Gas and propane stoves linked to 50k cases of childhood asthma, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Gas and propane stoves linked to 50k cases of childhood asthma, study finds

nbcnews.com

28 pointsjonkratz15 comments

One thing I learned from the california wildfires, after buying an indoor air quality monitor, was that doing something as innocuous as baking a pizza in an ELECTRIC oven was enough to spike the AQI PM 2.5 air quality to 400, briefly (15 min) in our 1200 sq ft unit. In the bay area PM2.5 outdoors usually hovers between 5 and 35, with 75 being roughly when haze is noticeable at longer distances. 300+ is what happens when certain international cities have days-long fireworks festivals. I was measuring 400 with an electric oven cooking a frozen pizza from safeway.

Unless it's 115F outside or driving rain sideways onto the window, it's almost always wise to crack a window when cooking. Food throws off a ton of stuff, smoke and various compounds.

You need to open a window to make up for extractor. I also shut off HRV so it doesn’t spread fumes around the house.

There’s no way around the production of combustion byproducts, but as the article states this is managed with proper ventilation - something that most builders skimp on. With the current focus on tight air envelopes, this might actually get worse compared to our older leakier way of building and sealing homes.

There’s also an education and awareness aspect to this! If you’re aware of the risks, by all means get a gas stove and vent properly. However I bet the vast majority of Americans are unaware of the risks and their ventilation systems inadequacy

The fume hood/microwave above the stove combos that seem to be standard now are terrible. They vent poorly and clog quickly. The microwave internals don't leave enough room for a wide vent, and the ventilation is shared by the microwave (which also means the microwave dies when it clogs).

They also often don't actually vent externally, they just cycle the air through a mesh (and maybe a carbon) filter and exhaust it back into the room.

That’s a requirement if you build European energy grade A+++ house (which is a minimum in LT) - can’t just be pulling warm air out and replacing with cold one (idk maybe an HRV can compensate for it).

Just breathing your own farts all day

I think HRV is also mandatory (plenty of old homes are retrofitted too).

> They also often don't actually vent externally […]

Some do (I have a relative with such a one).

> There’s no way around the production of combustion byproducts, but as the article states this is managed with proper ventilation - something that most builders skimp on.

In theory.

In 2014, a group of researchers in Baltimore ran a study with 78 homes with gas stoves to understand the most effective ways to reduce indoor air pollution. In one group of homes, they replaced gas stoves with electric stoves: in this group, NO2 pollution levels fell by 50%. (Apparently the remaining NO2 probably came from cars and other sources of pollution outside). In another group of homes, they gave homeowners an air purifier with a carbon filter and NO2 levels fell by 22%. In the last group, they installed range hoods: in this final group they found no significant difference in NO2 pollution.

* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24329966/

LBNL found that range hoods sometimes captured only 55% of pollutants like NO2:

* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22044446/

Another study found it 30%:

* https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es3001079

Even with range hoods, results can vary even for the same range, see (e.g.):

> These studies found that for many range hoods, [capture efficiency] is much higher for the back than for the front cooktop burners.

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...

* https://phys.org/news/2012-05-kitchen-exhaust-fans-vary-effe...

Some gas stoves leak pollution even when they are turned off (are you planning to run a vent 24/7?):

* https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/climate-and-health-...

Of course blaming ventilation is a standard go-to response from industry:

> “Ventilation is really where this discussion should be, rather than banning one particular type of technology,” said Jill Notini, a vice president with the Washington-based [Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers] trade group. “Banning one type of a cooking appliance is not going to address the concerns about overall indoor air quality. We may need some behavior change, we may need [people] to turn on their hoods when cooking.”

* https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/us-safety-agency-to-consider-ban...

It's probably a lot easier to prevent pollution in the first place as compared to dealing with it after the fact.

> It's probably a lot easier to prevent pollution in the first place as compared to dealing with it after the fact.

It certainly is but if someone’s informed they’re the consenting adult to make the decision they want.

Interesting venting didn’t make a difference but an air purifier did - this definitely doesn’t sound intuitive to me. Maybe venting shouldn’t be implemented as a hood, but something closer to the burners themselves?

Discussion [0] (39 points, 3 days ago, 73 comments)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40253637

Thank you — I had tried a search on hn.agnolia.com for "natural gas" in the last week, but I see now that was the wrong search term...I posted simply because I wanted to see the discourse on this study.

Does anyone know of residential range hoods where the motor is at the top of the stack rather than in the kitchen? I’d love to have a whopper of a motor but outside my house rather than the current in-kitchen options which seem to be either (a) powerful but so loud you can’t think or (b) ineffective but quiet

This particular pearl-clutching trigger always comes down to "poor people with poor ventilation in their kitchens", which is a banal conclusion and so obviously not newsworthy.

I'm not entirely certain what submarine captain is committed to eradicating natural gas stoves (probably some assumed angle around smearing natgas in the name of reducing emissions.

All of that notwithstanding, this article fails my spam filters on the basis of "think of the children!"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com