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Gas stoves are more hazardous than we’ve been led to believe (2020)
- xnx 4y agoIn the near future, I think we will think about indoor air quality (VOCs, PM2.5, High CO2) in the same way we think about smoking.
- dontbenebby 4y agoOTOH if your power goes out, being able to bake a quiche and not freeze to death is useful.
- philips 4y agoHow are you heating your home? Most methane furnace designs use electric blowers to actually get the heat into the home (at least in North America).
- hoppyhoppy2 4y agoThey're talking about gas stoves, which are designed for cooking but can be repurposed in a pinch as an emergency heat source.
- melolife 4y agoThey really can't because of the ventilation requirements and the amount of water vapor produced.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dontbenebby 4y agoI'm in an apartment, so I think it's boilers + then in individual units you can supplement with a heater? It was actually a persistent issue early on the grad students would screw with the knobs, and it's harder to pop a window open in a place like Pittsburgh than the Bay Area.
- achenatx 4y agoin the texas freeze last year natural gas never stopped flowing even though power was out for about 5 days. I cut the wire to my gas furnace and put a plug on the end. My small 2kw generator could easily run the blower on my gas furnace. We could still cook food on our gas stove. We still had hot water from our gas hot water heater (though the pipes eventually froze).
- liketochill 4y agoWhy did pipes freeze with furnace fan on generator ?
- cplusplusfellow 4y agoPoor construction of pipes in exterior walls with degraded insulation.
- dontbenebby 4y ago>Poor construction of pipes I thought it was more about lack of heat + insulation what about a pipe (absent other causes) makes it inherently more prone to freezing?
- cplusplusfellow 4y agoDid you miss this part? > in exterior walls with degraded insulation.
- vel0city 4y agoIt had never been below freezing that long since we started recording temperature for large parts of Texas. Thus, home designs often don't bother dealing with the question "but what if its freezing cold for days on end?", so there's no consideration to putting a water line on an exterior wall. We even have tankless water heaters mounted in or on the exterior wall with plumbing only protected by a metal plate if even that. In places where it does regularly get below freezing for long stretches of time they do try and avoid putting water lines on exterior walls specifically for this reason.
- macinjosh 4y agoThe power needed to run a small fan is a far cry from what is needed to power a stove and the rest of a household. Battery, generator or even manual power would be sufficient.
- dontbenebby 4y ago>The power needed to run a small fan is a far cry from what is needed to power a stove Orders of magnitude, I used to have an all electric apartment, using a fan versus AC was a 25 dollar difference or more. I used to do the math, and nursing an iced tea down the road during the hottest four hours of the day, some days, could pay for itself, but that was before the rents skyrocketed as scores of cost indifferent international students moved in just as I was moving out. (Last I was in the town I'm referencing, it had gone from 500ish walkable to campus to more like 1K and littered with those damn scooters.)
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoUnless your gas supply and appliances have green features that require electricity to function.
- philips 4y agoRelatedly I found this video on electric kettles vs gas stove efficiency for heating water pretty illuminating too: https://youtu.be/_yMMTVVJI4c?t=763 https://youtu.be/_yMMTVVJI4c?t=763 The summary is that a cheap electric kettle can boil water way faster and with far less wasted energy than a stove top kettle.
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoThat seems pretty obvious from their construction. I don’t know anyone that uses a stove top kettle. It’s unfortunate that in the US our electric kettles are much slower than in the U.K.
- AdmiralAsshat 4y agoI think it can be spread by word of mouth. I've already converted several friends and family over to electric kettles when they see how useful it is for coffee, tea, even for getting water boiled for cooking. The big question in my mind is whether the electric kettle itself is the "final form", or if I'll be proselytizing the same people in ten years to get an Asian style hot water heater/reservoir instead.
- maccard 4y agoA holiday rental I stayed in had a boiling water tap. It's a small improvement over a kettle, but in terms of improvement there's very little efficiency gains to be had over a hot plate directly in contact with the cooking liquid.
- 2ICofafireteam 4y agoOnce you've had one you can't go back. I don't know what the losses are from maintaining the hot water but it's the ultimate in convenience.
- pseudo0 4y agoAn induction-friendly stovetop kettle is a pretty great option as well, for those with induction burners. I have found it about as fast as an electric kettle, but it saves counter space, and won't have to be replaced every 1-5 years. Maybe I have just had bad luck with inexpensive electric kettles, but they kept dying on me.
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoThere was a bunch of articles about this in 2020. After looking into the data my conclusion is the threat is overblown (big surprise), a large part of it is from cooking of any kind (heating produces particulates) and that if you take some basic precautions (open a window, use vent fan) the risk is very low.
- qiskit 4y agoMakes me wonder whether these stories are paid advertising ( by electric stove companies or whomever ) or the journalist had to write something and just winged it. I'm guessing most garbage in media is paid advertising, but who knows at this point.
- taeric 4y agoYeah, I can't but think the headline is true, but then leads immediately to, "but not as hazardous as you are now thinking."
- i80and 4y agoIt is extremely common, even default in the US in my experience, to not have vent fans not actually... vent. As a renter, I don't really get a choice in the matter. Opening a window significantly is also pretty unfeasible most of the year.
- rascul 4y agoI see many of them that simply vent into the attic. This requires a properly vented attic, and has the downside of introducing moisture into the attic, which can lead to damage. That said, mobile homes pretty much always vent outside in my experience.
- stefan_ 4y agoA lot of them do not vent at all. They just draw it up through a coarse filter and out the top again.
- draw_down 4y ago
- ineedasername 4y agoI think this may get the cause of health issues like asthma at least partially wrong. Perhaps natural gas plants a part, I don't know, but it tends to be used in cooking much more often in more densely populated areas which also happen to be in closer proximity to polution-producing industries. The infrastructure for running natural gas lines costs money, so it is most economical in these more densely populated areas. Within 30 miles of where I live natural gas is dominant, but further out from this suburb of a major city electric heat and electric stoves are significant more common.
- aaron695 4y ago
- backtoyoujim 4y agoOnce my house has a battery large enough to where I won't end up going ballistic on my energy company for having 24+ hour power outages I am fine with moving away from gas. But I am not going to live with losing power a dozen times a year for up to a day at a time because a corporation wants my life to be the tip of the misery spear instead of their profit margins taking a hit.
- bittercynic 4y agoWhen you "go ballistic" are you verbally abusing a csr in a call center somewhere who already has an unpleasant and difficult job, or finding a way to apply pressure to someone who has some power to improve the situation?
- parkingrift 4y agoFitting your username that you would assume OP is verbally abusing someone at a call center.
- drivebycomment 4y agoWhere do you live ? Dozen times a year power outage sounds very rough.
- macinjosh 4y agoJust wait until the bean counters force everyone to only use electricity for energy. Grids will be overloaded and will go out consistently. They will also just turn off your electricity if you do something they don’t like.
- drivebycomment 4y agoBy bean counters you mean environmentalist / climate activists convincing politicians ? A common meaning of bean counters - who only cares about money - would never do that. And if you think general populace in the first world countries will suffer through consistent blackout, I think you are utterly and completely mistaken.
- was_a_dev 4y agoDoes no one use a kitchen extractor fan and have a CO monitor in their kitchen?
- kstenerud 4y agoGas stoves are an anachronism anyway; good riddance to them. There has been no better time for electric-only cooking. Air fryers are FAR more energy efficient than ovens, and also cook faster. Sous-vide cookers are cheap and can cook certain dishes to perfection every time. Instant pot style pressure cookers cover most of the rest. And everyone already knows the convenience of microwave ovens. Unless you're cooking a big roast or bird or cake, most stovetop and oven cooking can be done better with modern tools.
- legerdemain 4y agoWould you use a microwave, a sous vide apparatus, or an air fryer to make a Chinese-style stir fry? How about an omelet?
- Vladimof 4y agohttps://recipes.anovaculinary.com/recipe/easy-sous-vide-omelet-with-parmesan-and-herbs https://recipes.anovaculinary.com/recipe/easy-sous-vide-omel...
- alar44 4y agoI don't think you'll find a single cook who would prefer electric. Literally no one.
- xnx 4y agoEasily disproven by comments in this and other related threads.
- Gigachad 4y agoThe cooks and gas stoves feels a lot like the programmer / gamer with mechanical keyboards debate. There is really _no_ advantage to mechanical keyboards but almost everyone picks them and insists membrane keyboards are unusable. It doesn't matter what the facts are, its just a personal preference thing at that point.
- 4y ago
- poutine 4y agoMy wife and I have allergies and are poor sleepers, as a result I religiously monitor air quality in several points in the home in order to manage the air. I find CO2 ppm over 1000 provides for headaches and poor sleep. Having a modern well sealed home means you rely a lot on an HRV to exchange the air, but sometimes you need to open the windows. After all the monitoring for years I can attest that the gas cooktop has a massive influence on poor air quality. The vent hood helps, but does not eliminate CO2. Keeping CO2 under ~700ppm in occupied bedrooms takes some work. For my next house that I'm building now I've put in induction, will never do gas again. Also supersized the vent hood and HVAC systems. Indoor air quality is such an unappreciated topic in home construction.
- mulligan 4y agodo you have a comparison of air quality in your home when cooking using a non-gas stove?
- poutine 4y agoYes. I have a portable induction plate we use for things like hot pot. I don’t have an apples to apples comparison though. The cooking itself doesn’t influence co2 though it does spike pm2.
- gregwebs 4y agoAre you putting in a fresh air ventilation system (ERV) in your new house?
- poutine 4y agoYup. It’s require by code. They’re usually installed at such low CFM that they don’t help a lot against short term blips from cooking though.
- sbate1987 4y ago
- dmtroyer 4y ago::stares nervously at unvented landlord special 1970’s stove with multiple pilot lights that is always warm to the touch::
- VirusNewbie 4y agoMeasuring an old gas stove in a tiny kitchen seems suspect, modern homes have kitchens in much larger open spaces. My kitchen is in quite a large great room with 11’ ceilings, in combination with running the fan I have a hard time believing it would cause the same issues as it does in some of the older small apartments.
- bad_good_guy 4y agoVast majority of people do not have large homes to fit large kitchens
- xtracto 4y agoIn the USA... here in Mexico gas stoves are in the vast majority of homes.
- Havoc 4y ago"larger open spaces" isn't going to save you unless it is open as in window open