I'm not hugely invested but I do prefer cooking on gas. I've had element stoves, they suck. I then had gas, it's great. I stayed in an Airbnb for a month and a friend's condo for a week with induction, it was better than radiant but worse than gas to me.
Also the power goes out at my house about 2x a year when we have windstorms. The stove still works, induction doesn't. So I can still cook and make coffee. My other option would be to use my grill in that situation. I like having backups.
It's not some conspiracy with me, I just didn't like it as much. There are dozens of us.
I also ran an experiment a few years back with some particulate sensors. I noticed when measuring during wild fire smoke the particulates went way up when I cooked bacon. So I did it again on a hot plate not gas. Same thing. The bacon grease and cooking itself was giving off a ton of particulates. To me the lesson was maybe cook outdoors. Or figure out how to plumb a vent through an upstairs living space attic and roof to vent outside.
I've also been hesitant on electric cars. My friend has an original roadster that I've driven several times. It's great even tho I can't even get out of it because of my size. However I go out to ski and road trip a lot. I constantly am evaluating if an ev is ready for that use, it's getting closer but not yet. The ski hills I go to are near range for a EV and the charging spots are all taken as are all the spots so that's a risk. Camping and backpacking is more iffy. There was charging at Yellowstone in a few spots but I doubt they ran it to mowich lake yet.
But the kicker is I just have several old cars (08) that are in great shape and I hate all the shit on new cars when I rent them. There's a few features that are great like the anti-tbone feature, and some backup cameras. But he'll they used to beep whenever someone was near you, or they freak out when your 5 feet from a hedge when parking moving .2 mph and slam on the brakes, or the infotainment system is slow, crashes, and has no buttons. So I'll just hold while those bugs are worked out. I think these cars may all get to 20 years easily.
That’s really interesting that the particulates were comparable from induction and gas cooking. If you did any more comparisons and recorded them anywhere, I’d be curious to read more about them.
I’m guessing this might be a temperature dependent issue. I enjoy using a cast iron to brown meats, but I really dial it back in homes without true range hoods (e.g. they vent back indoors). If I go for maybe 25% browning, I can massively reduce the smoke. It feels a shame to not do a steak to perfection, but when I’ll prefer that to venting the whole place for an hour.
The sensor I used was one of these (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NSGY7B3) attached to a ESP32 sending data to my grafana/prom setup on my nas. If you have done those it's like 2 hours of work and about $40 per sensor/esp pair. I couldn't leave the house without a respirator when our aqi got up to 650 for 2 days.
Anyway it's pretty easy to play around with. I didn't save the data anywhere unfortunately.
>To me the lesson was maybe cook outdoors. Or figure out how to plumb a vent through an upstairs living space attic and roof to vent outside.
Huh? Why would this be necessary? Just use the range hood that should already be installed and should vent to the outside. Are these not required in your country for some strange reason?
> I can’t believe that actual people are that invested in burning hydrocarbons.
Yeah, it's weird, right? Why _are_ people so invested in burning natgas and coal and other hydrocarbons for large-scale power generation when a plethora of proven near-zero-emissions alternatives exist?
From a climate-change perspective, banning natgas cookstoves is a few pennies saved on like a thousand dollar expenditure. It's similar to the performative "charging for plastic takeaway bags" and "not bringing out table water" nonsense that California likes to do from time to time... it's way easier than making a real dent in the underlying problem, it inconveniences a ton of people (so they know you're doing something), and because "something" has been done, enough of those people don't bother finding out about and loudly and continually agitating for making a real dent in the underlying problem.
Forget burning, even pumping gas to residences is itself a big source of emissions, because of how leaky the pipes are. Between two to seven percent of all gas put into the system is lost directly to the atmosphere, and it's a very potent greenhouse gas.
One way or the other, it needs to go away. It's not performative, it's necessary for achieving long-term emissions goals, and it's low-hanging fruit.
> ...banning natgas cookstoves is a few pennies saved on like a thousand dollar expenditure.
and
> [Low-impact, high-visibility stuff like that is done because] it's way easier than making a real dent in the underlying problem
If you'll pardon the mixed metaphors: When it comes to environmental stuff, a lot of the time, the low-hanging fruit isn't worth picking because the high-hanging fruit is the thing that's the immediate wildfire hazard.
Setting aside the validity of your claim that it’s just a “few Pennie’s on a thousand dollar expenditure (which I strongly disagree with…banning natural gas hookups would be worth it even if climate change wasn’t a problem).
Your argument basically boils down to “I’m in debt and need to start spending thousands of dollars less. Cutting out this completely unnecessary expenditure will only save me a few dollars so I shouldn’t cut out this completely unnecessary expense because it won’t save me all the thousands I need to save”.
I'd say a more accurate metaphor would be "I'm in debt and decided to ignore my biggest high interest loan in order to fully pay off my smallest low interest loan so I feel good about something"
Sure it's good you have less debt but while you were resolving the small loan you were racking up massive interest on the big one
It is still good to fix if it contributes to a significant amount of warming, but it isn't cumulative like CO2: it eventually degrades in the atmosphere.
There will be no “real dent”. You have to make small changes along with big changes.
And banning natural gas piped infrastructure is an easy win.
1. No one is banning natural gas stoves. You can still use a natural gas stove. You just need to bring your own cylinder like most of the world and half the food YouTubers already do.
2. Natural gas stoves have significant indoor pollution impact. It’s a huge benefit even outside the climate change side.
3. Natural gas infrastructure is expensive, dangerous and unnecessary. Cities will benefit from the removal of all those pipes from under their streets even if climate change wasn’t a thing.
Banning gas hookups is such an obvious win (again, for those who want, gas stoves are still available with a cylinder), it’s remarkable to see the level of status quo bias that exists.
> Natural gas infrastructure is expensive, dangerous and unnecessary.
It’s been used and operated safely for hundreds of years in cities on the East Coast. The idea that it’s dangerous is simply FUD to scare people into spending $1000 on a future piece of e-waste to cook their food.
Do you mean induction stoves are e-waste? Why? They should be perfectly durable, no moving parts, simple operating principle. They aren't even super expensive and their price is going down.
Far more things that can go wrong with them though (at least compared to a standard gas stove). "Repairability" for electronics is considered a competitive disadvantage where companies want to force you to buy a whole new device instead of fixing the blown capacitor (or whatever the issue is).
Although the right to repair movement seems to be making some headway recently, so maybe all is not lost. Touch screens (with no alternative), and subscription service shoehorns need the same treatment, ban them.
That would be a good way to actually make a difference because it not only makes using gas for cooking less attractive but it also makes gas heating and gas powered industry significantly more inconvenient!
EDIT: would probably be a political nightmare to implement though…
I don't think anyone that cooks for themselves genuinely thinks this. E-stovetops are literally a joke, designed by and for adult-infants that eat microwaved soup from Trader Joe's, not for real people that make real, delicious food.
Induction tops are orders of magnitude superior to coil-based stovetops, and are viable and possibly superior replacements for gas tops despite the cookware limitations and other issues; when their control schemes mature (no capacitive touch) and prices come down to the point of attainability for the unwashed masses they will be welcomed.
But, coil-based electric tops are an embarassment for anyone that sells them, installs them, and "uses" them.
The point of the natural gas stove ban in new construction is to stop building additional natural gas infrastructure. Building new pipes to new housing will lock us in to decades of additional natural gas use.
I expect natural gas for heating will be the long pole of greenhouse gas emissions. Eventually we'll have to disassemble what we already have. For some areas, it may make sense to do that soon.
Boston, for example, has old and leaky natural gas pipes that have been found to be leaking tons of methane into the atmosphere and causing occasional explosions. The city will probably have to invest billions of dollars into repairing its natural gas distribution pipes in the next 10-20 years, which would remain in use for 50-60 years more.
Or, they could spend a bit more money, convert everyone to induction cooktops and heat pumps, and get rid of the natural gas altogether.
I don't have any statistics on this, but I feel like I see far fewer plastic bags littering the streets these days. That alone is a win for me personally.
Give it time and you'll be seeing plenty of the reusable bags littering instead
In theory they are supposed to be reusable but in practice I think they are going to wind up being single-use for most people. Maybe we'll start using them as garbage bags as they accumulate around the house.
Yeah, my bag use hasn't changed at all, except instead of getting 3 to 6 lightweight plastic bags on each trip, I spend an extra quarter, and get 3-6 heavy plastic bags on each trip. Very much a net loss, as they have to use at least five times the material.
(When paper bags aren't available. I've always preferred paper.)
Product packaging probably generates 1-2 orders of magnitude more waste than the bags holding the product.
I live in an area that's banned plastic bags. Given enough experience, grabbing a reusable bag out of the car before going into the store became an unconscious programmed action.
Unless you empty your groceries in your car to leave the bags there, at some point bags need to make it from your house to your car, so that you have some to take into the store.
That's the part I struggle with.
Also, if you order groceries for delivery, they bring your order in reusable bags. Which you then keep.
My point is these re-usable bags have a tendency to accumulate over time. Maybe not at the same rate as plastic bags would otherwise, but once you have dozens of these bags at home it starts to be tempting to just use them as bin liners and toss them, just like we did with plastic bags
Which sort of defeats the whole purpose, right? The ideal is people would buy as many as they need and use them for years.
But that isn't going to happen any time soon imo. If ever.
They put out less BTUs (9k vs 15k-25k from a high end gas burner) and you can’t cook certain types of cuisines like a stir fry, getting a good sear on steaks, etc. As someone who went from Gas to Electric it really is a massive downgrade.
The reason gas is superior is due to heat recovery time. Recovery time is the time it takes to reach temperature after adding food to a pan. Gas is superior to all forms of electric in recovery time. There simply is /more energy/ in a cubic foot of gas compared to what a home electric circuit can deliver in the same time frame. It’s science, plain and simple.
The practical effect is food spends less time steaming, so for example, a stir fry doesn’t come out soggy and unappetizing.
A gas stove might be able to create more BTUs/min but if half of that heat misses the pan because it's rapidly rising and being vented out of the kitchen it's not really helping me much.
Meanwhile most of the energy from my electric stove actually makes it into my pan instead of out a vent or into my kitchen.
I have an induction wok, it cost a couple hundred dollars on Amazon, heats up instantly and goes up to very high temps.
I do not have the problem you are describing.
> Gas is superior to all forms of electric in recovery time.
This is really going to be dependent on which stoves we are comparing, along with the type of pan being used.
> There simply is /more energy/ in a cubic foot of gas compared to what a home electric circuit can deliver in the same time frame. It’s science, plain and simple.
Science as I alluded to in my previous comment, would account for waste heat. Which is where a significant amount of the energy of a gas stove goes.
Yes… it’s also significantly cheaper than I high end gas stove?
We’re talking about appliances here, OP was comparing a high end gas stove’s output to electric. My point is that my couple hundred dollar unit can replicate many of the things OP was claiming you’d need to buy a $5,000-$10,000 gas stove for (though I am in no way suggesting that these are equivalent in functionality to each other).
Gas stoves need to go away because getting rid of gas infrastructure in the long term will be a huge win, but the gas industry spends heavily on propaganda to convince people otherwise: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54
Us. We can make electricity from lots of things and turns out in about 10 years a lot of it will be made from renewables in most countries, and the trend is only going one way.
There's a reason there is a push to electrify everything.
Obviously getting rid of gas stoves is good for the environment. In the US, the only conceivable use I see for them longer term is camping stoves and extremely remote houses that don't have electricity.
I'm guessing you have some other view from your comment, please explain.
No one is banning gas stoves. They’re banning gas hookups which will indeed remove gas water heaters and furnaces.
The fact that NY’s decision to ban gas hookups in new buildings is being framed as banning gas stoves is in itself the result of gas industry propaganda. In fact,
Gas stoves are the one thing that can easily be continued because people can use gas cylinders.
Why not all three? Just stop using gas altogether. I pass enough of it myself, thanks.
Edit: why am I being downvoted? Is it not a legitimate question to ask why not go all the way with converting to electric when appliances exist for all three use cases? Do my farts stink too bad?
Because gas stoves are the easiest to replace. If someone doesn't have gas lines in their house, they'll just use an electric stove. Replacing a water heater or furnace either needs heat pumps or resistive heat and it becomes potentially much more expensive.
Stoves don't matter in the big picture here, they are secondary to whatever people are already doing for heat.
If you have a gas stove, you probably don't have a circuit or wiring or receptacle to plug in an electric stove. So you'll need to get a 240V circuit installed, which for most people will require hiring an electrician. Same as putting in a heat pump.
Much more money is spent on climate change propaganda than there is on gas propaganda. I see climate change propaganda almost every day, but pro fossil propaganda extremely rarely. I think that this is because fossil fuels are extremely useful in practice, and so the users don’t need to be convinced of their benefits.
The gas stove bans are idiotic and petty to defend based on environmentalist principles. The amount of gas burned by those stoves makes roughly zero impact compared with all the other hydrocarbons we burn.
The ban of gas connections and by extension gas water heaters, gas furnaces and gas stoves is being reframed to be just gas stoves. So yes, if you cherry-pick the lowest impact item out of the list of gas appliances, the impact is low.
Exactly this. Gas stoves are the flashpoint, because at the end of the day, people generally don’t think about what type of energy their heating comes from. The gas stove is the deciding factor that determines whether or not a gas line gets hooked up to a home or not.
Most people decide on a heating source based on price, not on the stove they want. In the US, in most areas, gas is cheaper to heat a house than electricity is. The may shift as heat pumps become more popular, but historically it has been the case.
No, the gas stove bans are smart. They're not for reducing carbon pollution, they're to reduce indoor air pollution, and also the danger of having combustible gas plumbed to everyone's home. Houses explode due to gas looks with alarming frequency. Electric is simply safer.
I'm not defending the ban on gas stoves, but a much better reason to ban them is their impact on indoor air quality. Burning natural gas indoors emits all kinds of nasty stuff like carbon monoxide, nitric oxides, formaldehyde...stuff linked to all kinds of diseases from asthma to cancer.
For serious chefs, gas ranges remain far superior to their electric counterparts. I’ll be the first in line to buy an induction cooktop that performs as well as a high end gas range, but we’re not there yet.
I've had three in different places I've lived, and while they are fantastic temperature-wise, the software and interface is always what infuriates me. They are almost all touch interfaces to keep the flat glass aesthetic, which is absurd because spills happen on stoves and touch interfaces don't work wet. Additionally, most of them automatically detect pans being removed and turn off. An annoying feature for an experienced cook who tosses food around in a pan with one hand.
Obviously. But it shuts it down when you remove it instead of just working again when reapplied. It turns off the cooking surface and you have to turn it back on again, instead of momentarily breaking the heat while you pick it up.
I've had pretty much all kinds in various apartments in the last while, currently back on "hot plate" resistive electric (renting currently), which sucks and is inefficient.
Induction is amazing for some things, but for some other things I prefer gas.
Given the choice, I'd have some kind of combination of gas and induction. Maybe half and half?
So not a chef by any stretch but i’ve been cooking on resistive stoves for a long time. I find it works great for me to use good pans. My favorite is one with low thermal mass but a good heat distribution layer - and it seems to be stable as far as keeping the cooking surface nice and flat.
If I had a choice I wouldn’t use gas for a few reasons. Air quality, the amount of water that gets released and fire hazard. Seen too many buildings explode on tv lol.
Induction is great for instances where you can just leave a flat bottomed pan to do its thing. It is also nice in smaller kitchens where the efficiency keeps the heat going to the pan rather than the air.
But they do not work well (or at all) when a pad is moved around a lot, or it has a rounded bottom like a Wok or Karahi. At least the ones ive used don't. You are also reliant on the designers to give enough heat levels to actually cook properly and to provide a generally usable device that is fit for purpose. None of these things are an issue with even the cheapest gas stoves.
Having a both would be perfect. Just one or two gas burners for frying would be fine.
Yeah, we are living through that horror as well, turns out roughly half of the people we know that have an induction stove ended up having either multiple replacements or live with the peculiarities of their unit. It’s not cheap stuff as well, one couple have a high end Miele one that goes completely haywire if anything drops on its surface and that is after getting one replacement and one “upgrade”…
They can continue using gas stoves with cylinders.
Most of the world does that.
Of course, what actually serious chefs find is that once the subsidy for gas is removed (by removing legislation requiring utilities and buildings to provide piped natural gas), not only are induction stoves much more effective, cook faster, etc., they also keep their kitchens incredibly cool and make them much better work environments than having a bunch of gas burners around.
For the restaurants that need woks they can use a gas stove and have a gas cylinder shipped in every morning.
Serious chef is such a condescending fallacy (no true scottsman, argument of authority). Please instead state why induction does not perform according to you.
You cited wok hei as an aspect of performance that induction stoves don't have, but it's hardly an argument in favor of gas stoves. The article you link is basically about a tool that makes up for what common home gas stoves can't even provide.
Previous Serious Eats articles about it even cited the lack of performance from gas stoves and recommended modifying one with a Wok Mon, but even then the results weren't perfect.
Edit: For some reason I feel the need to clarify that this isn't a comment in support of, or against, gas stoves. I just like cooking and am aware of how hard it is to achieve quality wok hei at home.
China is the world's largest adopter of induction cooktops. Wok cooking isn't a problem. You can even buy induction cooktops specifically shaped for woks. Can we please retire this silly talking point now?
This is true of standard wall outlets which are 110V but not for integrated appliances like ovens and induction cooktops which can pull 200+ volts from your breaker panel. The problem in the USA isn’t your power, it’s your weird habit of buying combination stove-and-oven units. Stop it.
Tabletop induction burners that use standard outlets are way more cost effective than induction ranges, too. That thing is $200, which didn’t even pay the electrician bill to put in the 240V 50A outlet and circuit for my range.
Also the power goes out at my house about 2x a year when we have windstorms. The stove still works, induction doesn't. So I can still cook and make coffee. My other option would be to use my grill in that situation. I like having backups.
It's not some conspiracy with me, I just didn't like it as much. There are dozens of us.
I also ran an experiment a few years back with some particulate sensors. I noticed when measuring during wild fire smoke the particulates went way up when I cooked bacon. So I did it again on a hot plate not gas. Same thing. The bacon grease and cooking itself was giving off a ton of particulates. To me the lesson was maybe cook outdoors. Or figure out how to plumb a vent through an upstairs living space attic and roof to vent outside.
I've also been hesitant on electric cars. My friend has an original roadster that I've driven several times. It's great even tho I can't even get out of it because of my size. However I go out to ski and road trip a lot. I constantly am evaluating if an ev is ready for that use, it's getting closer but not yet. The ski hills I go to are near range for a EV and the charging spots are all taken as are all the spots so that's a risk. Camping and backpacking is more iffy. There was charging at Yellowstone in a few spots but I doubt they ran it to mowich lake yet.
But the kicker is I just have several old cars (08) that are in great shape and I hate all the shit on new cars when I rent them. There's a few features that are great like the anti-tbone feature, and some backup cameras. But he'll they used to beep whenever someone was near you, or they freak out when your 5 feet from a hedge when parking moving .2 mph and slam on the brakes, or the infotainment system is slow, crashes, and has no buttons. So I'll just hold while those bugs are worked out. I think these cars may all get to 20 years easily.