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Comment by SamBam | Hacker News Reader

While it's probably a good idea for most people to eventually switch over to electric induction, not least because it's much more energy efficient, I do think that banning gas ranges nation-wide is a big step that would require significantly more evidence that it was necessary.

Most of the problems with indoor pollution can almost certainly be more cheaply mediated by adding building codes requiring venting range hoods.

The fact that (as far as I have understood, can't find the link) the vast majority of US homes do not have a hood that vents to the outside is crazy. This should be the default for all new construction.

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> Most of the problems with indoor pollution can almost certainly be more cheaply mediated by adding building codes requiring venting range hoods.

I would guess that adding range hoods is more expensive than switching everyone to electric stoves. Existing structures often have no provisions for venting to the outside and would often require very expensive retrofits. It would require opening up the ceiling to add ductwork, potentially building soffits if there isn't enough room in the ceiling, placing a vent in the exterior, etc. Range hoods above a certain CFM also require provisions for make-up air. In new construction, obviously the costs are different, but the cost difference between a gas and electric stove is also minimal.

Venting hoods would solve a lot more problems, though. Cooking on an electric stove or in an electric oven still generates a lot of particulates that I'd rather not subject everyone in the house to. Not to mention making everything smell like whatever I'm cooking for the next day. Personally, I'd rather have induction and a venting range hood.

> The fact that (as far as I have understood, can't find the link) the vast majority of US homes do not have a hood that vents to the outside is crazy. This should be the default for all new construction.

I agree and I think we are starting to see some areas move in this direction. But even if it was mandated today, most people wouldn't have venting range hoods for decades to come because they live in older buildings. I think we need incentives to retrofit buildings with better ventilation.

> I would guess that adding range hoods is more expensive than switching everyone to electric stoves.

Doesn't this depend critically on what percent of gas stove owners have hoods? If 75% do, then you'd have to "fix" 3x as many kitchens if your operation is replacing stoves versus adding ventilation. If only 20% have hoods, then it could make more sense to swap the stoves. But even this doesn't make sense if the article is correct and there is not evidence of gas being worse.

My own anecdotal experience is that in America, very few homes have hoods that vent to outside the building. I have lived in one LEED certified apartment building that had one, and even that had issues with the exhaust backing up because they needed to clean the exterior grille (it vented next to the dryer vent). In single family homes I have generally seen them in high end subdivisions or custom builds. I believe the code in some areas is getting stricter and they are starting to become more common, but they seem rare in existing housing stock.

I see a lot of recirculating range hoods, but they do nothing for combustion products. They only trap some of the aerosolized grease from frying and sautéing.

Weird, I've seen them all over, and not just in expensive areas.

I briefly lived in a place with a gas range and no venting range hood (just a fan that... exhausted inwards?) and I effectively never use the range.

Now I have a large gas range and a large exhaust range hood which is always on whenever the gas is, and for some time after the gas is off. I keep a CO2 monitor next to the stovetop to help indicate general air quality. The air quality is often better than normal (~100ppm above outdoor levels) when I'm cooking (outdoor levels) because the range hood is so efficient.

It would certainly be more effective to not use gas at all, but gas powers a lot of utilities in my home and here it's much cheaper. I'd consider induction if I were on the market for a new range and oven but I'm not. I'd also have to get new cookware and figure out how to keep my coffee warm.

There exists counter top induction ranges, with for example one or two elements, that are very good and everyone should probably own.

> There exists counter top induction ranges, with for example one or two elements, that are very good and everyone should probably own.

I'm sure they're nice, but try telling that to a New Yorker. Counter space is at a premium.

That's the brilliance of it. You can have it invisibly embedded in the counter.

https://victoriaelizabethbarnes.com/induction-cooking-integr...

The point is there isn't enough counter space as-is. Where do you chop things if you're cooking on the counter?

These are beautiful but not practical for small apartments.

Chop first, cook second. "Mise en place".

Unless you forgo a cooktop entirely in favor of microwaving/baking everything, your objection applies to every cooking surface - electric range, gas range, induction cooktop. At least here it's a dual-use surface.

OP was suggesting that everyone get a countertop induction unit. That includes people who have gas or electric ranges already. Getting a second countertop unit only makes sense for people with spare counters.

This is true, though in many countries in the world folks live in homes considered small by north American standards, and a countertop gas stove has been a staple of apartment cooking for some time now.

That's honestly pretty great.

Although now I will want a hood over my entire counter.

The problem with changing the building code is that the response would be much slower than banning the devices. Landlords notoriously don’t update their properties. But when the stove breaks, which it will, they would be forced to buying something that is healthier and more efficient.

Don't all serious proposals to ban gas stoves only ban installing new ones, rather than like-kind replacement?

Not sure, but I would be surprised if that were not the case.

That's crazy! Aren't most U.S. homes single family units? Adding a range vent is just a matter of making a 3x10 hole in an exterior wall and sticking a $40 external vent through it.

As long as the range is on an exterior wall.

The last two places I lived in the US, neither had an exterior wall near the range. The lack of regulation creates quite a bit of debt and makes change even more challenging.

I just moved mine to the middle of the bottom floor of a 2 storey home. It took some work and there is lots of fire safety code to adhere to but it wasn’t a difficult job if you can do basic jobs around the house. Mine was a 160mm circular steel vent which is typical here.

With an external vent it’s also easy to put the fan on the roof or attic instead of in the hood, to reduce noise inside.

An indoor-only hood with a charcoal filter is the alternative but only reduces odor. I couldn’t imagine not having an external vent from the kitchen. Super cheap but massive quality of life improvement.

To my untrained eye adding vents does not seem cheap at all.

Its a standard contractor job, when you are talking about installing a stove the difference between price in gas stove and induction may just offset the cost. I'd even assert you should have a vent regardless of range type: a lot of cooking methods necessarily create smoke, oily air, extreme steam, spicy air, on and on.

It depends. In my 100 year old home it involved cut a hole in the side of the house, run 2 foot of duct, add hooded vent cover, caulk, done. It was certainly cheaper than the extractor hood/microwave the previous owners installed and foolishly didn’t vent. But it can vary, and some might care about hiding the duct with a little box or something, or painting, which I didn’t bother with.

In most single-family dwellings, it'll probably be cheaper to add a range hood, even if some duct work is necessary, than to get a 240 volt 40-50 amp dedicated line for an induction stove that's as powerful as a gas range. Electric work is not cheap.

A serious, meaningfully effective range hood is much more expensive to install than a 240 plug. Most range hoods are performative. Can you sear a steak without setting off a nearby smoke alarm? If not, your range hood isn't doing much.

It's also much more expensive to maintain long term.

Some (but nowhere near all) of this is expensive because of gas appliances. If you have a powerful range hood you also need a complex makeup air system to avoid the hood pulling CO from your gas furnace and killing you. That makeup air system can also cause problems: if the grease that accumulates in the hood catches on fire, it can keep injecting air into the fire.

I’d like it to be easier to get a good range hood (some of the bad air quality effects of cooking are smoke from searing a steak!), which maybe electrification will help with.

There's a new company that uses a hefty battery to juice up the output of an induction stove, allowing you to have a powerful stove on a normal circuit. It can't output high power for as long as a real circuit but that seems fine for a lot of home cooking. Most high-temp cooking I do is in relatively short bursts (e.g. sear a steak for a couple minutes, stir fry, boil water and then turn the stove down to maintain).

Which is to say: a lot of these problems are product engineering and marketing problems, not fundamental technological problems. (should we ban gas stoves? probably not. Should developers at least consider putting induction and/or hookups in new construction? maybe).

That seems reasonable and likely, but it is worth pointing out that there is very little evidence collected about this. And what study has been done of indoor air quality seems to indicate that there are problems, though eliminating natural gas fixtures may not be the best response. What might be a good option would be to study the issue in more detail then come up with possible responses and study those also in order to formulate a response that is effective.

> more energy efficient

Sorry, thermodynamics would not agree with you. There are very few losses when converting natural gas to high entropy heat. Many losses when converting natural gas to high entropy heat, then to low entropy electricity, transmitting it and finally converting back to high entropy heat.

Of course the carbon footprint of an electric stove could be lower if powered by nuclear, wind or solar.

I thought the benefit was in transferring said energy to cookware. Induction just heats up the cookware, while gas heats up the surrounding area as well.

What kills the efficiency of gas stoves is not converting gas to heat, it's getting the heat into the pan. Induction stoves heat the pan directly. Gas stoves heat the air, which then has to heat the pan. Inductions stoves can be 90% efficient while gas is more like 40% [1]. Even if your electric company is using gas to generate electricity, generation and transmission losses can be low enough that you'd actually use less gas to power an induction stove than a gas stove.

What complicates things somewhat is that the extra energy goes into heating your house (if it is not effectively removed by a venting range hood). In the winter you may not be concerned about that, but in the summer it means you would spend more on air conditioning.

[1] https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2014/data/papers/9-7...

It shocks me

1. How much faster my $15 electric kettle boils water than our expensive nice gas range

2. How much gas stove seems to heat up the air, handle, cabinet, range hood, my hand. And just about everything but the food.

> Most of the problems with indoor pollution can almost certainly be more cheaply mediated by adding building codes requiring venting range hoods.

As houses become increasingly more energy efficient, the cost of providing conditioned air only increases. Venting that air willy nilly to the outside has a real financial and climate cost.

All rangehoods in new construction should be mandated come with sensors that auto adjust the power based on detected particulate levels. With the old school dumb rangehoods, most people never bother constantly touching a bunch of oil smeared buttons to adjust the speed and just have it on full blast the entire time. You save a couple of hundred dollars going with the non-sensor version but its a false economy as it silently increases your HVAC bill and ERV filter replacement costs over time.

i read about environmental regulations that forbid venting because it would be bad for the environment. so there is a tradeof to be made. the pollution needs to be trapped.

personally i am also bothered by the noise. noise pollution is a problem too.

as much as i prefer cooking with gas myself, burning anything creates pollution with is bad for the environment and for our health. i don't see a way to keep using gas if i want to create a better future

> cheaply mediated by adding building codes requiring venting range hoods.

Do you know how much it costs to add ventilation to a building that wasn't required to have it? It is anything but cheap. A $1000+ induction range is peanuts in comparison.

https://www.angi.com/articles/how-much-should-it-cost-instal...

> It typically costs between $400 and $1,500 to install a range hood, with the average being $750. Installing a ductless range or a replacement range hood with existing ductwork falls on the lower end. Installing a ducted range hood with new ductwork comes in near the high end.

In NYC to do this you'd have to penetrate the envelope of the building - that requires a permit, which requires an engineer. You're looking at 8k a shot, before a single piece of hardware or a single hour of labor. Figure 12k all told.

How much does it cost to upgrade the service entrance and run new electric lines of sufficient capacity to run an induction range through 19th/early 20th Century buildings that were never designed for that? I'm betting it's not cheap. One site estimates $15,000-30,000.

The range I'm looking at on the Lowes site requires nearly 12kW if you want to use all the burners, not counting the oven. That's 100 amps just to run the range without any other electric usage in the apartment.

An induction cooker may be more efficient, but if you're burning gas (or coal) to generate electricity to then operate an electric stove, it's more efficient to burn the gas directly in the stove.

Doesn't that depend on the delivery mechanism? City gas would be fine but LPG tubes would probably use up more fuel in transport vs existing power lines.

I imagine there is also loss involved in gas transport to hundreds of thousands of homes versus a single pipe to a power station

There's also losses when transporting electricity. A pipe can be made perfectly airtight, but a wire cannot be made perfectly efficient*

*Yes I know about superconductors, that doesn't apply here

Burning gas on a stovetop burner is nowhere near as capable of extracting energy from the resulting heat as a gas turbine power plant or even a modern furnace.

Literally, with no context, externalities, and in a lab setting, you are correct.

With the broader societal goal of "never burn fossil fuels when an alternative exists" and "never have to build new infrastructure for residential gas again", it becomes clear we should move away from residential fossil fuel consumption. We must work to cutover individual tools from fossil to electric, and in parallel work to cutover electric generations from fossil to renewable.

The same principle applies to vehicles. I don't care that the electricity for a Tesla comes from coal today - it soon won't.

I hear the rebuttal "ICE engines are very inefficient but a gas burner is different". Yes, but the replacement need is the same, and on the timeframe that people buy large appliances, it would be best if people moved to electric ASAP.

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That all said, from an air quality concern perspective, I agree the focus should be on proper venting. It is disgusting to me that so few houses and almost no apartments have true external venting for bathrooms and kitchens - why this was done in houses 50 years ago but not today should be an embarrassment to every homebuilder outfit.

That's simply not true, because you aren't accounting for the large losses in energy between the flames and the food. Induction is significant more efficient at getting the heat to the food.

By all accounts, the CPSC strongly agrees with this take.

Nobody should be installing gas in new construction, period. We won't stop using fossil fuels if we don't stop making things that need it.

"Nobody should be installing gas in new construction, period."

Couldn't you use that logic and say no one should be building cars with ICE, period?

The difference here would be that the only infrastructure burden that is introduced by banning gas stoves can be solved by the new construction itself - forcing everyone to buy an electric car isn't going to cause all the required home and quick chargers to pop up at the same time.

EV cars still have some drawbacks, are in absolute terms significantly more expensive and cars don't last nearly as long as homes.

Eventually, yes, we should probably do that (with minor exceptions).

I'd probably preceed it with a requirement for charging infrastructure in new home construction (especially if you're putting in a garage), and there are already subsidies for existing construction.

Yes! And we did -- and they're banned in 2035, which is later than I'd like but fine.

No, you couldn't. We're still solving technological and supply challenges with batteries, charging infrastructure and cost differences on the order of $10-30k for a vehicle.

None of those issues are present with stoves.

And yes, we should be working as a society as quickly as possible to not use fossil vehicles.

We won’t stop having slave children mine cobalt if we don’t stop making EVs that need it.

Both of Tesla's future chemistries (high nickel cathode, LFP) don't use cobalt.

Why can't it be mined by adults?

I don't know much about slaving, but presumably an adult is able to mount a more vigorous defense against would be slavers.

Why does Cobalt need to be mined by slaves when other things don't?

In the context you cannot both (burn fossil fuels) and (stop burning fossil fuels). You can mine things without child slave labour, so you can both (stop child slave labour) and (have EVs).

Something tells me you don't actually give a shit about slave children but have a chip on your shoulder about EVs.

Something tells me you don’t know me. I have a chip on my shoulder about people being treated as subhuman. I have a chip on my shoulder about government policy that harms people in the name of protecting them.

I'll judge a book by its excerpts. You don't like government, period. That's fine. What I don't like is dressing up your disdain for the union of people (government) by concern-trolling people into issues with supply chains for critical resources.

If you want to have a discussion about ethical transportation, let's do it. Let's talk about the harms of fossil fuels, the human toll of car culture and suburban sprawl, the ethics of destroying the planet for future generations for cheap goods now, the issues of exploited labor in energy markets (including lithium and cobalt battery production) and more.

I agree exploited labor is bad. We should, as a society and via our government, do what is possible to not rely on exploited/slave labor for anything.

Is your assertion that, if the price of moving away from provably catastrophic activity like consuming fossil fuels is that parts of the supply chain rely on slave labor in other countries, we should not use it in any way?

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