves decrease life expectancy by 53 days on average - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30275953 - Feb 2022 (117 comments)
How bad is my gas stove? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29935939 - Jan 2022 (520 comments)
Cities try to phase out gas stoves but cooks are pushing back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27874912 - July 2021 (481 comments)
Experts are sounding the alarm about the hidden dangers of gas stoves - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25332332 - Dec 2020 (343 comments)
Luckily we moved out after 8 months and her handwriting returned and our memories got much better.
I strongly recommend monitoring your air quality, ideally with a CO alarm, since it's deadly quickly, and something like the airthings.com which monitors PM2.5, CO2, radon, and VOC.
This is a rather frustratingly blithe conclusion. Should we ban electricity in homes because they can be wired wrong?
I'm not entirely sold on the health risks as presented, but that the author doesn't seem interested in seriously exploring any of the obvious solutions to this (seemingly) fixable problem makes this entire analysis feel rather lazy.
Anyone have any air quality sensor recommendations? Preferably one that i can easily extract data from for analysis.
Search the HN archive. There are lots of debates and discussions about air quality sensors, especially around the time of the West Coast US fires.
But from right now, every time you turn on your gas stove or oven, open a window and set your stove extractor fan to maximum, even if it briefly makes your house cold.
(btw: iiuc the "special" thing about the SGP41 module sold by AirGradient as opposed to some Alibaba vendor is that the AirGradient one doesn't come with surface-mounted terminating resistors installed. If you buy one from somewhere else and want to plug it into the AirGradient board, you need to desolder those because the AirGradient's I2C bus is already terminated elsewhere.)
I have an older SGP30. Less luck there; it does VOC and CO2, no NO2.
[1] https://sensirion.com/media/documents/5FE8673C/61E96F50/Sens...
If you’re having issues with air quality have your humidity levels checked. If it’s too low, a furnace attached humidifier will solve that by adding humidity to the treated air.
As others have said, if correctly installed you should not have any furnace exhaust indoors.
You should _always_ have at least a Carbon Monoxide alarm (CO) installed in the furnace room. If there is no monoxide leak it's unlikely that other particulates are escaping. The CO alarm should be installed in your furnace room irrespective of whatever sensor analytics you would like to add for your investigate.
Easy problems:
1. No more cycling-induction/electric stoves. I do not want my food alternating between burning & sitting around.
2. A power setting where low-to-medium aren't only kind of burning your food.
3. Off means off. I don't want my food cooking for 5 more minutes after I turn the stove off.
4. Kitchen ranges having high quality broilers to make up for the lack of a charring mechanism on alternative ranges.
Hard problems:
1. Being able to change the shape of the surface element to trace the shape of the pan. I cook with a wok, and all non-gas-ranges only heat the very center. If I can use a wok to fix the shape of the coil into a bowl, then I can ensure even heating even in a wok. (It's a spring coil, the shape should be mechanically adjustable).
2. Can the good ones be competitive on prices with top gas ranges ?
I really dislike electric stoves, they have the worst of all worlds. Induction stoves: I could live with, but the good ones are too expensive to be a reasonable alternative for most people. There are additional good reasons to switch as seen from this[1] video.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54
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Final caveat for tropical countries. Here, windows are always open. Houses often lack a gas connection, and instead have a gas-cylinder supplied to the house. So the pollution & removal-of-gas benefits do not apply. The cooking culture often relies on instantaneous fire to give certain staple flavors. They rely on curved pot shapes for cooking techniques & and the price differentials hurt a lot more when you're a poor country.
Gas stoves sound a lot less evil in these tropical circumstances and this is the region where a majority of the world's population lives.
I've seen commercial grade equipment for wok (shaped) and even claypot (they really need to make a 220v one for where I am https://www.siroca.co.jp/product/kamadosandenki/ )
hmm a bed of magnets to hug the bottom of pans with flexible induction coils beneath would work, and to clean just pop the magnetic layer into dishwasher
time for a kickstarter?
In my current London flat (which I'm moving out of soon), nobody uses the fan above the stove because it's super loud and doesn't work properly anyway. Frying pretty much anything in the kitchen will cause my PM2.5 meter, which is upstairs in my bedroom on the other side of the house, to go crazy. Often up into the hundreds of µg/m³.
Good kitchen ventilation is super important, gas stove or otherwise!
[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/5/7/21247602...
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/gas-stoves-air-pollution-1.6...
Comparing indoor pollution while cooking with a gas stove versus an electric stove makes sense.
Yes, I suspect electric is cleaner than gas, how much cleaner is what's important.
I try to use our portable induction burner whenever I can now, even though we pay for electricity but we don't pay for gas.
I was extremely skeptical and snooty about the potential of induction cooktops when it was first floated, but if I owned a home I would definitely prefer an induction stovetop to a gas one now. Induction is a lot faster and more responsive than gas, in my experience. Just wish there were induction stovetops that has real knobs and weren't so easily cracked or scraped.
If anyone is curious I have a Qingping Air Monitor Lite which I love. It's probably sucking up my data but I don't mind too much because it has a great physical interface, natively connects to HomeKit so I can see the current status and trigger events when levels get too high, and has a decent app that shows charts over time.
It's nice to be able to remotely see that particulate levels are rising and turn on my air filter for a bit so everything's back to normal by the time I get home.
Even if your stove is burning cleanly it is a luxury to be able to cook on high heat without filling the entire room with smoke.
Not to mention I'd suspect the fumes from the burning oil are probably worse than your clean[ish] burning LNG/propane stove.
How do I go about testing my gas stove for dangerous emissions?
If it's functioning correctly, exhaust gas and indoor air do not directly contact each other at all, they both go on opposite sides of a heat exchanger.
I don't know the rules around gas boilers, but I'd expect that they're probably the same.
Gas stoves are very different from an air pollution perspective. Kitchens are high-traffic areas in a lot of houses, and stoves are usually out in the open from an airflow perspective. Lots of houses don't have an exhaust hood that vents to the outside. And lots of cooks aren't in the habit of turning on their exhaust fans unless something has burned.
January 2023 not 2022.
article does not mention particulates produced by food being cooked
Looks like the cultural elites don't want you enjoying cooking with gas.
They'll have to cancel that expression as well. Now you are cooking with subatomic particles!
Everywhere Nazis are trying to overthrow democracy, climate change is going to destroy us all in the next 5 years, viruses go rampage and we need to lock everyone up, now your gas stove is trying to kill you.
While in reality western world has never been so safe and prosperous.
Good grief.
Does not seems like a place for balanced views.
With a proper hood, they aren’t an issue inside.
When working properly, they are also quite minor.
Sources don't matter, depth of analysis doesn't matter, expert consensus doesn't matter, basic risk mitigation principles don't matter, what matters is that wherever a view is shared, all other views must be shared at equal volume and with equal credence.
37000 people die each year in vehicular accidents, but somehow people think there's a benefit to using cars, and to use them without making them 3X as expensive just to save perhaps half of those lives.
So too do we continue to use gas appliances because they're relatively cheap, effective, and resilient, and if you want to convince us the harm is too great, then quantify it for our judgement.
That's literally what TFA does. Dispute the data or the argument if you want. "This site looks like it doesn't like fossil fuels" is not disputing the data. It's "I suspect there's another side that's not represented [duh] and I therefore will dismiss this information out of hand." It's a terrible heuristic to get anywhere.
And each of those crashes is a tragedy. Surely you know that there are also efforts to make streets safer, and that other countries have been vastly more successful at it than the US?
Traffic crashes were until very recently the leading cause of death among young people, and are still #2. We shouldn't just overlook that either!
Everything is dangerous and has some risks, but usually weights the risks against other things, we see what are the ways to mitigate them, etc.
If you say that gas stove is bad for indoor air quality, how does it compare to making toasts or having carpet and a bit more dust or living close to roads with lots of circulation.
When it become a religious fervor, when there is only one side of the coin, that’s where there I see a problem.
Facts matter, and it doesn't do anyone any good to paint something as "extremely bad" without balancing all relevant facts. Acknowledging that gas stoves are often (but not always) bad for indoor air quality is part of that.
Like a touchscreen?
Whatever what the activists and government does, the pricing alone is driving out all fossil fuels. Solar, wind and batteries are already cheaper than the other alternatives. It’s just a question of a few years.
Perhaps there are other articles less objective on that site but it doesn’t seem like this article should be dismissed out of hand.
Otherwise we have to do our own research, collect our own data. There is no other way around if there is no trust.
It’s very easy for some information to be true, but also excluding all the bits that don’t fit the author bias.
I think a source that is that biasied should be called out.
Fell like Twitter before the cleanup here.
You can live your life by boiling everything on an induction range or you can cook with gas indoors like billions of people have without issue for generations. Stop being weird.
Probably even running an electric toaster will have an impact, especially if it hasn't been cleaned out (which is likely).
There’s a combined effort to demonize gas ranges by some climate extremists and it has been picked up by some media. They can’t convince people to change (because gas is superior technology) so they cone up with badly designed studies to scare people.
They won’t be happy until you’re eating dehydrated beetles and grasshoppers.
I can’t wait until they tell me to stop using my wood burning (gasp!!) fireplace every day.