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This is such a foolish law, environmentally speaking. I totally understand doing this once we've phased out burning natural gas for electricity. But we are no

• basedgod 4y ago
  you don't know what you're talking about or anything about induction stoves induction stoves are far more efficient in terms of heat transferred to food vs gas, which mostly heats the air instead and yeah it's a bummer the one time every 2 years you go to use all 4 burners at once you won't be able to max amp it
  • ars 4y ago
    I use all 4 burners at the same time at least every week, if not more often. You must not cook very much. It's not hard: boil water for pasta, potatoes, make a soup, and then cook a protein, and bake a cake. That's not a complicated meal - you could do than on any random day. > which mostly heats the air instead That isn't actually true, which you can tell for yourself by simply putting your hand near a fire, and a fire with a pot on it.
    • sofixa 4y ago
      > bake a cake I'm willing to bet most people don't bake cakes daily. When i cook it's usually 2, max 3 at the same time, even with a multi-course meal.
      • Brian_K_White 4y ago
        So therefor, it's fine if you now have a stove that can only heat 2 burners at once. Why have the other burners at all? We could save so much space if we just had 2 burner stoves and no ovens since I never bake either. I do use the oven occasionally but occasionally is not enough excuse to have it I guess. Obviously no one even needs a stove at all, that's what restarants and grubhub are for right?
• teruakohatu 4y ago
  > 30 amp for the dryer plus 30 amp for the water heater plus 30 amp for the AC, Heat pump water heaters and heat pump air heaters solve that problem and save money. Heat pump dryers on the other hand are a bit rubbish (take a very long time to dry clothes, but they do save money).
  • ars 4y ago
    Heat pump water heaters are also bad, I wanted to buy one and didn't because they are very slow to heat the water. Too slow to be useful for me. They are especially bad in northern climates since the incoming water is cold, and they put cold air in your house - which then has to be heated by the home heater. An A/C is already a heat pump.
    • krallja 4y ago
      > water heater…slow it goes in an insulated tank? why does the speed matter? the tank is always at temperature. if you run out of hot water, that’s a tank size issue, not a heater technology issue.
      • ars 4y ago
        A 40 gallon tank can provide 2 showers per hour. You can get 80 gallon ones for residential use, larger than that is in commercial territory. But that's still just 4 showers - if you have a bunch of people all getting ready for an event, and you also have laundry to do (which uses double what a shower uses, although takes longer) and run the dishwasher, etc. It's not enough. You would need a truly mammoth tank. Instead you have a large fire at the bottom, and heat the water almost as fast as you use it, then you don't run out. A heat pump water heater would simply not work for a 6 person home in the north in the winter.
        • brewdad 4y ago
          Congratulations on creating a scenario in your mind that will never happen. If you are all less than an hour away from leaving for an event, why are you washing clothes that won't be ready in time? Did you really have to run the dishwasher right before Kim's wedding or could you have set it to run while you are gone or after you get back if you somehow have a dishwasher without a timer setting? If you know you need four people to shower, maybe don't all wait until the last minute.
• spacemanmatt 4y ago
  Someone wired 120 amps to just my stove. I think my A/C is the only other circuit that fat. House is a "builder" model I estimate is about 1 in 10 or 15 around here, from the 1980s.
  • ars 4y ago
    120amp to your stove? What in the world does the plug look like? I've never seen a plug that big, except with 3-phase.
    • krallja 4y ago
      NEMA doesn’t define a plug that big, so it would have to be hard-wired, and probably has a cutoff switch.
      • spacemanmatt 4y ago
        I'm almost sure that's the case. Source: The breaker is 30A x 4 ganged.
• GaelFG 4y ago
  "So using electricity instead of natural gas in your home is wasteful." I (genuinely) wonder if what's true. I remember thinking the same things about electric car "how can burning fuel in a factory, storing it, send it thought line for kilometers and then store them in a car batteries and then feed the motor be more efficient than burning fuel directly in the motor" and was proven false. Assuming we aldready have the electric lines of course. (I also dont know the ergy waste of packaging the gaz in usable bottle, move them and retrive them, I assume it's significant, maybe i'm wrong).
  • letitbeirie 4y ago
    If you're burning fuel for power that's one thing, but you don't get any conversion losses at all if you're burning it for heat underneath/inside the thing you want to be hot.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • mcv 4y ago
      You're not losing any if you're burning it inside the thing you want to heat (your home). You definitely lose a lot if you're burning it underneath the thing you want to heat (a pan on the stove); a lot of the heat goes around the pan. Just feel the air above the pan. All of that is wasted heat.
      • letitbeirie 4y ago
        I could see gas being less efficient at heating a pan since it's using convection in an uncontained space. What I was getting at was the fact that with electric, you're burning the gas inside a heat engine to generate power first, so right off the bat your best outcome is the Carnot limit.
        • adrian_b 4y ago
          The modern power plants with combined cycle have an efficiency of up to 65%. The power plants with heat cogeneration have an efficiency of up to 80%. I doubt very much that even half of the energy consumed by burning gas ends inside the cooking pot in most cases. Regardless of the energy efficiency or pollution risk of gas stoves, there are people who prefer other cooking methods just because they like their results better. Even if I have a gas stove and I continue to pay for gas as if I would use it, because I live in a condo and there is no individual metering, I have stopped using the gas stove several years ago.
• Maursault 4y ago
  > This is such a foolish law, environmentally speaking. I concur. This is the same thing as blaming Climate Change on road vehicles when most of Climate Change is caused by energy, shipping, construction, concrete manufacture, glass making, etc. Mostly, Climate Change isn't caused by the People. It's business and industry causing it. IOW, greed causes Global Warming. So they're focusing on a space that has negligible effect or no effect whatsoever on Climate Change, while there are massive methane and ethane leaks in Bakersfield and Aliso Canyon, the later of which dumped 100K tons of methane into the atmosphere. Pay no attention to most of the stupid oil rigs all over SoCal that are probably leaking mountains of methane and expressly not benefitting CA residents with fuel less than $8/gal. Why does everything have to be so stupid?! Just shut it all down, every contributor, ban it all, bite the energy bullet now, and stop Climate Change before the dang Thermohaline breaks and Europe freezes over. Well, I guess that will stop it, but we'll all be half asleep and asphyxiating from so much CO2.
  • wolverine876 4y ago
    > This is the same thing as blaming Climate Change on road vehicles when most of Climate Change is caused by energy, shipping, construction, concrete manufacture, glass making, etc. Do you have data on how much each of those sectors contributes? IIRC, road transportation contributes a relatively large amount.
    • Maursault 4y ago
      Thanks for the homework, but no thanks. You do it. Off the top of my head, consumer vehicles globally contribute 5-6% of Climate Change-causing emissions. If you'd care to look, you'll see this pales in comparison to the major contributors, electricity generation, agriculture, deforestation, oil drilling, etc. If we could overnight stop the major contributors, such as industrial processes, your ice car just wouldn't matter.
      • wolverine876 4y ago
        If you make the claims, the homework is yours. Otherwise, the claims could say anything.
• buro9 4y ago
  > I totally understand doing this once we've phased out burning natural gas for electricity I've been thinking about this in Europe. How to wean oneself off of gas. The big wins are electric generation, and those can be done within a reasonable timeframe by states with largely unilateral decision making. But the long tail... Domestic use of gas. That's hard. How does one ask an entire populace to rid themselves off of gas hobs, gas heated water, gas heated radiators? It takes time, maybe with concerted effort in only one generation could it be achieved. Weirdly it makes sense to start banning things on the long tail and seed the idea that this all comes to an end and early adopters need to be on electricity already. As ridiculous a drop in the ocean of banning a BBQ grill... That long tail has to be addressed. I'd love to see a ban on all gas combi boilers and gas hobs in the UK as soon as 5 years time. I'm more surprised this isn't seen as an opportunity to innovate in this space and open multiple new markets and leaps in what can be done with electricity.
  • wentwiththeflow 4y ago
    lun.energy
    • hgomersall 4y ago
      What is lun? I looked at the website and learnt nothing.
  • mcv 4y ago
    One easy thing to do is build all new homes with a good electricity connection, heat pumps and no gas lines anymore. Leaving out gas lines saves a lot of complex infrastructure costs and risks. Upgrading old homes is less urgent. Make the first step first, the rest will come.
  • martincollignon 4y ago
    This is why we created Lun. Every gas boiler's consumption emits about 2tCO2 per year - and there are about 90 million buildings in Europe that could be heated using heat pumps instead, with huge benefits for energy efficiency and carbon emissions. As you said, it's a hard problem. Luckily, politicians and bureaucrats are passing more and more legislation that will force the fossil fuels out of heating over the next decade. We see it as our job to make sure it's going to happen in real life by being the glue between all parties in the value chain (consumers, OEMs, installers, utilities, governments, financial institutions). And we're looking for great people ;) careers.lun.energy
• mcv 4y ago
  > So using electricity instead of natural gas in your home is wasteful. Depends entirely on what you use it for. For heating, burning gas is very efficient: everything gets turned into heat. For cooking, a lot of heat gets lost, because you heat the air, the air heats the pan, and the pan heats the food. An induction stove heats the pan directly, which means less heat is lost, which also makes cooking more comfortable. > But induction stoves of today cannot run all four burners and the stove at the same time. Yes they can. Mine does. Of course your electricity supply needs to be powerful enough, but that's easily upgraded. In NL, 3x25A is extremely common. Our house had 1x35A which wasn't enough, so we had it upgraded to 3x35A, and that's plenty. Of course switching from gas to electricity will mean changes in infrastructure, but that's not a blocking obstacle. It would make sense for any new homes built today to have a better electricity connection and no gas. Heating? Heat pumps are even more efficient than gas heating.
• cpwright 4y ago
  If you're worried about gas usage, the stove seems to be the wrong place to care as well. We use propane for our stove, which comes to somewhere in the neighborhood of $100/year (<30 gallons). Our space heating is oil, and that is over $2000 a year and is more energy dense (~1000 gallons). If you want to have the most effect on usage, you'll worry about space heating not cooking. As long as your home is warm, you don't care. My wife specifically wanted gas for the stove instead of electric when we redid the kitchen, so we went through the effort to get propane.
• jcranberry 4y ago
  I remember reading some studies and IIRC it turned out that overall power usage including energy transfer efficiency and grid leakage for gas stoves and induction was about the same. One other issue with gas stoves which I believe some California gov agency recently discovered is that even when you're not using them they may contribute to methane gas leakage.
• mike00632 4y ago
  15% of all natural gas use is residential. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/use-of-natural-gas.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/use-of-natur... These laws are about removing the need for gas lines entirely. I think that restaurants count as commercial so the impact would be even higher. It's nonsense to claim that these changes won't have an impact.
  • elil17 4y ago
    Using natural gas in an appliance is more efficient than burning it to produce electricity (heat pumps are the exception here). Plus, there's a good chance we will want to use the natural gas grid to move renewable hydrogen, methane, or dimethyl ether because those forms of energy are easier to store and move than electricity.
    • mike00632 4y ago
      Electricity doesn't only come from natural gas.