[traceroute66]

> Electricity allows for so many more automatic safeguards.

Since the mid-2000s there has actually been a push by Japanese utility companies for adoption of what they call "all-electric" オール電化.

Adoption has been reasonably good with new-builds because they can also have solar panels. But adoption in older properties has been slower.

First in general, electricity in Japan has tended to be more expensive than gas.

Second, a large Part of the slow adoption comes from cooking related inertia.

A lot of traditional (and therefore very common) Japanese cookware just will not work on electric, full stop. For example, traditional donabe (clay pots).

Beyond that, for example, aluminium pans being non-ferromagnetic will not work on induction. Yes you find aluminium pans in the West with extra ferromagnetic bases attached, but that is not common in Japan.

Finally, the Japan Society of Cookery Science did commission a study[1] where they had two groups of people cook four dishes on both gas and induction. The conclusion was gas was preferred across all four.

[1]https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/cookeryscience/47/6/47_...

[ctime]

“People used to cooking with gas, cook better with gas”

Induction offers the benefits of not emitting noxious fumes, the dangers of transporting gas over long distances in bulk, the fire hazards inside the home, and dependency on single source energy.

Electricity, via induction cooktops, is often faster, more energy efficient, safer for everyone, and doesn’t depend on whatever regime or state wants to play games with the supply. Where I live, electricity is often sold at negative rates for most of the day and that electricity is now going into batteries at a massive scale. It seems unlikely gas has any future, outside of niche cooking or industrial/commercial uses.

[perpetuallunch]

> Induction offers the benefits of not emitting noxious fumes,

I don’t understanding this criticism.

Who in their right mind ie cooking inside at all without an externally ventilated exhaust fan? The moisture control issue leading to mould growth will destroy your health faster than hoofing nat gas combustion products.

I believe the nat gas combustion product health risks for home and commercial cooking are wildly overblown. Commercial kitchens are required to have certain ventilation requirements, as are all new home builds, at least in any jurisdiction anyone would want to live in.

> electricity is often sold at negative rates for most of the day and that electricity

Is it? Is it though? What evidence is there?

Negative rates may apply to the wholesale price, but I’m not aware of anywhere that passes that on to the residential retail customer.

In Australia, electricity retailers are require to offer a plan that has a 3 hour free period, which is usually in the middle of the day when everyone is at work, and the plans non-free-period rates are worse, as well as the daily supply charge being higher. Thereby resulting, in all likelihood, in people on those plans likely ending up paying the same or more, if they’re not obsessively fussing over their electricity usage.

What are you going to do? Set your induction cook top to fry your eggs for the next morning at 1pm? How’s that supposed to work? Cook your roast chicken in the tumble dryer, because your oven doesn’t have a 12hr delay timer? Admittedly some newer ovens do, because leaving a raw chicken at room temperature in the oven for hours on end is a great idea.

Like everything the Australian Labor government touches, it’s a sham. Including the battery subsidy, which just moves wealth from everyone else (taxpayers), but especially poor people, to already relatively wealthy home owners. All the while alleviating government and energy infrastructure industries of the responsibility of making investments they’ll have to maintain.

Not to mention Australia already has electricity prices that are ridiculously high, so even if you benefit from the three-for-free plan, you’re still worse off than you were five years ago.

And with the propensity of batteries to spontaneously combust and be nearly impossible to extinguish, EV and home battery owners, scooters and ebiked too, are soaking up resources of fire departments.

See StacheD on YouTube for an in exhaustible stream of battery fire nightmares.

Ah, the good old unintended consequences of poorly thought out government policy. Which are always poorly thought out, because a very few number of Australian politicians have ever had to worry about energy prices, because they are nothing but glorified career dole-bludgers.

Jacinta Allan’s, the recent former Premier of the once great state of Victoria, industry experience extended to a brief period as a grocery bagger before her and her drunken uni mates messed around with an Ouija board and some other gray magic and accidentally summoned demons who took their souls and parasitised their bodies.

Or did they summon the demons on purpose? Probably, comrades.

Nyet Zero, as Topher Field is fond of saying.

[lightedman]

"Who in their right mind ie cooking inside at all without an externally ventilated exhaust fan?"

Anyone in an older gas-served apartment building has the potential to not have direct external ventilation.

[perpetuallunch]

I’ve worked in appliance repair and have worked on induction cook tops.

I wouldn’t recommend buying one. The fancier models have a stupendous number of circuit boards in them, and obviously a lot of power electronics, as well as cooling fans. Probably buy the cheapest model with the least number of features that you can bear the sight of, style matters in a kitchen, if you have to buy one at all.

I’ve simplified by cooking to an electric pressure cooker, which also functions as a slow cooker and pot for frying, an air fried, and a microwave. No kettle, no pots or pans, no cooktop, no oven. An oven would be useful I suppose if I were cooking for more people. The pressure cooker plus air frier is a faster and more convenient substitute for roasting meat.

As they become more common and age, I predict induction cooktops will have a much higher failure rate than dumb rheostat controlled resistive element cooktops. Everything has a much higher failure rate than dumb resistive element cooktops. And they are much easier to repair with very few parts: a resistive element and a rheostat.

I’ve don’t quite a good many replacements of fully functional dumb resistive cooktops and ovens with the new version of the same model, simply because the 70 to 80 year old residence wanted something newer and shinier, even though the new model is almost identical to the 20 to 30 year old model they’re replacing.

Improper installation of induction cooktops in older kitchens with out the necessary cabinet work to correctly ventilate them is a big problem too.

Anyways, gas is a great source of energy especially for commercial and industrial cooking and heating, where electric is simply impractical due to the immense amount of power required.

At home, sure. The typical setup requires less than 10kW. Trivial.

In a food court or restaurant strip currently serviced by gas, the electricity requirement could easily exceed 1 megawatt, which means major infrastructure upgrades, and you’ll never get the rapid heat control like gas provides, which is essential in reasonable service times, along with the fact that gas cookers are infinitely simpler and have very low failure rates compared to anything electric that is put through repeated thermo cycling 16 or 24hrs a day.

[com2kid]

Counterpoint - my dirt cheap entry level induction cooktop has been incredibly reliable. We cook intensely with it almost every day and have done so for years. Do I wish it was smarter? Sure. Is it faster to heat water than my old gas stove? Yup. Do I want even more power? Heck yeah.

Only having 1 large burner is stupid, and the 1 large burner it has could stand to be another inch or so wider.

But it has been a definite upgrade over gas. From better air quality to not heating my house up in the summer, to being faster to get pots hot.

> As they become more common and age, I predict induction cooktops will have a much higher failure rate than dumb rheostat controlled resistive element cooktops. Everything has a much higher failure rate than dumb resistive element cooktops. And they are much easier to repair with very few parts: a resistive element and a rheostat.

Agreed, resistive elements are simple, you can still find ones that are 30+ years old and working fine. Same with old gas stoves, easy to repair, dirt simple.

Induction requires fancy electronics, and modern circuit boards just don't have a long life expectancy.

[kalleboo]

> As they become more common and age

Induction cooktops have been common in Europe for 20 years now and I've never heard any complaints about them breaking down

[rawgabbit]

I see some places in the Japanese countryside where homeowners get propane tanks delivered to them for cooking? I believe in an earthquake prone country, this is safer than having natural gas piped to their homes?

The problem I think is that Japanese culture values hot baths daily. Heating water for the bath using electricity is still too costly.

[kalleboo]

Propane tanks strapped to your house is common even in cities since it's cheaper to install (but then costs more per cubic meter).

The downside to propane tanks is they become fireworks if a neighbor has a fire which heats them up.

In Japan anyone who goes all-electric these days is getting a heat pump water heater ("eco-cute") by default, resistive electric heating doesn't really exist out of small plugin units like kotatsu and radiant heaters.

[rawgabbit]

If you have a link to an "eco-cute" water heater, I would like to learn more. Thanks.

[kalleboo]

All the big Japanese makes have them. They basically look like a water tank with the outside portion of a mini split air conditioner hooked up next to them.

With my power company in Japan, by going "all-electric" (having an eco-cute and induction stove), I qualify for a rate plan where I can trade off solar power peak hours (half price) for the duck curve hours (double price), so I have my water heating only running during cheap hours and cut down on air conditioning during the expensive hours.

Ours is from Mitsubishi and is just the builder-grade one from our fix-rate renovation company. It will connect to the wifi so you can start a bath from an app on your phone on your way home from work. There's also an intercom between the bath and the kitchen so mom can tell the kids to get out of the bath, dinner is done. Traditional Japanese values.

Mitsubishi https://www.mitsubishielectric.co.jp/home/ecocute/

Panasonic https://sumai.panasonic.jp/hp/

Daikin https://www.ac.daikin.co.jp/sumai/alldenka/ecocute/structure

Corona https://www.corona.co.jp/eco/

Noritz https://www.noritz.co.jp/product/kyutou_bath/ecocute/

[numpad0]

btw, "eco-cute" is a pun on cute and kyuto(給湯, "supply hotwater")

[klausa]

The bath intercom always cracks me up. I’m sure it makes sense in bigger, maybe multi-level houses; but I can’t imagine myself ever using it in my 2LDK.

[rawgabbit]

I see the Mitsubishi one uses CO2 as the refrigerant. And the warranty lasts for ten years. And the model for cold regions recommends putting the outdoor unit in an elevated covered stand. I assume to keep the snow and wet away. I will look at the other models later. Thanks again.

[bombcar]

I thought so to until I repurposed some old Cisco phones - the difference between talking and yelling is huge.

[rawgabbit]

Hey thanks. I'll be reading these in-depth. I am fascinated by Japanese appliance tech-wizardry. LOL about the mom using the intercom to get the kids out of the bath.

[larkost]

From a quick look, these are very similar to the heat pump water heaters that are starting to become common in the SF Bay Area (it looks like gas water heaters will be banned in the next few years, so people are hopping on the band wagon).

At a glance the only difference is the ones I am seeing have the heat exchangers in the body of the unit (so take the heat from the room where the tank is), whereas these "eco-cute" look like they put that outside the home.

[toast0]

Where I live in the US (near Seattle), there's no piped natural gas, most detatched houses have a 250-500 gallon propane tank. Seattle has piped gas, but my county never had the density to justify the expense to install distribution piping and now its disfavored.

My house has a second tank for a backup generator. We use the main tank for our stove/range, water heater, clothes dryer, and a decorative fireplace that's rarely used. Some neighbors have a propane furnace, but we've got a heatpump with resistive strips as backup heat.

[com2kid]

> Seattle has piped gas,

This is block by block. Long ago Seattle asked home owners on each block to foot the bill to run gas. Many blocks said yes, some said no. For blocks where only 1 side was developed, the cost was higher and there was a greater chance of everyone saying no. That is what happened on the street I grew up on, when the city had asked everyone to pay for gas lines, there were so few houses on that working class block that it was cost prohibitive for everyone to pony up how much $ would have been needed.

So instead people had oil furnaces installed and now that block will at some point require serious environmental remediation. :/

[saltcured]

It's interesting all the permutations there are out there. We have gas from PG&E. Our house has an electric clothes dryer, gas stove with dual-fuel oven, gas furnace, and gas water heater. No air-conditioning other than a portable unit for "emergency" heatwave and AQI events. Our furnace is ancient, and the winter gas bill is the painful part.

I have a long term interest in full electrification, but find the process daunting due to the interlocking set upgrades. Between insulation envelope upgrades and electrical system upgrades, there is a lot of potentially disruptive work needed to even allow permits to be issued for heat-pump HVAC and water heater or fully electric kitchen.

If the internal wiring also needs much work, it threatens to be almost as invasive as a gut renovation. Then, I ponder what other work we'd want to piggyback on it. But then it all sounds too much for life and budgets, so we procrastinate...

[toast0]

Yep, when I was in the bay area, we had a gas furnace that was built in week 53 of the year before the 78% efficiency standard took effect. Our plan was to put in a heatpump to replace it when it stopped working and get A/C to manage (at least) the heatwaves, but it kept going, so you know. That house was built in 1907 and had an unfinished basement for the original footprint and a generous crawl space for the addition --- wiring would have been pretty simple, but it would still be a lot of investment to replace something that was working ... of course a heat pump system would be way more than replacing like for like.

[jambalaya8]

Were you there for the earthquake in 2001? I was. I still find it surprising there hasn't been another large quake in Seattle since then. Pretty fortunate.

[toast0]

No, I moved in 2018; long enough to complain about all the people moving here even though I did the same thing ;) I did get to experience the viaduct, and did the tunnel / viaduct ride before the grand opening of the 99 tunnel and the demolishing of the viaduct; so I've got some street cred?

I think the area got off pretty light from the 2001 quake and the pace of retrofits has been too slow, but has had fortunate timing so I think things won't be too bad for the next quake, depending on exactly where it hits.

[rawgabbit]

Wow that's interesting. If you have to do it all over again, would you still get the heatpump?

[toast0]

Yes, our climate rarely drops below freezing, so the heatpump is a good fit. My house has little shade, so a/c in the summer is very nice.

I would have a separate unit for the basement and the first floor though; we do have zoning dampers, but it's not very effective and the basement gets too cold.

Propane deliveries are expensive, if starting from scratch, I might have wired for electric clothes drying and water heating. And I would have probably gone with owned tanks instead of the current system where the delivery company owns the tanks. Electricity prices doubled in the last 5 years, but propane may have gone up more.

[idiotsecant]

seattle is basically the ideal location for a heatpump.

[jakzurr]

At the plastics plant I worked at in the 2010's, they had seismic emergency valves for the natural gas. At the time, I thought they were such a pain, as the vibration caused by a semi-trailer bumping a warehouse dock could cause them to shut off. (But it only took a screwdriver and 2 minutes to reset the valve.)

Now I'm thinking such valves are a good measure. I have no idea if they could work in such a major quake, though - for example, if the gas line fractured farther back from the seismic cutoff valve?

[kalleboo]

It looks like the building used LP Gas from a tank, and the was an automatic shutoff valve at the tank end and in each individual shop in the food court, but that still leaves all the pressurized gas in the large piping from the tank to the inside of the building.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQlaUfMPHFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHwJHyoGQWw

[dfxm12]

The study doesn't appear to be blind (not sure how you can do a blind cooking test). Also, The panellists were satisfied with cooking when they could control the heat as desired suggests inexperience with electric is a part of preference (as a personal anecdote, it took me a few months to get used to an electric stove in a new house after a lifetime of cooking on gas). This is also over a decade old. There have been some advancements in electric cookery since.

[benj111]

If you aren't using induction, it's also slow, slow to heat, slow to cool.

Yes you can get used to turning the heat up 5 minutes before you want hot. A down 5 minutes before your food is done. But it's a pain.

[FabHK]

Induction is the trick. It's nearly as fast as gas.

[com2kid]

Induction is faster than gas.

I had an issue when I first got induction where I'd warp my pans because I turned the stove up to max and the metal would get so hot so fast the bottom of the pan would bend.

Oops. Lesson learned.

[lightedman]

Yup. I did the exact same thing, except I split a cast iron pan, and shattered the induction cooktop.

[xp84]

Sure, but it imposes its own limitations as the previous poster pointed out. There is no 1:1 swap-out for cooking that doesn't require either changing out your cookware or settling for a frustrating and slow cooking experience.

Also (this is a US perspective - perhaps Japan's labor costs are different?), running new heavy duty (240v, high-amperage) power cabling from the main breaker box to your kitchen is another huge cost barrier to electrification - this could easily cost many thousands of dollars. Which is why even places like California, which are happy to add costly burdens to homeowners in the name of "green," are only trying to push electrification in new builds.

It's true though that in a new build, if you have a roof chock full of solar panels and a big battery, getting a heat pump furnace, induction cooking, and all the rest of the electric appliances is super economical and awesome.

[kalleboo]

Japan has a very different real estate market. Homes are typically built to order, you buy it on a 35 year loan and then live it until you die, then the next person buys the land, tears the house down and builds their own dream home to order. So houses depreciate like cars. Land only gains value in specific downtown areas since the country is depopulating.

It's common to do a "full renovation" where the house is torn down to the frame and the rooms rebuilt. Instead of people DIY maintaining their house (they're too busy with work or whatever), they'll just do one of these after 10-20 years to modernize it. When you do this it's easy to have it converted to all-electric at the same time.

For the 180 m2 (1900 sq ft) house we bought used, the full renovation cost us $120k. This included literally ripping everything out down to the base concrete walls, re-arranging rooms, and re-building everything - walls, floors, ceilings, kitchen, all exterior/roofing, all plumbing/fixtures including installing a heat pump water heater, electrical including lights and an induction stove, cat 6a, tearing out the old rock garden, etc etc etc.

[xp84]

That is super cool. Unimaginable budget from a US perspective. I think in California I could struggle to stay under that $120k budget on just one kitchen renovation, and I don't mean a luxury kitchen with Viking appliances. Just the normal Home Depot grade stuff. If you added a single bathroom to the invoice there's no way it would stay under.

[FabHK]

We agree. New buildings can be designed and built with induction stoves without destroying precious Japanese cooking culture, just as gas (and wood for that matter) has been replaced elsewhere. And medium term Japan does not lack the resources to convert legacy buildings, either.

[mishellaneous]

odd not to mention resistance heating in what otherwise seems like a thorough review of the question