26 ms·

Cities try to phase out gas stoves but cooks are pushing back

123 points by voisin 5y ago

traverseda 5y ago
How does removing natural gas stoves reduce carbon emissions? Unless the cities are using a lot of renewables I'd expect going from natural-gas to heat would be a lot more efficient than going from some-fuel to electricity to heat?
- wffurr 5y ago
  Induction stoves are very efficient and it’s possible to run them with solar or wind power. Reducing natural gas infrastructure will also reduce methane leaks, which is also a potent greenhouse gas.
- GravitasFailure 5y ago
  I've heard electric burners are more energy efficient than gas because you have a more direct energy transfer through physical contact, and induction are even more efficient because the cookware is the heating element. Of course to reduce greenhouse emissions that increase in efficiency needs to be greater than the generation and transmission transmission losses. I'd be fascinated to see emissions figures related to restaurants and home cooking from gas. It'd be shocking if it were more than a rounding error.
  - cartoonworld 5y ago
    Electric does not have a more direct energy transfer through physical contact. Consider your GPU or CPU: with the cooling fan disconnected, imagine or even very carefully experiment with the tempuratures that the heat sink will reach. Now uninstall the heat sink, clean the thermal paste off of both surfaces, and repeat the experiment. Induction is more efficient in the way you describe. Cooking has gotta be less than %0.5 of total domestic ghg. We would do so much better and avoid needless political hassles by increasing solar wind geothermal and hydroeclectric, electrifying fleets, and controlling centralized industrial and agricultural sources.
    - jhoechtl 5y ago
      We would do so much better if these giant vessels the international supply chain is relying on would run on a greener energy but crude oil.
- nate_meurer 5y ago
  I think the idea is just to better position household energy usage in order to take advantage of rapidly expanding renewable electrical generation.
- 0xB31B1B 5y ago
  The goal is to decarbonize our economy. We need to convert pretty much everything that uses fossil fuels in house to use electricity. At the same time we are replacing in house fossil fuel usage (gas stoves, gas water heaters, etc) we also need to be increasing the energy share of renewables on the grid. Its not an "either/or" its a "both/and" situation. Decarbonizing the household can and should be done in tandem with decarbonizing the grid. Induction stoves, which are the modern alternative to gas, are much more efficient, get to temperature instantly, and are generally considered a very high quality.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    They are also more fragile and have a high cost of repairs, and aren’t we running out of copper?
    - 0xB31B1B 5y ago
      1) "fragility and cost of repairs" are not an inherent quality of a manufactured product. When gas appliances were new, they were also fragile and expensive to repair. The process by which they became sturdy and cheap to repair was that they became widely used, which lead to an incentive structure where the companies that manufacture them were rewarded for making them sturdier and easier to repair. If we can make induction stoves a widely used appliance, their fragility and cost of repairs will improve due to the natural improvements during a products lifecycle. 2) No, we are not running out of copper.
      - jazzyjackson 5y ago
        I can have a guy at my house same-day to fix a gas oven, or maybe just grease the valve myself. A computer-controlled induction coil will never be so simple to fix, in some cases it's probably cheaper to junk the broken one and replace the whole thing. And I was obviously being a little facetious, but copper is becoming more expensive and mines are having to expand to meet demand.
    - jhoechtl 5y ago
      My moms gas oven is 50 years old. It did't fail a single time. Doesn't have electric ignition though. Still running on the fist set of flame outlets. It will probably outlive her. My understanding of how they work is that they are dam simple and reliable.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  It's not just taking what little gas is used for cooking out of the equation because of the shift to renewable sources of energy. When heating is done with electricity or district heating it makes sense to get rid of the gas infrastructure completely. The maintenance and infrastructure costs for having a gas pipe to every home in every street just for cooking are too high to make economic sense once you take out heating of rooms and water (i.e., the bulk of a house's gas usage).
- klodolph 5y ago
  The answer is that natural gas hookups to homes leak some amount of natural gas, and the leakage in the distribution system is somewhere around 2-3%, some of that is residential. The GWP of natural gas is fairly high--somewhere around 84.
da_big_ghey 5y ago
this also is true on gas grill, wood smoking or barbacuing, blackening in cajun, others. some food are not transfering easily to electricity stove. building heating technology change make sense, just not so much with cooking.
- moate 5y ago
  This point is sort of all over the place. Some thoughts (from a former chef) Blackening: You could do this on anything. I used to work in a cajun/creole place and we had one burner reserved for a cast iron skillet that was on at all times in case someone ordered a blackened whatever. This could be done just as easily on induction Grilling/Broiling: IDK how you do this without a gas line or charcoal while maintaining timing and flavor. The direct flame required for the cooking also allows for smoke/char that you're going to have a hard time recreating with a heating coil "grill". Smoking: You can get an electric smoker...but you still need to burn some sort of wood for the smoke. When you get into larger BBQ joints that are doing 50+ shoulders/briskets/whatever a day, IDK how you possibly convert from wood-fire to a fully electric system. Wood/coal fired pizza ovens: Same as BBQ smokers, there's a difference between this and an electric coil in flavor imparted that changes the end result.Obviously you can make a giant electric pizza oven and have great pizza come out of it, but you literally can't make a Neopolitan pizza without a woodfired oven.
jarym 5y ago
It's a real enough problem - I hate cooking on electric stoves. Part of me wonders how hard it'd be to come up with an electric stove that simulates a gas cooker. Also in the UK (where I am) gas is still cheaper than electricity - hoping that will change soon though.
- 0xB31B1B 5y ago
  People are not moving from natural gas to the old style resistance coil electric stoves that everyone is accustomed to, they are moving to induction stoves that get to temp nearly instantly, have a high power output ceiling.
  - ip26 5y ago
    I swear my induction hot plate is even more responsive than gas
    - nate_meurer 5y ago
      Mine certainly is... as long as the pan is flat and large enough for the induction top to recognize it. My induction cooktop will warp a cast iron pan if I'm not careful. I've never had to be careful like that with gas hobs.
    - JimTheMan 5y ago
      Does your induction stove also work if water/muck gets on it? I have only used one at a holiday house, and I swear it was the most temperamental thing in the world. A few drops of water or oil and it refuses to work. Could just be that I am using an early model (this one was bought 10+ years ago, it has a touchpad for controls instead of knobs which also blows)
      - ip26 5y ago
        Yeah, the surface is sealed and the controls are tactile buttons and a knob. It’s technically a commercial unit, I agree that there are some rotten consumer units out there. It doesn’t care if there’s a mess on it. Another plus, when a mess happens, I can actually wipe up with a wet rag literally as I’m cooking, even under the pot.
denimnerd42 5y ago
I'm running an outdoor pizza oven, outdoor grill, and indoor gas range on NG. If I had to move to an area like new san jose developments that don't have natural gas hookups that'd be pretty sad. Blaming my food cooking for global warming would be a joke especially since 2/3 of those can run on wood.
- 0xB31B1B 5y ago
  We need to decarbonize the economy, including food prep. 2 weeks ago, British Columbia Canada recorded temps in the F 120s. Just this past week a huge series of flash floods destroyed a lot of towns and killed 130+ people in Germany and the Netherlands. If we don't attempt to decarbonize the economy, its going to get much much worse.
  - qwytw 5y ago
    Banning gas stoves would reduce total emissions by how much? Focusing on something like this seems silly to me when 20% of all electricity in the US is still produced in coal power plants (and another 40% in natural gas ones).
    - D13Fd 5y ago
      It's not just natural gas stoves, it's natural gas heating and infrastructure, including extraction. All of it needs to go and we need to use low-carbon energy sources in its place. It sucks, and it's a huge change. But it's unavoidable, and the longer we wait the worse it will be for everyone.
  - Notanothertoo 5y ago
    So every natural disaster hence forth is global warming cool. Go after the fucking businesses for their waste. There are a dozen boats that produce more carbon than all the gas stoves in the world.
- deleted 5y ago
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DangitBobby 5y ago
Yes, a big hurdle to 'solving' climate change is that people are unwilling to make even the smallest sacrifices to solve a problem that they don't perceive as affecting them directly. People refusing to wear masks during the pandemic was/is an excellent example of this.
- raspyberr 5y ago
  Isn't that putting the burden on people again rather than businesses a la plastic straws and plastic recycling.
  - DangitBobby 5y ago
    You need to get the general populace on board. It requires a cultural revolution to culminate in political upheaval, or nothing will stop companies from externalizing costs by buying corrupt politicians.
    - bpiche 5y ago
      DangitBobby, hillposting in a natural gas thread. Amazing. Didn’t notice until after I had read several of your well informed comments. Bwahh!
- clairity 5y ago
  99% of mask usage was wasteful and pointless safety theater, like wearing them outdoors. similarly, most natural gas is used for power generation and industrial processes. in the US, only ~15% is used residentially, and most of that is for home heating, water heating, and clothes drying. about 1/3 of our national energy use is derived from natural gas, so you're on the order of 1% (or less) of national energy being consumed by natural gas cooking. it's a tiny problem in the energy pollution mix. we'd be much better served in this regard by focusing all our efforts on reducing carbon pollution from electricity production and transportation, which accounts for well over half of the problem, not a tiny slice like gas cooking because it's a "small sacrifice".
  - 5y ago
0xB31B1B 5y ago
This sucks a lot. Induction stoves are better than gas stoves but chefs don't like them because it's a new tool the need to learn how to use. They have a many years of experience with their old tool, of course they will say the new thing is worse. We see this in software engineering and technology all of the time. We need to decarbonize the economy and these cities shouldn't be allowing new gas stoves.
- sp332 5y ago
  I don't like my induction stovetop because the heating is very uneven. I use it for boiling water, but it doesn't work e.g.for searing steak because I end up with a small rectangle that is hotter than the rest.
  - 0xB31B1B 5y ago
    thats likely an issues with your pans, or with your coil size. Both of those are solvable problems, and if we had mandates to enforce electric only heating these problems would be solved much faster due to demand.
    - lumost 5y ago
      Induction and electric stove tops requires much higher quality pans than gas. Gas will heat a warped pan relatively evenly. Gas doesn't care much about the quality of your pan either, whereas a positive induction experience really depends on having a quality set of induction pans that are not warped from use. Considering that many individuals are cooking with poor quality, old, and warped pans - gas will be a better cooktop for them.
      - sp332 5y ago
        If the poor old warped pans work great with gas and badly with induction, then induction is less good.
        Dylan16807 5y ago
mdiesel 5y ago
Interesting, as there was an article linked either from HN or Pocket about how a lot of "gas is better for cooking" was deliberate advertising campaigns: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/06/how-the-fossil-fuel-industry-convinced-americans-to-love-gas-stoves/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/06/how-the-foss...
- GravitasFailure 5y ago
  While there certainly has been advertising by the gas industry, the only people I've met that said they preferred electric over gas were home cooks using inductions stoves, and pretty nice ones at that.
- gruez 5y ago
  But if it's actually better for cooking (eg. response time), why should we care?
  - philips 5y ago
    Induction has immediate response time as well. I use both at home and I don’t think response time is a huge issue. The two things that stop us from removing the gas all together: - A few pans that we haven’t replaced with induction compatible ones - The gas stove came with the house and works OK If the house hadn’t come with gas induction would be fine with us- works great.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >Induction has immediate response time as well Side question: do induction stoves have proper power levels yet? I used an induction stove a few years ago at a short-term vacation rental, and it could only toggle between on/off. If I set it at 50% power, it would cycle between being on and off, rather than staying on 100% of the time but at 50% power. My non-induction electric stove does the same thing. Is this an issue that is solved with higher end models?
      - 5y ago
ip26 5y ago
Cooking on gas uses relatively little gas compared to space and water heating. Does anyone know if natural gas stoves can run on propane? Perhaps people could run their gas stove “off grid” as a compromise…
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Yes. You can get a tank and have it filled every so often.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  If you had natural gas before the nozzles will have to be changed, but yes, you can run a stove off a propane/butane tank.
- gkop 5y ago
  Quality gas stoves can be easily converted to propane. Doing as you propose would be in violation of urban building codes.
- simonsarris 5y ago
  Yes, almost all natural gas appliances can be converted to propane, and come with the instructions to do so. In NH natural gas is only in the cities, all rural houses (that want it) use 100-500 gallon propane tanks instead. It's very common here. When I built my house new in 2018 I installed a 500 gallon tank for the heating system + cooking. (Though the house is primarily heated with a wood stove)
- kemiller 5y ago
  Everyone here is right that you can sub for propane with little modification. Propane actually has higher energy density than methane, too, so it creates higher heat with less fuel. Seems like the best solution — allow restaurants to install propane tanks and even subsidize conversion. Could be challenging in dense cities though.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  It's a violation of federal regulations to store more than 2lbs of propane inside living spaces/kitchens. Those big 20lbs are supposed to be stored in garages/outside. Obviously, people break that all the time, but a compromise that requires people to do so seems bad.
why5s 5y ago
Based on the comments in this thread, I’m guessing the majority of HN doesn’t cook. The switch from an induction stove to a proper gas stove changes the way you cook. No more waiting for the coils to warm up, being able to dynamically adjust the heat, being able to sear bell peppers against an open flame, etc. I’m almost certain I will never go back to an induction stove for cooking.
- jolux 5y ago
  Induction cooktops heat up instantly, you may be thinking of electric.
- 0xB31B1B 5y ago
  Induction stoves don't have visible coils and heat up instantly. You're talking about a resistance stove, not an induction stove. induction: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ikea.com%2Fus%2Fen%2Fp%2Fsaerklassig-induction-cooktop-black-20462066%2F&psig=AOvVaw1BSnjilx7wD4TRcr0eyavT&ust=1626721302383000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAsQjRxqFwoTCNja2p6n7fECFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ikea.c... resistence: https://www.centurylife.org/is-induction-more-efficient-than-electric-coil-or-gas-an-energy-efficiency-comparison-between-stoves/img_1597/ https://www.centurylife.org/is-induction-more-efficient-than...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- nate_meurer 5y ago
  Even my cheap 1500 watt induction cooktop heats up my larger pans shockingly fast. So fast in fact that I have to be really careful not to warp them.
- zaphoyd 5y ago
  As noted in the other comments here, you are likely thinking of coil based resistive electric stoves and not induction. Induction stoves have no warm up period, change heating amounts instantly like gas stoves and have a ton of other benefits that as some who cooks most meals at home I can’t live without. I put a $100 induction hot plate on top of the “fancy” gas stove in my apartment because it is that much better for actually cooking things. I definitely agree that cooking on a resistive electric coil is awful and will grudgingly use gas over that.
gnicholas 5y ago
Personally I strongly prefer an induction stove to gas, partly because it’s faster to heat up, partly because it’s easier to clean. But I can’t imagine professional chefs being told they have to switch to electric or induction. You can’t effectively cook in a wok with induction, since the sides of the wok don’t heat up nearly enough.
- tpmx 5y ago
  There are induction woks now: https://nuwavenow.com/NuWaveWok https://nuwavenow.com/NuWaveWok No idea how well the concept would work in a commercial asian kitchen though.
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    That's cool, and better pricing than I expected ($159). If it works well, it could help convince some of my relatives that have been on the fence about switching to induction, partly because they cook a lot of Chinese food.
  - genericone 5y ago
    Thats only about 1500w or 5000 btu. The typical asian kitchen wok jet is about 2-3x that at 10k-15k btu. Maybe a good equivalent replacement: https://www.plantbasedpros.com/product/cooktek-605501-drop-in-commercial-induction-wok-unit-200-240v-1ph/?gclid=CjwKCAjwos-HBhB3EiwAe4xM91-OmxX2ybHI_aC3oNUk3t2-YwfKIu7BClY_xoKVWNnA-YyrV-qw8hoCGokQAvD_BwE https://www.plantbasedpros.com/product/cooktek-605501-drop-i... edit: @ 2000 dollars
    - 1MachineElf 5y ago
      Speaking on behalf of a family that's run Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai restaurants - It's just not a wok if there are no flames shooting around the sides of it that can sear the food as it get tossed about.
      - dllthomas 5y ago
cyb_ 5y ago
https://archive.is/ohO3X https://archive.is/ohO3X
nate_meurer 5y ago
Almost every day, I use three different types of range: gas, induction, and radiant electric. Of the three, gas would be the hardest to give up. My most-used pieces of cookware are small aluminum pots that are not magnetic (and thus not induction capable), and even if they were, too small to work on my induction cooktop, which doesn't recognize any magnetic base of less than about six inches in diameter. I use the induction cooktop for slow cooking, boiling, and pressure cooking. Everything else gets put on gas if I have room. Nothing beats gas for output and control. I could certainly do just fine on radiant or, god forbid, coils. But the gas and induction together are a huge luxury that I feel grateful for every time I use them. One under-appreciated advantage of a gas range is how evenly it heats pans of lesser quality. Because so much of the heating on gas is accomplished by the flow of hot "exhaust" gas across the entire bottom of the pan, a thinner and less thermally conductive pan will still heat much more evenly than it would on an electric coil or induction hob. EDIT: I'm definitely on board the energy efficiency bandwagon. I have a four kilowatt solar array on my house, and I drive a twenty five year old Honda minivan because of the mileage and low upkeep. If I thought gas cooking was a low hanging fruit on the efficiency tree, I might be more willing to give up the luxury of it. But from what I've seen it's not. It's rather like the highest gas-powered fruit on the tree.
- D13Fd 5y ago
  Oh yeah, screw the environment and keeping us at 2C, I need those exhaust gases to heat my beans evenly in my aluminum cookware.
  - raspyberr 5y ago
    Oh yeah, screw the environment and keeping us at 2C, I need those cheap Chinese trinkets delivered to me on the same day.
  - nate_meurer 5y ago
    LOL, I wouldn't say I need anything. I can make hollandaise in a tin can. I'm just giving my perspective as a long-time user of these very different tools.
  - 5y ago
oliv__ 5y ago
As if gas stoves were a primary reason for carbon emissions. This is just ridiculous regulations overreach. EDIT: anyone who downvotes is welcome to provide a stat and make a fool of themselves
- voisin 5y ago
  I am not sure we have the luxury of only going after primary emitters. I think at this point we have to do literally everything we can. Also, I read on HN a month or so ago about gas stoves making indoor air quality worse. So there is some upside there too. And if we remove gas stoves then people will probably not care to have gas brought in just for water heaters, and maybe we can avoid an entire type of infrastructure.
  - oliv__ 5y ago
    Copying someone's comment on WSJ: "Cooking with nat gas is ~ 3% of gas use which is about 0.001% of US fossil fuel use which is about 0.001% of global fossil fuel emissions. Banning gas cooking is farcical virtue signaling if you truly want to decrease CO2 emissions."
    - sixo 5y ago
      That sounds wrong. Quickly googling, https://www.c2es.org/content/international-emissions/ https://www.c2es.org/content/international-emissions/ says the US is around 13% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/energy-and-the-environment/where-greenhouse-gases-come-from.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/energy-and-the-environme... says gas is around 44% of U.S emissions. so that random WSJ comment is pretty hard to believe.
  - smabie 5y ago
    It's premature optimization and not worth the time to even think about.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  They're not. Nor does the article assert that they are. You're attacking a straw man. Natural gas heating is the largest greenhouse gas source in my province and many other jurisdictions. Not providing natural gas hookups to new construction is one way to reduce that. The loss of natural gas cooking is a side effect. But if you really need a gas stove you don't need a hook up, you can use a bottle and nobody will stop you. Carbon taxes might make it expensive, but nobody will stop you.
wu_187 5y ago
I have a different perspective. Having gas during freeze in Houston allowed us to boil water while the power is out. It not only allowed us to have warm water for taking a bath it also allowed us to boil the water to make it potable as the water was unsafe to drink during that time. Had we not had gas it would have been much worse for us.
- gkop 5y ago
  This is a really good point, in that the cities that are banning natural gas in new construction, have not as far as I know invested in more reliable electric infrastructure to compensate for the lost redundancy. Are they considering the consequences of eliminating a second redundant energy supply leaving a “single point of failure”? More people will inevitably freeze to death, and that human cost should be accounted for along with the climate crisis, in finding the best path forward. BTW in my experience, natural gas infrastructure is no more reliable than electricity. In winter 2011, our gas was shut off across Northern New Mexico for a week, due to high demand with record cold temperatures, and the need to retain pressure in the pipeline so it could function at all. Wood saved the day then, and seems to me a more distributed and robust emergency solution. Wood is super dirty of course, so it seems plausible that retaining gas residential hook ups as a backup to the electric supply, could be better for the environment by reducing wood use. Have the cities that are banning natural gas done this analysis? https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/natural-gas-crisis-a-chronology/article_529f64d6-63a4-572b-806d-ccdcff16c752.html https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/natural-ga...
  - aeternum 5y ago
    For safety gas needs to be shut off during many emergencies. Solar panels and battery backups are probably better as they are less dangerous and less prone to common-mode failures than gas. As you mention, a woodpile is also a nice low-tech and low-risk backup.
    - shadilay 5y ago
      Most solar installs are grid tied and add no emergency redundancy.
desine 5y ago
We're going to need to draw the lines somewhere. Blaming gas stoves for climate change seems like a bit of an over reach. Where's the resistance to people buying crappy, unnecessary junk from countries with cheap labor and low environmental regulation, and the associated carbon output of mega barges burning bunker oil, the lowest grade petroleum product? Is that just too popular, compared to barbecue and natural gas stoves? This push to be perfect is never ending, but always attacks the common folk, and rarely the multi-national megacorps. It's always with a justifiable pro-environment angle, which means any common folk who fight against it are painted as immoral, or uncaring about the planet. This is just the next lowest hanging fruit, but I'm getting annoyed at this point.
- mdoms 5y ago
  The real issue is gas hook-ups to homes, not just gas cooking. The author of this article just tried to frame it in the most controversial way possible. Using gas to heat a home and provide cooking heat in an area where electricity is almost perfectly green is a big problem.
  - desine 5y ago
    How do I cook with gas if not my home hookup? By driving my car to the nearest hardware store, purchasing or renting a steel propane tank, filling it from another tank that was filled by a truck that drove in, and driving home? This is death by 1000 cuts.
    - mdoms 5y ago
      No, my point here is that you're saying we're "blaming gas stoves for climate change" but no one is saying that. However gas hookups are a big contributor to carbon output for a family home.
      - desine 5y ago
        I guarantee the habits of the habitants are greater. But no politician wants to run around chastising their voter base, so that's not an option.
GreaterFool 5y ago
I rented an Airbnb recently and they had a basic induction stove on top of non-functional gas stove. The induction stove, with special pots, was like tech from the future. I was only doing basic cooking but it was blazing fast and precise. I never gave this any thought. I don’t cook much. But something about this inductive stove impressed me.
- nate_meurer 5y ago
  Induction really excels at some things. My 1500 W induction cooktop will boil a pot of water far faster than a 12,000 BTU/hr gas hob. I agree, it feels somehow very modern. Until I burn something because I entered the wrong number on the touchscreen. Or maybe that's modern too?
  - throaway46546 5y ago
    >touchscreen ewww
raspyberr 5y ago
Gas feels really natural to cook on. It FEELS good to cook on. Induction stoves really are amazing with how quickly they heat up but they don't feel as good. Electric is obviously horrible.
- zaphoyd 5y ago
  I’m always curious about this sentiment. I find gas really bad feeling to cook on. Gas stoves are very difficult to keep clean. The surfaces can’t easily double as counter space. All the waste heat makes my kitchen hot and pot handles hot (I regularly burn myself when using gas stoves now because I am just not used to having to use mittens to handle pots on the stove). Finally, literally allowing the byproducts of combustion to float around my non-existantly ventilated American apartment kitchen feels barbaric. What is it that feels good? Is it nostalgia? Is it literally just visible fire feels dangerous and powerful?
  - nate_meurer 5y ago
    Where to start? My most often-used pans are small, not very flat, and aluminum. Any one of these traits disqualifies them for induction use. I use these pans-- a small garlic pot and a saucier-- literally every day. I could use other pots, but I'd be slower and less efficient. The jumpers I use to saute things are induction-capable, and large enough to be responsive and efficient on an induction cooker, however they're still useless on either induction or electric, because an electric or induction hob only heats a pan when it's making contact with the surface. The moment I lift it to jump a meatball the cooker stops cooking. This is especially true for induction cooktops, which will typically de-energize if you take the pan off the surface. You can mitigate this somewhat by using a heavy saute pan or skillet, which will maintain its temperature longer when it's not in contact with the cooking surface. But sauteing this way is a lot slower and more painful that using a light steel or aluminum pan. And at some point, I'm not strong enough to handle a heavy pan safely anyway. My gas range is controlled by simple knobs. I use it by feel, and I always know how much power I'm using because I can see the flame and feel the heat on my face and hands. My induction cooker has a touchscreen and gives no feedback. I adjust it by guessing what number to enter, and then waiting for the food to make sounds. I am much less connected to the induction hob, and I'm therefore slower, less efficient, and I fuck things up far more often than I do on gas. Same problems with radiant electric. The vast majority of the indoor pollution from cooking comes from the food, not the gas combustion. Getting burned by handles sucks, and is probably unavoidable if you cook long enough on any surface. As Marco Pierre White says, "handles are for burning". If the pots and pans don't get you, the oven door eventually will. I don't ever, ever, fucking ever use any cooktop as counter space. That's just asking for a catastrophe when a hob is accidentally turned on. I feed a family with these tools, so I don't feel that the difference is merely one of convenience.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sys_64738 5y ago
I'll never give up gas utilities in my home: cooker, heating system, boiler. These are negligible when it comes to the environment. Maybe go after the actual culprits that cause global warming than wasting time/money/effort on this nonsense.
- sundaeofshock 5y ago
  I’d ask you to at least consider replacing your gas hot water heater with a heat pump hot water heater. Good for the environment and will save you significant money at the same time. https://www.bobvila.com/articles/heat-pump-water-heaters/ https://www.bobvila.com/articles/heat-pump-water-heaters/
  - theNJR 5y ago
    From that article, you need to install it in a 700+ sqft location. That’s a pretty big garage.
    - Syonyk 5y ago
      You don't. You simply need to add additional venting area if it's in a smaller space. Check the manuals for them, not the poorly written articles. ;) Many places (and just about everywhere without a basement or attached garage) have water heaters closed up in tight spaces. A heat pump heater won't work there, but if you add some vents to the door so it can exchange air with the rest of the house, they're just fine. Or, depending on where you live, you might consider venting it to the attic - if you have an attic that runs hot, "extracting heat directly from it into the hot water and then cooling the attic" is a good use of time.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/ohO3X https://archive.is/ohO3X
mlinksva 5y ago
The article only mentions climate change, but there are other reasons to eliminate gas hookups: - explosions - indoor air quality - gas infrastructure costs something to maintain, and for new developments, create Especially if climate change were the only reason, I'd say tax, don't ban.
- mlinksva 5y ago
  Perhaps I should've added - fire hazard - burn hazard because I'd guess that induction is less hazardous than gas in these respects, and some otherwise would-have-been gas ranges will be replaced by induction.
anonytrary 5y ago
You can't successfully ban X and replace it with Y if Y does not have feature parity with X. Gas stoves are almost always better for cooking; they give you a more even heat distribution and it is easier to control the amount of heat the pan is getting at any time. Chefs love them. Tangentially, I had the same complaint about paper straws when they started banning plastic straws. You are forced to drink fast, or you end up having a flimsy straw that can't suck, so you're forced to get another one. Bad alternative solution to plastic straws. Electric stoves are a less viable alternative to gas stoves, but they are definitely better than paper straws...
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  Electric coil ranges are awful, yes - but have you tried a good induction range? And electric ovens completely beat gas ovens. My house came with some fancy-pants 48-inch gas oven+range unit from an Italian company whose name I can't pronounce - the cool (er... hot!) and unusual range-top features are nice and it is a good gas range, no-doubt, but the gas oven just lacks all the neat mod-cons and features you can only get with an electric oven, like better temperature regulation, self-cleaning, etc... While my friends and associates with induction ranges (especially the ones you don't see sold in Best Buy) won't stop talking about how great they are while I'm dealing with another stovetop flame-out, aieee.
  - tomhoward 5y ago
    A relative is a professional-ish cook; not a chef, but she writes Italian cook books and runs cooking classes from her home kitchen. She utterly loves her induction stove and finds it perfect for cooking Italian dishes.
    - Wistar 5y ago
      I have a fairly high-end gas cooktop, dual electric ovens and a frickin' amazing Breville/PolyScience Control Freak induction burner. The Control Freak is considerably more precise than the gas cooktop. I have increasingly been using it in place of my sous vide setup, and the results have been excellent. I am a fan. Right now, I wouldn't willingly give up any of them but, if I had to, I would cede the gas cooktop for the Breville induction burner, or, rather, several of them, or, better yet, a multi-burner induction cooktop of Breville quality. The two biggest issues would be: • Certain favorite pans of mine are not induction friendly, and… • The extra electrical circuits that would need to be added as the Breville is power hungry What I wouldn't give up are the electric ovens. https://www.breville.com/us/en/products/commercial/cmc850.html https://www.breville.com/us/en/products/commercial/cmc850.ht...
spyder 5y ago
Another drawback of gas stoves is indoor air pollution: https://slate.com/technology/2020/12/gas-stoves-hazardous-asthma.html https://slate.com/technology/2020/12/gas-stoves-hazardous-as...
- desine 5y ago
  Misunderstood, deleting, I am wrong, feel free to downvote
  - adrianN 5y ago
    It appears to me that the studies in the article compared homes with gas stoves with homes without gas stoves. Do you think that people without gas stoves cook significantly less to explain away the difference to other cooking methods?
    - desine 5y ago
      I was under an incorrect impression that gas stoves were more common in more wealthy homes. Every crap place I rented had an electric stove. Every nice place I've lived came with a gas range. I was incorrectly extrapolating from there that poor people cook less (I still think this is true - see food deserts, fast food induced health issues, and the like). Basically a chain of incorrect assumptions, and ones I didn't even properly express
      - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        Gas is problematic for insurance on rental properties so landlords avoid it.
  - mattst88 5y ago
    Is it possible to do something about the pollutants inherent to cooking? Clearly you can do something about the pollutants from gas. Maybe the pollutants from one dwarf the other? I have no idea, but I'd be interested to learn the answer.
  - 5y ago
thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
Why wouldn’t restaurants just switch to propane if not given a natural gas connection from the city?
- a1369209993 5y ago
  It seems that the city is trying to phase out gas stoves entirely, and removing natural gas connections is only the first step of this. It's a less lethal version of "First they came for the communists...".
bamboozled 5y ago
Can't gas be produced from carbon neutral sources? For example, capture from landfill ?
- oblio 5y ago
  I can't imagine that's enough production to actually power up everyone's stove, though.
aaron695 5y ago
Gas is better for CO2 reduction. Gas is better for energy security. Gas is better for the city and your families energy security when the power fails. Gas is culturally better. Gas might/probably introduces unacceptable levels of pollutants into your home. It might hurt your family. So you can get rid of it everywhere and heat the earth and decrease security. Or just get induction yourself. As good as gas for cooking except for the culture bit. Interesting game theory.
dawnerd 5y ago
I’d get an electric oven but to run power it would cost a fortune.
CannisterFlux 5y ago
One big reason I prefer gas over electric for the stove top at least, is that all modern electric hobs have these awful unresponsive touch controls, to give the overall stove that totally flat look. Tap tap tap to go from 1-9, where every 2nd or 3rd tap doesn't register. It drives me nuts. Gas always has a nice big knob for you to turn, even if the settings are not very precise, being pretty much full blast or low. However the writing is on the wall for gas in domestic use. At least where I live it's more of a pain to install - requiring the specialist gas guy to do it rather than an electric stove that anyone can just plug in. Then the gas fixtures require regular safety review every couple of years. Between moving/renovating houses and helping family replace stoves over the last 10 years or so I've seen that stores have gradually stopped selling gas units. You have to order them specially and the selection gets smaller each time. They only sell electric by default now. Eventually I can see there being a kind of de facto ban just from you not being able to get gas anywhere, or it being so much hassle that you really, really have to want to get it. It's pretty much the situation now. And if you are renting the place is almost guaranteed to be electric because gas requires more effort to fit, and has more that can go wrong.
- BozeWolf 5y ago
  The unresponsiveness of controls drive me nuts as well. Greasy or wet fingers makes it hard to use the controls. This is solvable with physical knobs. Also the power moves up and down in steps, induction alternates between on and off to deliver an average amount of power. With gas knobs you have more fine grained control. When you want to fry something, with induction you often have 2 power options: the “fry, cook, fry, cook” option and the “fry just a bit too hard” option. I have debuyer pans, made of thick metal, acting as a buffer, which helps a bit. Stepless controll, with physical knobs would help a lot. Induction stoves are great for cooking water though. And for cleaning.
  - ants_a 5y ago
    I think that's largely a function of how much the manufacturer is willing to spend on hardware. I have a Bosch Series 8 cook top and it has enough power levels and fast enough PWM cycle that I can't detect the pulsing even with a light weight carbon steel pan. There still are issues, like the automatic pan warm up feature control logic overshoots with a carbon steel pan and undershoots with a cast iron one. Pan detection takes a couple of seconds every time it's triggered which makes it annoying to use lifting the pan as a way of temperature control.But overall I'm pretty happy. A separately installed control panel with physical knobs would be appreciated though. Wouldn't want knobs on the main cook top as having a flat surface makes cleanup so much nicer.
bob1029 5y ago
I'm currently in the process of replacing a gas cooktop with induction. My justifications are primarily ease of cleaning, followed by speed & power. I am putting in a jennair unit that can pipe 5kw through the air into a single pan. If you do the math, you will find that to be far more than a single gas burner puts out in a residential setting. Calrod and other radiant doesn't come close either. If I was big into wok cooking or other edge cases I'd probably keep the gas range, but 99% of the time I'm just trying to boil water or heat a piece of iron as fast as possible.
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  >99% of the time I'm just trying to boil water or heat a piece of iron as fast as possible. Works for you then, but asking professional cooks to switch to electric is ridiculous. If this gets pushed through next everyone will wonder why the restaurant food tastes so bad all of a sudden. And then 30 years later NPR Hidden Brain will do a piece about how back in the day people used to cook with gas and that it enabled cooking methods that made the food taste amazing.
  - bob1029 5y ago
    > asking professional cooks to switch to electric is ridiculous. I agree with this specific point, but I do not agree with the justifications presented. The notion that gas somehow enables food to magically taste better does not sit well with me. I do agree that there are certain cuisines that are more ideally prepared with an indirect heat source, but any skilled chef should be able to produce excellent outcomes regardless of pedantic concerns around their tools. The cooktop is just a source of heat energy at the end of the day. The way you manage that energy is part of the artform. Blaming tools for bad food would be like blaming visual studio because production went down.
pgt 5y ago
In South Africa, the power frequently goes out. Gas doesn't fail in a centralized way, though the supply can.
LightG 5y ago
As someone who has just installed a new kitchen, I can attest this. My wife insisted on a couple gas hobs as the taste is "better" / "different" whereas I just wanted electric. The compromise was a mixed solution. You can get pretty good looking mixed cooking surfaces with 4 electric hobs for things like boiling, and 2 gas hobs for where we think it makes a difference (mainly wok style, some teas, and frying). This has the added benefit of giving us a back up should anything happen with the power supply. Also feel like at least we're moving in the right direction enviromentally. Having read the article though - I wish the end result had been different. The gas industry usingt his as a "wedge issue" sounds about right. p.s. Am using Siemens and touch controls are fine.
GrumpyNl 5y ago
Its the UI thats sets me of. With gas i see whats going on controlled by one button with one option, more or less gas.
whiddershins 5y ago
This is putting the cart before the horse. Heating homes with natural gas (which the article clarifies is the source of the majority of the emissions) is currently far more efficient than with electricity. If everyone in NYC switched to electric heat, the grid would certainly fail. Additionally the grid uses a lot of natural gas for energy production. Once all the electric production is green, and we have lots of extra capacity, it might make sense to look at reducing natural gas service to homes. Until then, doing this will actually just make more emissions.
- phicoh 5y ago
  Heating a home with a heatpump is a net win compared to gas in many parts of the world even when the electricity required is made with gas. The reason is that the heatpump moves heat (from outside to inside) which is more efficient than generating heat directly. Obviously there needs to be a plan to upgrade the grid to deal with electric heating, cooking, cars, etc.
- kevindong 5y ago
  > If everyone in NYC switched to electric heat, the grid would certainly fail. Not to mention cost of heating in the winter would balloon to comical heights. Housing costs would also increase, but to a less degree, since utilities are a part of housing costs. Resistive heating is absurdly electricity intensive.
phicoh 5y ago
The solution is simple. Produce green gas from electricity. Probably first make hydrogen and then add CO2 to create methane. This will cost a fortune compared to current gas prices, but will allow everybody who is really set on using gas to keep doing so. Same thing of course for petrol for classic cars, etc. Technically we can do it, it is just a matter of blocking the sale of fossil gas (or taxing the hell out of it to make it more expensive than the green equivalent).
twobitshifter 5y ago
Isn’t natural gas one of the easiest biofuels to produce? I even think it’s straightforward to reform from the air. There should be a sustainable solution that allows people to keep cooking on gas.
fmajid 5y ago
In San Francisco, gas lines are a major risk of fire in case of earthquake, as in 1906, and that is probably a more important consideration than CO2 emissions, at least for cooking.
hokkos 5y ago
I am disgusted by the answer here, people are inconvenienced by minor gripes about electric heating, claim that banning gas stoves miss the big picture, but gas stove is the enabler to heat your whole house with it, it is really the sign we are in deep shit about climate change. Also electric reliability is sure a major point, if we want people to abandon gas we need ultra reliable electric grid, with enough firm 0 carbon electric generation. The point is to tear down the leaky gas distribution to put the money into an ultra reliable electric grid.
kpozin 5y ago
I've recently been trying to find an apartment in NYC. Every apartment has a gas stove. And all of the post-war apartments (and most of the older ones, too) don't have ventilation in the kitchen — at most they'll have a tiny passive vent opening in a corner somewhere, and even that's not guaranteed. The fans over the cooktops, if present, don't connect to outside air but just recirculate the stove exhaust throughout the kitchen. I don't understand how such designs aren't banned by building codes.
- chaorace 5y ago
  I have to begrudgingly agree. It's almost insulting that most apartment stove sets blow the ventilation exhaust right back in your face. It reminds me of the Victorian practice of burning gaslight fixtures all day long in sealed rooms. With that being said... I hate electric fixtures so much! I know instant feedback is impossible, but do the electric alternatives really have to be this slow? It's as if everyone gave up on improving the concept 10 years ago and it drives me a little crazy...
EL_Loco 5y ago
In my country of 200 million, it's pretty much gas everywhere. I have three gas cylinders and when they empty I have to either wait for the gas truck to come by with its song (like ice cream trucks), or I just take the cylinder to the deposit and exchange for a full one. I the biggest cities here you get gas coming from the ground to your home, but mostly it's still like that, you get your gas by the cylinder. I bet many, many countries still deliver gas to homes this way.
etempleton 5y ago
I have a gas stove, furnace, and water heater. I can tell you that the furnace is about 90 percent plus of my total gas usage annually. If you want to ban anything, ban the installation of new gas / oil furnaces, but that is going to only increase demand on the grid and delay the removal of coal power plants. I don’t really think banning residential or even commercial gas makes a whole lot of sense. Focus on removing coal/oil/gas power plants first. Natural gas will still make a great backup to renewable sources of energy production, but ideally it is emergency use only.
- frankbreetz 5y ago
  This is the problem with how the whole climate movement is being handled. The vast majority of the problem is corporations, but the media focuses on individual action. I get why people are skeptical and think it is simply the government is reaching for more control. Here is the line of reasoning: Why am I not allowed to have a gas stove, but I can see huge amounts of pollution from factories and power plants being dumped into the environment? If it were an actual problem wouldn't politicians focus on the bigger portions of pollution? Wouldn't they focus on the things that wouldn't affect average people? It is easier to demonize these people as "anti-science", but they have a valid point. Look at this past year with COVID, virtually all traffic and personal emissions stoped and we only saw about a 10% drop in emissions.
Arete314159 5y ago
Look, we can either make sacrifices for the environment, or we can come up with special reasons why this particular sacrifice is too inconvenient. Given that the Pacific Northwest has had 115 degree days this summer and an entire town in Canada just spontaneously combusted, there are some bigger stakes at play that getting a perfect omelette.
- voisin 5y ago
  I couldn’t agree more. I am so frustrated by the tone of many of these HN posts along the lines of “it doesn’t solve a big enough portion so don’t inconvenience me at all.” And then magically nothing changes and everything keeps getting worse. shocked face
jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
Rather than making a million stupid, tiny rules, you can make a few big rules. For example, a carbon tax. IMO Biden and other world leaders should be getting shit on every single day until they implement this.

123 points by voisin 5y ago

How does removing natural gas stoves reduce carbon emissions? Unless the cities are using a lot of renewables I'd expect going from natural-gas to heat would be a lot more efficient than going from some-fuel to electricity to heat?

wffurr 5y ago
Induction stoves are very efficient and it’s possible to run them with solar or wind power. Reducing natural gas infrastructure will also reduce methane leaks, which is also a potent greenhouse gas.
GravitasFailure 5y ago
I've heard electric burners are more energy efficient than gas because you have a more direct energy transfer through physical contact, and induction are even more efficient because the cookware is the heating element. Of course to reduce greenhouse emissions that increase in efficiency needs to be greater than the generation and transmission transmission losses. I'd be fascinated to see emissions figures related to restaurants and home cooking from gas. It'd be shocking if it were more than a rounding error.
- cartoonworld 5y ago
  Electric does not have a more direct energy transfer through physical contact. Consider your GPU or CPU: with the cooling fan disconnected, imagine or even very carefully experiment with the tempuratures that the heat sink will reach. Now uninstall the heat sink, clean the thermal paste off of both surfaces, and repeat the experiment. Induction is more efficient in the way you describe. Cooking has gotta be less than %0.5 of total domestic ghg. We would do so much better and avoid needless political hassles by increasing solar wind geothermal and hydroeclectric, electrifying fleets, and controlling centralized industrial and agricultural sources.
  - jhoechtl 5y ago
    We would do so much better if these giant vessels the international supply chain is relying on would run on a greener energy but crude oil.
nate_meurer 5y ago
I think the idea is just to better position household energy usage in order to take advantage of rapidly expanding renewable electrical generation.
0xB31B1B 5y ago
The goal is to decarbonize our economy. We need to convert pretty much everything that uses fossil fuels in house to use electricity. At the same time we are replacing in house fossil fuel usage (gas stoves, gas water heaters, etc) we also need to be increasing the energy share of renewables on the grid. Its not an "either/or" its a "both/and" situation. Decarbonizing the household can and should be done in tandem with decarbonizing the grid. Induction stoves, which are the modern alternative to gas, are much more efficient, get to temperature instantly, and are generally considered a very high quality.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  They are also more fragile and have a high cost of repairs, and aren’t we running out of copper?
  - 0xB31B1B 5y ago
    1) "fragility and cost of repairs" are not an inherent quality of a manufactured product. When gas appliances were new, they were also fragile and expensive to repair. The process by which they became sturdy and cheap to repair was that they became widely used, which lead to an incentive structure where the companies that manufacture them were rewarded for making them sturdier and easier to repair. If we can make induction stoves a widely used appliance, their fragility and cost of repairs will improve due to the natural improvements during a products lifecycle. 2) No, we are not running out of copper.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      I can have a guy at my house same-day to fix a gas oven, or maybe just grease the valve myself. A computer-controlled induction coil will never be so simple to fix, in some cases it's probably cheaper to junk the broken one and replace the whole thing. And I was obviously being a little facetious, but copper is becoming more expensive and mines are having to expand to meet demand.
  - jhoechtl 5y ago
    My moms gas oven is 50 years old. It did't fail a single time. Doesn't have electric ignition though. Still running on the fist set of flame outlets. It will probably outlive her. My understanding of how they work is that they are dam simple and reliable.
Freak_NL 5y ago
It's not just taking what little gas is used for cooking out of the equation because of the shift to renewable sources of energy. When heating is done with electricity or district heating it makes sense to get rid of the gas infrastructure completely. The maintenance and infrastructure costs for having a gas pipe to every home in every street just for cooking are too high to make economic sense once you take out heating of rooms and water (i.e., the bulk of a house's gas usage).
klodolph 5y ago
The answer is that natural gas hookups to homes leak some amount of natural gas, and the leakage in the distribution system is somewhere around 2-3%, some of that is residential. The GWP of natural gas is fairly high--somewhere around 84.

da_big_ghey 5y ago

this also is true on gas grill, wood smoking or barbacuing, blackening in cajun, others. some food are not transfering easily to electricity stove. building heating technology change make sense, just not so much with cooking.

moate 5y ago
This point is sort of all over the place. Some thoughts (from a former chef) Blackening: You could do this on anything. I used to work in a cajun/creole place and we had one burner reserved for a cast iron skillet that was on at all times in case someone ordered a blackened whatever. This could be done just as easily on induction Grilling/Broiling: IDK how you do this without a gas line or charcoal while maintaining timing and flavor. The direct flame required for the cooking also allows for smoke/char that you're going to have a hard time recreating with a heating coil "grill". Smoking: You can get an electric smoker...but you still need to burn some sort of wood for the smoke. When you get into larger BBQ joints that are doing 50+ shoulders/briskets/whatever a day, IDK how you possibly convert from wood-fire to a fully electric system. Wood/coal fired pizza ovens: Same as BBQ smokers, there's a difference between this and an electric coil in flavor imparted that changes the end result.Obviously you can make a giant electric pizza oven and have great pizza come out of it, but you literally can't make a Neopolitan pizza without a woodfired oven.

jarym 5y ago

It's a real enough problem - I hate cooking on electric stoves. Part of me wonders how hard it'd be to come up with an electric stove that simulates a gas cooker. Also in the UK (where I am) gas is still cheaper than electricity - hoping that will change soon though.

0xB31B1B 5y ago
People are not moving from natural gas to the old style resistance coil electric stoves that everyone is accustomed to, they are moving to induction stoves that get to temp nearly instantly, have a high power output ceiling.
- ip26 5y ago
  I swear my induction hot plate is even more responsive than gas
  - nate_meurer 5y ago
    Mine certainly is... as long as the pan is flat and large enough for the induction top to recognize it. My induction cooktop will warp a cast iron pan if I'm not careful. I've never had to be careful like that with gas hobs.
  - JimTheMan 5y ago
    Does your induction stove also work if water/muck gets on it? I have only used one at a holiday house, and I swear it was the most temperamental thing in the world. A few drops of water or oil and it refuses to work. Could just be that I am using an early model (this one was bought 10+ years ago, it has a touchpad for controls instead of knobs which also blows)
    - ip26 5y ago
      Yeah, the surface is sealed and the controls are tactile buttons and a knob. It’s technically a commercial unit, I agree that there are some rotten consumer units out there. It doesn’t care if there’s a mess on it. Another plus, when a mess happens, I can actually wipe up with a wet rag literally as I’m cooking, even under the pot.

denimnerd42 5y ago

I'm running an outdoor pizza oven, outdoor grill, and indoor gas range on NG. If I had to move to an area like new san jose developments that don't have natural gas hookups that'd be pretty sad. Blaming my food cooking for global warming would be a joke especially since 2/3 of those can run on wood.

0xB31B1B 5y ago
We need to decarbonize the economy, including food prep. 2 weeks ago, British Columbia Canada recorded temps in the F 120s. Just this past week a huge series of flash floods destroyed a lot of towns and killed 130+ people in Germany and the Netherlands. If we don't attempt to decarbonize the economy, its going to get much much worse.
- qwytw 5y ago
  Banning gas stoves would reduce total emissions by how much? Focusing on something like this seems silly to me when 20% of all electricity in the US is still produced in coal power plants (and another 40% in natural gas ones).
  - D13Fd 5y ago
    It's not just natural gas stoves, it's natural gas heating and infrastructure, including extraction. All of it needs to go and we need to use low-carbon energy sources in its place. It sucks, and it's a huge change. But it's unavoidable, and the longer we wait the worse it will be for everyone.
- Notanothertoo 5y ago
  So every natural disaster hence forth is global warming cool. Go after the fucking businesses for their waste. There are a dozen boats that produce more carbon than all the gas stoves in the world.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

DangitBobby 5y ago

Yes, a big hurdle to 'solving' climate change is that people are unwilling to make even the smallest sacrifices to solve a problem that they don't perceive as affecting them directly. People refusing to wear masks during the pandemic was/is an excellent example of this.

raspyberr 5y ago
Isn't that putting the burden on people again rather than businesses a la plastic straws and plastic recycling.
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  You need to get the general populace on board. It requires a cultural revolution to culminate in political upheaval, or nothing will stop companies from externalizing costs by buying corrupt politicians.
  - bpiche 5y ago
    DangitBobby, hillposting in a natural gas thread. Amazing. Didn’t notice until after I had read several of your well informed comments. Bwahh!
clairity 5y ago
99% of mask usage was wasteful and pointless safety theater, like wearing them outdoors. similarly, most natural gas is used for power generation and industrial processes. in the US, only ~15% is used residentially, and most of that is for home heating, water heating, and clothes drying. about 1/3 of our national energy use is derived from natural gas, so you're on the order of 1% (or less) of national energy being consumed by natural gas cooking. it's a tiny problem in the energy pollution mix. we'd be much better served in this regard by focusing all our efforts on reducing carbon pollution from electricity production and transportation, which accounts for well over half of the problem, not a tiny slice like gas cooking because it's a "small sacrifice".
- 5y ago

0xB31B1B 5y ago

This sucks a lot. Induction stoves are better than gas stoves but chefs don't like them because it's a new tool the need to learn how to use. They have a many years of experience with their old tool, of course they will say the new thing is worse. We see this in software engineering and technology all of the time. We need to decarbonize the economy and these cities shouldn't be allowing new gas stoves.

sp332 5y ago
I don't like my induction stovetop because the heating is very uneven. I use it for boiling water, but it doesn't work e.g.for searing steak because I end up with a small rectangle that is hotter than the rest.
- 0xB31B1B 5y ago
  thats likely an issues with your pans, or with your coil size. Both of those are solvable problems, and if we had mandates to enforce electric only heating these problems would be solved much faster due to demand.
  - lumost 5y ago
    Induction and electric stove tops requires much higher quality pans than gas. Gas will heat a warped pan relatively evenly. Gas doesn't care much about the quality of your pan either, whereas a positive induction experience really depends on having a quality set of induction pans that are not warped from use. Considering that many individuals are cooking with poor quality, old, and warped pans - gas will be a better cooktop for them.
    - sp332 5y ago
      If the poor old warped pans work great with gas and badly with induction, then induction is less good.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago

mdiesel 5y ago

Interesting, as there was an article linked either from HN or Pocket about how a lot of "gas is better for cooking" was deliberate advertising campaigns: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/06/how-the-fossil-fuel-industry-convinced-americans-to-love-gas-stoves/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/06/how-the-foss...

GravitasFailure 5y ago
While there certainly has been advertising by the gas industry, the only people I've met that said they preferred electric over gas were home cooks using inductions stoves, and pretty nice ones at that.
gruez 5y ago
But if it's actually better for cooking (eg. response time), why should we care?
- philips 5y ago
  Induction has immediate response time as well. I use both at home and I don’t think response time is a huge issue. The two things that stop us from removing the gas all together: - A few pans that we haven’t replaced with induction compatible ones - The gas stove came with the house and works OK If the house hadn’t come with gas induction would be fine with us- works great.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Induction has immediate response time as well Side question: do induction stoves have proper power levels yet? I used an induction stove a few years ago at a short-term vacation rental, and it could only toggle between on/off. If I set it at 50% power, it would cycle between being on and off, rather than staying on 100% of the time but at 50% power. My non-induction electric stove does the same thing. Is this an issue that is solved with higher end models?
    - 5y ago

ip26 5y ago

Cooking on gas uses relatively little gas compared to space and water heating. Does anyone know if natural gas stoves can run on propane? Perhaps people could run their gas stove “off grid” as a compromise…

UncleMeat 5y ago
Yes. You can get a tank and have it filled every so often.
HarryHirsch 5y ago
If you had natural gas before the nozzles will have to be changed, but yes, you can run a stove off a propane/butane tank.
gkop 5y ago
Quality gas stoves can be easily converted to propane. Doing as you propose would be in violation of urban building codes.
simonsarris 5y ago
Yes, almost all natural gas appliances can be converted to propane, and come with the instructions to do so. In NH natural gas is only in the cities, all rural houses (that want it) use 100-500 gallon propane tanks instead. It's very common here. When I built my house new in 2018 I installed a 500 gallon tank for the heating system + cooking. (Though the house is primarily heated with a wood stove)
kemiller 5y ago
Everyone here is right that you can sub for propane with little modification. Propane actually has higher energy density than methane, too, so it creates higher heat with less fuel. Seems like the best solution — allow restaurants to install propane tanks and even subsidize conversion. Could be challenging in dense cities though.
HWR_14 5y ago
It's a violation of federal regulations to store more than 2lbs of propane inside living spaces/kitchens. Those big 20lbs are supposed to be stored in garages/outside. Obviously, people break that all the time, but a compromise that requires people to do so seems bad.

why5s 5y ago

Based on the comments in this thread, I’m guessing the majority of HN doesn’t cook. The switch from an induction stove to a proper gas stove changes the way you cook. No more waiting for the coils to warm up, being able to dynamically adjust the heat, being able to sear bell peppers against an open flame, etc. I’m almost certain I will never go back to an induction stove for cooking.

jolux 5y ago
Induction cooktops heat up instantly, you may be thinking of electric.
0xB31B1B 5y ago
Induction stoves don't have visible coils and heat up instantly. You're talking about a resistance stove, not an induction stove. induction: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ikea.com%2Fus%2Fen%2Fp%2Fsaerklassig-induction-cooktop-black-20462066%2F&psig=AOvVaw1BSnjilx7wD4TRcr0eyavT&ust=1626721302383000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAsQjRxqFwoTCNja2p6n7fECFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ikea.c... resistence: https://www.centurylife.org/is-induction-more-efficient-than-electric-coil-or-gas-an-energy-efficiency-comparison-between-stoves/img_1597/ https://www.centurylife.org/is-induction-more-efficient-than...
deleted 5y ago
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nate_meurer 5y ago
Even my cheap 1500 watt induction cooktop heats up my larger pans shockingly fast. So fast in fact that I have to be really careful not to warp them.
zaphoyd 5y ago
As noted in the other comments here, you are likely thinking of coil based resistive electric stoves and not induction. Induction stoves have no warm up period, change heating amounts instantly like gas stoves and have a ton of other benefits that as some who cooks most meals at home I can’t live without. I put a $100 induction hot plate on top of the “fancy” gas stove in my apartment because it is that much better for actually cooking things. I definitely agree that cooking on a resistive electric coil is awful and will grudgingly use gas over that.

gnicholas 5y ago

Personally I strongly prefer an induction stove to gas, partly because it’s faster to heat up, partly because it’s easier to clean. But I can’t imagine professional chefs being told they have to switch to electric or induction. You can’t effectively cook in a wok with induction, since the sides of the wok don’t heat up nearly enough.

tpmx 5y ago
There are induction woks now: https://nuwavenow.com/NuWaveWok https://nuwavenow.com/NuWaveWok No idea how well the concept would work in a commercial asian kitchen though.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  That's cool, and better pricing than I expected ($159). If it works well, it could help convince some of my relatives that have been on the fence about switching to induction, partly because they cook a lot of Chinese food.
- genericone 5y ago
  Thats only about 1500w or 5000 btu. The typical asian kitchen wok jet is about 2-3x that at 10k-15k btu. Maybe a good equivalent replacement: https://www.plantbasedpros.com/product/cooktek-605501-drop-in-commercial-induction-wok-unit-200-240v-1ph/?gclid=CjwKCAjwos-HBhB3EiwAe4xM91-OmxX2ybHI_aC3oNUk3t2-YwfKIu7BClY_xoKVWNnA-YyrV-qw8hoCGokQAvD_BwE https://www.plantbasedpros.com/product/cooktek-605501-drop-i... edit: @ 2000 dollars
  - 1MachineElf 5y ago
    Speaking on behalf of a family that's run Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai restaurants - It's just not a wok if there are no flames shooting around the sides of it that can sear the food as it get tossed about.
    - dllthomas 5y ago

cyb_ 5y ago

https://archive.is/ohO3X https://archive.is/ohO3X

nate_meurer 5y ago

Almost every day, I use three different types of range: gas, induction, and radiant electric. Of the three, gas would be the hardest to give up. My most-used pieces of cookware are small aluminum pots that are not magnetic (and thus not induction capable), and even if they were, too small to work on my induction cooktop, which doesn't recognize any magnetic base of less than about six inches in diameter. I use the induction cooktop for slow cooking, boiling, and pressure cooking. Everything else gets put on gas if I have room. Nothing beats gas for output and control. I could certainly do just fine on radiant or, god forbid, coils. But the gas and induction together are a huge luxury that I feel grateful for every time I use them. One under-appreciated advantage of a gas range is how evenly it heats pans of lesser quality. Because so much of the heating on gas is accomplished by the flow of hot "exhaust" gas across the entire bottom of the pan, a thinner and less thermally conductive pan will still heat much more evenly than it would on an electric coil or induction hob. EDIT: I'm definitely on board the energy efficiency bandwagon. I have a four kilowatt solar array on my house, and I drive a twenty five year old Honda minivan because of the mileage and low upkeep. If I thought gas cooking was a low hanging fruit on the efficiency tree, I might be more willing to give up the luxury of it. But from what I've seen it's not. It's rather like the highest gas-powered fruit on the tree.

D13Fd 5y ago
Oh yeah, screw the environment and keeping us at 2C, I need those exhaust gases to heat my beans evenly in my aluminum cookware.
- raspyberr 5y ago
  Oh yeah, screw the environment and keeping us at 2C, I need those cheap Chinese trinkets delivered to me on the same day.
- nate_meurer 5y ago
  LOL, I wouldn't say I need anything. I can make hollandaise in a tin can. I'm just giving my perspective as a long-time user of these very different tools.
- 5y ago

oliv__ 5y ago

As if gas stoves were a primary reason for carbon emissions. This is just ridiculous regulations overreach. EDIT: anyone who downvotes is welcome to provide a stat and make a fool of themselves

voisin 5y ago
I am not sure we have the luxury of only going after primary emitters. I think at this point we have to do literally everything we can. Also, I read on HN a month or so ago about gas stoves making indoor air quality worse. So there is some upside there too. And if we remove gas stoves then people will probably not care to have gas brought in just for water heaters, and maybe we can avoid an entire type of infrastructure.
- oliv__ 5y ago
  Copying someone's comment on WSJ: "Cooking with nat gas is ~ 3% of gas use which is about 0.001% of US fossil fuel use which is about 0.001% of global fossil fuel emissions. Banning gas cooking is farcical virtue signaling if you truly want to decrease CO2 emissions."
  - sixo 5y ago
    That sounds wrong. Quickly googling, https://www.c2es.org/content/international-emissions/ https://www.c2es.org/content/international-emissions/ says the US is around 13% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/energy-and-the-environment/where-greenhouse-gases-come-from.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/energy-and-the-environme... says gas is around 44% of U.S emissions. so that random WSJ comment is pretty hard to believe.
- smabie 5y ago
  It's premature optimization and not worth the time to even think about.
bryanlarsen 5y ago
They're not. Nor does the article assert that they are. You're attacking a straw man. Natural gas heating is the largest greenhouse gas source in my province and many other jurisdictions. Not providing natural gas hookups to new construction is one way to reduce that. The loss of natural gas cooking is a side effect. But if you really need a gas stove you don't need a hook up, you can use a bottle and nobody will stop you. Carbon taxes might make it expensive, but nobody will stop you.

wu_187 5y ago

I have a different perspective. Having gas during freeze in Houston allowed us to boil water while the power is out. It not only allowed us to have warm water for taking a bath it also allowed us to boil the water to make it potable as the water was unsafe to drink during that time. Had we not had gas it would have been much worse for us.

gkop 5y ago
This is a really good point, in that the cities that are banning natural gas in new construction, have not as far as I know invested in more reliable electric infrastructure to compensate for the lost redundancy. Are they considering the consequences of eliminating a second redundant energy supply leaving a “single point of failure”? More people will inevitably freeze to death, and that human cost should be accounted for along with the climate crisis, in finding the best path forward. BTW in my experience, natural gas infrastructure is no more reliable than electricity. In winter 2011, our gas was shut off across Northern New Mexico for a week, due to high demand with record cold temperatures, and the need to retain pressure in the pipeline so it could function at all. Wood saved the day then, and seems to me a more distributed and robust emergency solution. Wood is super dirty of course, so it seems plausible that retaining gas residential hook ups as a backup to the electric supply, could be better for the environment by reducing wood use. Have the cities that are banning natural gas done this analysis? https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/natural-gas-crisis-a-chronology/article_529f64d6-63a4-572b-806d-ccdcff16c752.html https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/natural-ga...
- aeternum 5y ago
  For safety gas needs to be shut off during many emergencies. Solar panels and battery backups are probably better as they are less dangerous and less prone to common-mode failures than gas. As you mention, a woodpile is also a nice low-tech and low-risk backup.
  - shadilay 5y ago
    Most solar installs are grid tied and add no emergency redundancy.

desine 5y ago

We're going to need to draw the lines somewhere. Blaming gas stoves for climate change seems like a bit of an over reach. Where's the resistance to people buying crappy, unnecessary junk from countries with cheap labor and low environmental regulation, and the associated carbon output of mega barges burning bunker oil, the lowest grade petroleum product? Is that just too popular, compared to barbecue and natural gas stoves? This push to be perfect is never ending, but always attacks the common folk, and rarely the multi-national megacorps. It's always with a justifiable pro-environment angle, which means any common folk who fight against it are painted as immoral, or uncaring about the planet. This is just the next lowest hanging fruit, but I'm getting annoyed at this point.

mdoms 5y ago
The real issue is gas hook-ups to homes, not just gas cooking. The author of this article just tried to frame it in the most controversial way possible. Using gas to heat a home and provide cooking heat in an area where electricity is almost perfectly green is a big problem.
- desine 5y ago
  How do I cook with gas if not my home hookup? By driving my car to the nearest hardware store, purchasing or renting a steel propane tank, filling it from another tank that was filled by a truck that drove in, and driving home? This is death by 1000 cuts.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    No, my point here is that you're saying we're "blaming gas stoves for climate change" but no one is saying that. However gas hookups are a big contributor to carbon output for a family home.
    - desine 5y ago
      I guarantee the habits of the habitants are greater. But no politician wants to run around chastising their voter base, so that's not an option.

GreaterFool 5y ago

I rented an Airbnb recently and they had a basic induction stove on top of non-functional gas stove. The induction stove, with special pots, was like tech from the future. I was only doing basic cooking but it was blazing fast and precise. I never gave this any thought. I don’t cook much. But something about this inductive stove impressed me.

nate_meurer 5y ago
Induction really excels at some things. My 1500 W induction cooktop will boil a pot of water far faster than a 12,000 BTU/hr gas hob. I agree, it feels somehow very modern. Until I burn something because I entered the wrong number on the touchscreen. Or maybe that's modern too?
- throaway46546 5y ago
  >touchscreen ewww

raspyberr 5y ago

Gas feels really natural to cook on. It FEELS good to cook on. Induction stoves really are amazing with how quickly they heat up but they don't feel as good. Electric is obviously horrible.

zaphoyd 5y ago
I’m always curious about this sentiment. I find gas really bad feeling to cook on. Gas stoves are very difficult to keep clean. The surfaces can’t easily double as counter space. All the waste heat makes my kitchen hot and pot handles hot (I regularly burn myself when using gas stoves now because I am just not used to having to use mittens to handle pots on the stove). Finally, literally allowing the byproducts of combustion to float around my non-existantly ventilated American apartment kitchen feels barbaric. What is it that feels good? Is it nostalgia? Is it literally just visible fire feels dangerous and powerful?
- nate_meurer 5y ago
  Where to start? My most often-used pans are small, not very flat, and aluminum. Any one of these traits disqualifies them for induction use. I use these pans-- a small garlic pot and a saucier-- literally every day. I could use other pots, but I'd be slower and less efficient. The jumpers I use to saute things are induction-capable, and large enough to be responsive and efficient on an induction cooker, however they're still useless on either induction or electric, because an electric or induction hob only heats a pan when it's making contact with the surface. The moment I lift it to jump a meatball the cooker stops cooking. This is especially true for induction cooktops, which will typically de-energize if you take the pan off the surface. You can mitigate this somewhat by using a heavy saute pan or skillet, which will maintain its temperature longer when it's not in contact with the cooking surface. But sauteing this way is a lot slower and more painful that using a light steel or aluminum pan. And at some point, I'm not strong enough to handle a heavy pan safely anyway. My gas range is controlled by simple knobs. I use it by feel, and I always know how much power I'm using because I can see the flame and feel the heat on my face and hands. My induction cooker has a touchscreen and gives no feedback. I adjust it by guessing what number to enter, and then waiting for the food to make sounds. I am much less connected to the induction hob, and I'm therefore slower, less efficient, and I fuck things up far more often than I do on gas. Same problems with radiant electric. The vast majority of the indoor pollution from cooking comes from the food, not the gas combustion. Getting burned by handles sucks, and is probably unavoidable if you cook long enough on any surface. As Marco Pierre White says, "handles are for burning". If the pots and pans don't get you, the oven door eventually will. I don't ever, ever, fucking ever use any cooktop as counter space. That's just asking for a catastrophe when a hob is accidentally turned on. I feed a family with these tools, so I don't feel that the difference is merely one of convenience.

deleted 5y ago

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sys_64738 5y ago

I'll never give up gas utilities in my home: cooker, heating system, boiler. These are negligible when it comes to the environment. Maybe go after the actual culprits that cause global warming than wasting time/money/effort on this nonsense.

sundaeofshock 5y ago
I’d ask you to at least consider replacing your gas hot water heater with a heat pump hot water heater. Good for the environment and will save you significant money at the same time. https://www.bobvila.com/articles/heat-pump-water-heaters/ https://www.bobvila.com/articles/heat-pump-water-heaters/
- theNJR 5y ago
  From that article, you need to install it in a 700+ sqft location. That’s a pretty big garage.
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    You don't. You simply need to add additional venting area if it's in a smaller space. Check the manuals for them, not the poorly written articles. ;) Many places (and just about everywhere without a basement or attached garage) have water heaters closed up in tight spaces. A heat pump heater won't work there, but if you add some vents to the door so it can exchange air with the rest of the house, they're just fine. Or, depending on where you live, you might consider venting it to the attic - if you have an attic that runs hot, "extracting heat directly from it into the hot water and then cooling the attic" is a good use of time.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/ohO3X https://archive.is/ohO3X

mlinksva 5y ago

The article only mentions climate change, but there are other reasons to eliminate gas hookups: - explosions - indoor air quality - gas infrastructure costs something to maintain, and for new developments, create Especially if climate change were the only reason, I'd say tax, don't ban.

mlinksva 5y ago
Perhaps I should've added - fire hazard - burn hazard because I'd guess that induction is less hazardous than gas in these respects, and some otherwise would-have-been gas ranges will be replaced by induction.

anonytrary 5y ago

You can't successfully ban X and replace it with Y if Y does not have feature parity with X. Gas stoves are almost always better for cooking; they give you a more even heat distribution and it is easier to control the amount of heat the pan is getting at any time. Chefs love them. Tangentially, I had the same complaint about paper straws when they started banning plastic straws. You are forced to drink fast, or you end up having a flimsy straw that can't suck, so you're forced to get another one. Bad alternative solution to plastic straws. Electric stoves are a less viable alternative to gas stoves, but they are definitely better than paper straws...

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
Electric coil ranges are awful, yes - but have you tried a good induction range? And electric ovens completely beat gas ovens. My house came with some fancy-pants 48-inch gas oven+range unit from an Italian company whose name I can't pronounce - the cool (er... hot!) and unusual range-top features are nice and it is a good gas range, no-doubt, but the gas oven just lacks all the neat mod-cons and features you can only get with an electric oven, like better temperature regulation, self-cleaning, etc... While my friends and associates with induction ranges (especially the ones you don't see sold in Best Buy) won't stop talking about how great they are while I'm dealing with another stovetop flame-out, aieee.
- tomhoward 5y ago
  A relative is a professional-ish cook; not a chef, but she writes Italian cook books and runs cooking classes from her home kitchen. She utterly loves her induction stove and finds it perfect for cooking Italian dishes.
  - Wistar 5y ago
    I have a fairly high-end gas cooktop, dual electric ovens and a frickin' amazing Breville/PolyScience Control Freak induction burner. The Control Freak is considerably more precise than the gas cooktop. I have increasingly been using it in place of my sous vide setup, and the results have been excellent. I am a fan. Right now, I wouldn't willingly give up any of them but, if I had to, I would cede the gas cooktop for the Breville induction burner, or, rather, several of them, or, better yet, a multi-burner induction cooktop of Breville quality. The two biggest issues would be: • Certain favorite pans of mine are not induction friendly, and… • The extra electrical circuits that would need to be added as the Breville is power hungry What I wouldn't give up are the electric ovens. https://www.breville.com/us/en/products/commercial/cmc850.html https://www.breville.com/us/en/products/commercial/cmc850.ht...

spyder 5y ago

Another drawback of gas stoves is indoor air pollution: https://slate.com/technology/2020/12/gas-stoves-hazardous-asthma.html https://slate.com/technology/2020/12/gas-stoves-hazardous-as...

desine 5y ago
Misunderstood, deleting, I am wrong, feel free to downvote
- adrianN 5y ago
  It appears to me that the studies in the article compared homes with gas stoves with homes without gas stoves. Do you think that people without gas stoves cook significantly less to explain away the difference to other cooking methods?
  - desine 5y ago
    I was under an incorrect impression that gas stoves were more common in more wealthy homes. Every crap place I rented had an electric stove. Every nice place I've lived came with a gas range. I was incorrectly extrapolating from there that poor people cook less (I still think this is true - see food deserts, fast food induced health issues, and the like). Basically a chain of incorrect assumptions, and ones I didn't even properly express
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      Gas is problematic for insurance on rental properties so landlords avoid it.
- mattst88 5y ago
  Is it possible to do something about the pollutants inherent to cooking? Clearly you can do something about the pollutants from gas. Maybe the pollutants from one dwarf the other? I have no idea, but I'd be interested to learn the answer.
- 5y ago

thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago

Why wouldn’t restaurants just switch to propane if not given a natural gas connection from the city?

a1369209993 5y ago
It seems that the city is trying to phase out gas stoves entirely, and removing natural gas connections is only the first step of this. It's a less lethal version of "First they came for the communists...".

bamboozled 5y ago

Can't gas be produced from carbon neutral sources? For example, capture from landfill ?

oblio 5y ago
I can't imagine that's enough production to actually power up everyone's stove, though.

aaron695 5y ago

Gas is better for CO2 reduction. Gas is better for energy security. Gas is better for the city and your families energy security when the power fails. Gas is culturally better. Gas might/probably introduces unacceptable levels of pollutants into your home. It might hurt your family. So you can get rid of it everywhere and heat the earth and decrease security. Or just get induction yourself. As good as gas for cooking except for the culture bit. Interesting game theory.

dawnerd 5y ago

I’d get an electric oven but to run power it would cost a fortune.

CannisterFlux 5y ago

One big reason I prefer gas over electric for the stove top at least, is that all modern electric hobs have these awful unresponsive touch controls, to give the overall stove that totally flat look. Tap tap tap to go from 1-9, where every 2nd or 3rd tap doesn't register. It drives me nuts. Gas always has a nice big knob for you to turn, even if the settings are not very precise, being pretty much full blast or low. However the writing is on the wall for gas in domestic use. At least where I live it's more of a pain to install - requiring the specialist gas guy to do it rather than an electric stove that anyone can just plug in. Then the gas fixtures require regular safety review every couple of years. Between moving/renovating houses and helping family replace stoves over the last 10 years or so I've seen that stores have gradually stopped selling gas units. You have to order them specially and the selection gets smaller each time. They only sell electric by default now. Eventually I can see there being a kind of de facto ban just from you not being able to get gas anywhere, or it being so much hassle that you really, really have to want to get it. It's pretty much the situation now. And if you are renting the place is almost guaranteed to be electric because gas requires more effort to fit, and has more that can go wrong.

BozeWolf 5y ago
The unresponsiveness of controls drive me nuts as well. Greasy or wet fingers makes it hard to use the controls. This is solvable with physical knobs. Also the power moves up and down in steps, induction alternates between on and off to deliver an average amount of power. With gas knobs you have more fine grained control. When you want to fry something, with induction you often have 2 power options: the “fry, cook, fry, cook” option and the “fry just a bit too hard” option. I have debuyer pans, made of thick metal, acting as a buffer, which helps a bit. Stepless controll, with physical knobs would help a lot. Induction stoves are great for cooking water though. And for cleaning.
- ants_a 5y ago
  I think that's largely a function of how much the manufacturer is willing to spend on hardware. I have a Bosch Series 8 cook top and it has enough power levels and fast enough PWM cycle that I can't detect the pulsing even with a light weight carbon steel pan. There still are issues, like the automatic pan warm up feature control logic overshoots with a carbon steel pan and undershoots with a cast iron one. Pan detection takes a couple of seconds every time it's triggered which makes it annoying to use lifting the pan as a way of temperature control.But overall I'm pretty happy. A separately installed control panel with physical knobs would be appreciated though. Wouldn't want knobs on the main cook top as having a flat surface makes cleanup so much nicer.

bob1029 5y ago

I'm currently in the process of replacing a gas cooktop with induction. My justifications are primarily ease of cleaning, followed by speed & power. I am putting in a jennair unit that can pipe 5kw through the air into a single pan. If you do the math, you will find that to be far more than a single gas burner puts out in a residential setting. Calrod and other radiant doesn't come close either. If I was big into wok cooking or other edge cases I'd probably keep the gas range, but 99% of the time I'm just trying to boil water or heat a piece of iron as fast as possible.

trompetenaccoun 5y ago
>99% of the time I'm just trying to boil water or heat a piece of iron as fast as possible. Works for you then, but asking professional cooks to switch to electric is ridiculous. If this gets pushed through next everyone will wonder why the restaurant food tastes so bad all of a sudden. And then 30 years later NPR Hidden Brain will do a piece about how back in the day people used to cook with gas and that it enabled cooking methods that made the food taste amazing.
- bob1029 5y ago
  > asking professional cooks to switch to electric is ridiculous. I agree with this specific point, but I do not agree with the justifications presented. The notion that gas somehow enables food to magically taste better does not sit well with me. I do agree that there are certain cuisines that are more ideally prepared with an indirect heat source, but any skilled chef should be able to produce excellent outcomes regardless of pedantic concerns around their tools. The cooktop is just a source of heat energy at the end of the day. The way you manage that energy is part of the artform. Blaming tools for bad food would be like blaming visual studio because production went down.

pgt 5y ago

In South Africa, the power frequently goes out. Gas doesn't fail in a centralized way, though the supply can.

LightG 5y ago

As someone who has just installed a new kitchen, I can attest this. My wife insisted on a couple gas hobs as the taste is "better" / "different" whereas I just wanted electric. The compromise was a mixed solution. You can get pretty good looking mixed cooking surfaces with 4 electric hobs for things like boiling, and 2 gas hobs for where we think it makes a difference (mainly wok style, some teas, and frying). This has the added benefit of giving us a back up should anything happen with the power supply. Also feel like at least we're moving in the right direction enviromentally. Having read the article though - I wish the end result had been different. The gas industry usingt his as a "wedge issue" sounds about right. p.s. Am using Siemens and touch controls are fine.

GrumpyNl 5y ago

Its the UI thats sets me of. With gas i see whats going on controlled by one button with one option, more or less gas.

whiddershins 5y ago

This is putting the cart before the horse. Heating homes with natural gas (which the article clarifies is the source of the majority of the emissions) is currently far more efficient than with electricity. If everyone in NYC switched to electric heat, the grid would certainly fail. Additionally the grid uses a lot of natural gas for energy production. Once all the electric production is green, and we have lots of extra capacity, it might make sense to look at reducing natural gas service to homes. Until then, doing this will actually just make more emissions.

phicoh 5y ago
Heating a home with a heatpump is a net win compared to gas in many parts of the world even when the electricity required is made with gas. The reason is that the heatpump moves heat (from outside to inside) which is more efficient than generating heat directly. Obviously there needs to be a plan to upgrade the grid to deal with electric heating, cooking, cars, etc.
kevindong 5y ago
> If everyone in NYC switched to electric heat, the grid would certainly fail. Not to mention cost of heating in the winter would balloon to comical heights. Housing costs would also increase, but to a less degree, since utilities are a part of housing costs. Resistive heating is absurdly electricity intensive.

phicoh 5y ago

The solution is simple. Produce green gas from electricity. Probably first make hydrogen and then add CO2 to create methane. This will cost a fortune compared to current gas prices, but will allow everybody who is really set on using gas to keep doing so. Same thing of course for petrol for classic cars, etc. Technically we can do it, it is just a matter of blocking the sale of fossil gas (or taxing the hell out of it to make it more expensive than the green equivalent).

twobitshifter 5y ago

Isn’t natural gas one of the easiest biofuels to produce? I even think it’s straightforward to reform from the air. There should be a sustainable solution that allows people to keep cooking on gas.

fmajid 5y ago

In San Francisco, gas lines are a major risk of fire in case of earthquake, as in 1906, and that is probably a more important consideration than CO2 emissions, at least for cooking.

hokkos 5y ago

I am disgusted by the answer here, people are inconvenienced by minor gripes about electric heating, claim that banning gas stoves miss the big picture, but gas stove is the enabler to heat your whole house with it, it is really the sign we are in deep shit about climate change. Also electric reliability is sure a major point, if we want people to abandon gas we need ultra reliable electric grid, with enough firm 0 carbon electric generation. The point is to tear down the leaky gas distribution to put the money into an ultra reliable electric grid.

kpozin 5y ago

I've recently been trying to find an apartment in NYC. Every apartment has a gas stove. And all of the post-war apartments (and most of the older ones, too) don't have ventilation in the kitchen — at most they'll have a tiny passive vent opening in a corner somewhere, and even that's not guaranteed. The fans over the cooktops, if present, don't connect to outside air but just recirculate the stove exhaust throughout the kitchen. I don't understand how such designs aren't banned by building codes.

chaorace 5y ago
I have to begrudgingly agree. It's almost insulting that most apartment stove sets blow the ventilation exhaust right back in your face. It reminds me of the Victorian practice of burning gaslight fixtures all day long in sealed rooms. With that being said... I hate electric fixtures so much! I know instant feedback is impossible, but do the electric alternatives really have to be this slow? It's as if everyone gave up on improving the concept 10 years ago and it drives me a little crazy...

EL_Loco 5y ago

In my country of 200 million, it's pretty much gas everywhere. I have three gas cylinders and when they empty I have to either wait for the gas truck to come by with its song (like ice cream trucks), or I just take the cylinder to the deposit and exchange for a full one. I the biggest cities here you get gas coming from the ground to your home, but mostly it's still like that, you get your gas by the cylinder. I bet many, many countries still deliver gas to homes this way.

etempleton 5y ago

I have a gas stove, furnace, and water heater. I can tell you that the furnace is about 90 percent plus of my total gas usage annually. If you want to ban anything, ban the installation of new gas / oil furnaces, but that is going to only increase demand on the grid and delay the removal of coal power plants. I don’t really think banning residential or even commercial gas makes a whole lot of sense. Focus on removing coal/oil/gas power plants first. Natural gas will still make a great backup to renewable sources of energy production, but ideally it is emergency use only.

frankbreetz 5y ago
This is the problem with how the whole climate movement is being handled. The vast majority of the problem is corporations, but the media focuses on individual action. I get why people are skeptical and think it is simply the government is reaching for more control. Here is the line of reasoning: Why am I not allowed to have a gas stove, but I can see huge amounts of pollution from factories and power plants being dumped into the environment? If it were an actual problem wouldn't politicians focus on the bigger portions of pollution? Wouldn't they focus on the things that wouldn't affect average people? It is easier to demonize these people as "anti-science", but they have a valid point. Look at this past year with COVID, virtually all traffic and personal emissions stoped and we only saw about a 10% drop in emissions.

Arete314159 5y ago

Look, we can either make sacrifices for the environment, or we can come up with special reasons why this particular sacrifice is too inconvenient. Given that the Pacific Northwest has had 115 degree days this summer and an entire town in Canada just spontaneously combusted, there are some bigger stakes at play that getting a perfect omelette.

voisin 5y ago
I couldn’t agree more. I am so frustrated by the tone of many of these HN posts along the lines of “it doesn’t solve a big enough portion so don’t inconvenience me at all.” And then magically nothing changes and everything keeps getting worse. shocked face

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago

Rather than making a million stupid, tiny rules, you can make a few big rules. For example, a carbon tax. IMO Biden and other world leaders should be getting shit on every single day until they implement this.