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Comment by tastyfreeze | Hacker News Reader

Gas cooktops are good for still being able to cook when the power is out.

Interesting fact: A lot of modern gas cooktops have safety features that will cut the gas off when the electricity is out. The safety mechanisms are powered by electricity, so if they can't confirm that the operation is safe they fail with the gas valve shut off.

It comes as a surprise to most users because power outages are so rare. They just assume it will work until 8 years later when they try to cook something during the first long outage in their area.

TIL. Never used a modern gas stove, so I had not considered that without a pilot light, there must be a way to disable the flow or constantly spew gas into the house. Then again, I have had a pilot light go out for some amount of time without obvious ill effect, so the volume of gas must be low.

Pilot lights stay lit all the time so no igniter is required. My range has electric spark igniters. They don't work when the power is out but there is also no pilot light expelling gas. I just manually light the burner when the power is out.

My gas stove has spark ignitors for the burners and the oven has an incandescent ignitor. The oven has safety interlocks so the gas valve won't open if the ignitor is not hot. The oven cannot be lit manually, but the stovetop burners can. So in a power outage, I can cook in pots and pans but not bake.

Usually the pilot energizes a thermocouple+solenoid that is used to hold the gas valve open, so the valve shuts if the pilot goes out.

> Interesting fact: A lot of modern gas cooktops have safety features that will cut the gas off when the electricity is out.

Huh, I did not know that. The natural gas stove that I grew up with has a good ol' fashioned pilot light, so it's fine even when the power goes out.

Gas stoves need electricity for the starter these days. Maybe you can get a really old one with a pilot light.

It's far easier to provide a backup for electric appliances using a generator, than it is to store CNG onsite for gas interruption.

Matches work fine to light burners.

A lighter works wonders if your spark igniters ever get shorted by your wife dumping water on the stove.

You could get a small propane burner or a lot of people have propane grills (sometimes with burners) in their backyards. Gas burners and stoves aren't bad but expanding the gas network to new homes is a huge expense.

I am not sure where you live, but I cannot remember the last time our power went out (Western Europe).

I have gas-cooked since I was a kid (living in an area with a lot of natural gas, so houses were connected to gas since the 50ies), but induction is so much nicer that I'm happy to not be able to cook during a once in a ~10-20 year outage. Also a lot safer (it still happens quite frequently that a house blows up because of a gas leak, just this week there was a huge explosion in Utrecht what was presumably a gas leak).

Of course, the equation may change for countries with less stable power.

> I am not sure where you live, but I cannot remember the last time...

Here in SE Michigan (USA) I have quite a few friends who've totaled more than 15 days without power in the past couple years. Most of that in multi-day outages.

Sadly one of those countries is the United States.

Here in Colorado they've started pre-emptively shutting off power during wind storms when it's hot and dry because there have been multiple instances of wind blowing down power lines which then start big fires. We had one instance in December where the power was out 2-3 days for tens of thousands of people, and over a week for some people.

Of course the problem is that nobody wants to pay to bury the lines. They'd need all new equipment for digging, to retrain all of the technicians, and get permission from a million different entities to dig up their land. We're effectively locked in to overhead cables.

It's very local here. I'm in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in one of the highest income counties in the state, two blocks from a major hospital, one block from a suburban downtown. Despite that, I've experienced one or two 4-6 hour long power outages per year the past few years. (Mostly correlated with weather.) One outage in June 2025 was 50 hours long!

Many larger homes in this area have whole-house generators (powered by utility natural gas) with automatic transfer switches. During the 50-hour outage, we "abandoned ship" and stayed with someone who also had an outage, but had a whole-house generator.

Other areas just 5-10 miles away are like what you describe: maybe one outage in the past 10 years.

On an island, in a rainforest with regular storms. The power goes out multiple times a year due to trees falling on power lines. We also don't have municipal gas lines piped everywhere. Delivery only. If you have a leak they won't deliver until its fixed.

In the central USA my power is out up to 3 or 4 times a year for an hour or more, and momentarily maybe once every month or two. It's due to our power distribution being mostly overhead lines which are vulnerable to falling trees, squirrels, ice accumulation, storm and wind damage, etc. Even though my neighborhood has buried lines, that's just the last mile. The incoming power is all overhead lines.

North America generally has more extreme weather (everything from tornadoes to hurricanes and usually a much larger temperature range) and more above-ground electrical distribution than Europe.

I live in downtown Toronto and we get ice rain that occasionally knocks out power in portions of the city, though I live downtown where most of the lines are buried and I'm on the same electrical sub-block as several hospitals. The last time I lost power was the massive North American blackout of 2003.

> I am not sure where you live, but I cannot remember the last time our power went out (Western Europe).

I guess you don't live in Berlin.

I recommend a backup butane stove, which is what I have for outages where my induction stove doesn't work.

Also an outdoor camp chef stove. Both are cheap and work great. My camp chef doubles as an outdoor pizza oven.

Batteries or Generators don’t just let you cook and stay warm when the power is out but do everything else such as keep food cold as well.

Do induction cooking tops work well on batteries (or generators)? IIRC our induction plate has two-phase power because it can pull more than 3.6kW.

There are models that include a battery to reduce the input power requirement. That's not quite the same as the question, but it answers it, you just need a big enough battery and they are fine.

Sure, as long as you size the system to expected loads.

An 8kW generator suitable for occasional use is only ~1,000$. A Powerwall 3 does 11kW continuous and peaks at 30kW for transitory loads like starting heavy equipment.

The most convenient solution where a generator automatically kicks in during a power outage requires an electrician and extra equipment, but there’s also real tradeoffs to having gas lines going to your home.

There is a good technology connections video about building backup batteries into the actual stove.

I think part of the problem with whole home backups is that they tend to be sized to a maximum load that is unusual or could be avoided with some effort. And that providing a backup for the essentials you actually need is relatively cheap and uncomplicated if you make some modest sacrifices.

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