8 ms·

Alec, of the Technology Connections YouTube channel, shows it's not just energy saving, but faster and cleaner. Even with US outlet power limits a kettle will b

Alec, of the Technology Connections YouTube channel, shows it's not just energy saving, but faster and cleaner. Even with US outlet power limits a kettle will boil a volume of water much more quickly than a gas stovetop, and my indoor CO2 sensor won't spike by hundreds to a thousand PPM of CO2. While the time savings is modest, if you have an electric kettle it's a no brainer to prefer that over gas. Though induction stovetops can be faster yet, and just as clean.

amluto 4y ago
Your gas stove will likely dramatically outperform an 1800W electric heater if you use a proper pot: https://turbopot.com/ https://turbopot.com/ I would still rather use a nice induction range, but it is possible to get decent efficiency out of gas.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Buying cookware that works better on gas but is specifically incompatible with induction cooking seems a bit like rigging your Ram to roll coal, at this point in time.
  - marssaxman 4y ago
    How's that? Most people who have serviceable gas ranges are not going to rip them out and replace them with induction any time soon. Someone who wants to go electric badly enough to spend thousands of dollars installing a high-current power outlet is not likely to balk at the cost of new pans.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  There's still a huge amount of energy that gets dumped out into the kitchen by any non-induction cooktop, no matter what pot you use.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    I always wanted some kind of "collar" that I could put around a burner to try to direct that excess heat back into the pan/pot.
    - socialismisok 4y ago
      The problem is you need airflow or you generate carbon monoxide instead of carbon dioxide. So simple solutions can get more heat but also kill you.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        minor side effect
        BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
        Death only increases the amount of carbon emissions this method saves.
        socialismisok 4y ago
        Lower carbon emissions with this one weird trick!
        Temporary_31337 4y ago
        Product idea: a broken CO detector that saves up to 100% of person’s future emissions. Saves money in the future too.
        Tepix 4y ago
        But your decomposing family will release CO2!
        paranoidrobot 4y ago
        It's offset against the future CO2 emissions of the family and their descendants. (Gee, this thread got dark. Like carbon-black dark)
- carabiner 4y ago
  Crazy. Like a Jetboil for your home stove.
- modriano 4y ago
  What efficiency (in terms of energy transfer to the intended material vs to the environment) is observed with gas? IIRC, gas achieves maybe 35-50% efficiency (depending on the surface area and material of the pan) compared with ~80% for electric resistance heating and >90% for induction. Adam Ragusea did a water boiling comparison and the gas stove was dumping so much energy into the air around the pot that his thermometer melted [0]. I just don't see how any pan geometry could extract much of the energy from the quickly rising hot gas produced by combustion. [0] https://youtu.be/Xn1LUo5ra_A?t=249 https://youtu.be/Xn1LUo5ra_A?t=249
  - stephen_g 4y ago
    The claim on the site is that the heat exchanger base boosts efficiency up to 60%. You still of course do have the problem that home rangehoods usually aren't powerful enough to create enough air-flow to properly deal with the NOx and SOx produced by burning gas, which turns out to be a big health risk...
    - amluto 4y ago
      Most home range hoods are too powerful. Go to any site that calculates commercial range hood requirements, enter in your parameters, and then try to find a nice range hood that matches. Those 700 cfm or 1000 cfm beasts the appliance stores sell are entirely inappropriate. There may well be a problem with a poorly designed range hood and exhaust that inevitably isn’t captured. And people might not like using the hoods all the time.
  - heisenbit 4y ago
    Comparing gas with electrical efficiency is not representing realistic end-to-end efficiencies wrt. co2 as long as the vas majority of electricity is generated from primary energy. Power plants tend to have efficiencies lower 50%.
    - zwirbl 4y ago
      The gas end-to-end "efficiency" will not improve drastically ever, while for an electrical stove it is tied to energy production. Arguing with end-to-end efficiencies and power plants is misleading, as I can power my induction stove from my solar panels
- namuol 4y ago
  I have a gas stove in my studio apartment. I still use an electric kettle to get water boiling before dumping it into a preheated pan to cook noodles/whatever. Highly recommend this approach if you are stuck with gas.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    > Highly recommend this approach if you are stuck with gas. My partner, who cooks more, bemoans that our new apartment has electric. Grew up using gas and claims that it’s better for cooking. I prefer not to intentionally dump gas into our house and welcome the minor benefit of energy efficiency. Funny how different people see the world (and technology).
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      Get a (high power) portable induction hob. If you have an outlet that can supply a 1.8-3kW one, it's better than gas unless you're using a wok or simar.
    - diordiderot 4y ago
      Watch this video about how the idea that gas was better for cooking was a marketing ploy with no basis in reality and how they used lobbyist to force has connections into building codes https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54
      - leoedin 4y ago
        "no basis in reality". Do you cook? Gas is functionally superior than traditional electric resistance cooking. That's not some evil lobby, that's practical experience. You can instantly control the temperature without juggling multiple burners at different heats. That makes it better. I'd take gas over electric (resistive or halogen) all the time - and I've lived with both. Induction is on par with gas in controllability - and although there are some downsides, the upsides (so easy to clean!) Make it worth it (imo). I'm not saying that because big induction paid me to either.
ReptileMan 4y ago
>Though induction stovetops can be faster yet, and just as clean. You have the mother of all hotspots on the pan (less relevant for boiling) where the induction ring itself is and getting simmer right is harder. Induction as implemented right now is on/off with full blast for the duration and just increased downtime. It is not the same as low constant output.
- kergonath 4y ago
  > You have the mother of all hotspots on the pan (less relevant for boiling) where the induction ring itself is and getting simmer right is harder. Not at all. There is no significant hot spot as heat is actually produced by the bottom of the pan and not the coils themselves. > Induction as implemented right now is on/off with full blast for the duration and just increased downtime. It is not the same as low constant output. Again, not at all. All the devices I have used were perfectly fine generating a low, constant heat. what you describe may be the case for bargain basement ones, and it was the case for most resistive cooktops, but is definitely not the case for inductions ones.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    I guess you could have a hot spot on the pan if the coils are ill-designed or you’re putting a large pan on a small burner? The pan will only heat up near the coil, so if the coil covers only the center third of the pan, only that will heat up (though some pans have a heat-spreading layer to mitigate this, and sometimes to add some more inertia depending on the pan’s purpose).
    - kergonath 4y ago
      > I guess you could have a hot spot on the pan if the coils are ill-designed or you’re putting a large pan on a small burner? Yes, but then it’s hardly a problem with the technology if you put a large pan on a small burner. As for the rest, in all cookers I have seen, the coils cover the whole surface, except for a small spot in the centre. Besides, induced current does not happen only where the cookware is closest to the coil. The magnetic field is more spread out than that and the heating surface is larger than just the surface of “contact” (there is no real contact, but anyway). I assume there could be an exceptionally badly designed induction cooktop with hot spots (it’d have to have a very weird geometry, though), but that would take some effort.
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> While the time savings is modest, if you have an electric kettle it's a no brainer to prefer that over gas. Not quite. Water is heavy and boiling water is dangerous; if you're boiling your water in a teakettle you then have to transfer it to a pot on the stove without scalding yourself. (This isn't the exact problem I'd experience if I adopted your advice. I have an electric teakettle, but it is low volume and is also sharply limited in the rate at which you can pour out water from it. That's fine if you want to prepare individual servings of tea. It's unworkable if you want to prepare a bunch of boiling water to boil stuff in. But fixing that problem will immediately cause the "boiling water is dangerous" problem.)
- SECProto 4y ago
  Presumably you mean you have a gooseneck kettle, which I agree is not well suited to this task (though if it takes 30s to pour out the kettle, it's not really a big deal). Regardless, pouring boiling water out of a kettle is far less dangerous than pouring the cooked pasta + boiling water out of the pot and into a strainer. If I'm looking to boil say 2 litres of water, I'll put 1.5 l in the electric kettle, 0.5l in the pot on the gas stove with a lid on. Generally the kettle boils first.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Regardless, pouring boiling water out of a kettle is far less dangerous than pouring the cooked pasta + boiling water out of the pot and into a strainer. I don't think this is true. The mechanics are essentially the same. But the colander receiving the pasta + boiling water is situated inside the sink, which will catch the water that is in that case intended to spill out. The pot is situated on the stove, which is a raised platform that can't catch water at all. Any spill there will splash all over.
    - SECProto 4y ago
      Well, with my sample size of one, I've splashed boiling water on the floor when trying to drain pasta or potatoes, but never while pouring out a kettle. Perhaps related, a kettle has a cold base in addition to a cold handle oriented more appropriately for pouring.

amluto 4y ago

Your gas stove will likely dramatically outperform an 1800W electric heater if you use a proper pot: https://turbopot.com/ https://turbopot.com/ I would still rather use a nice induction range, but it is possible to get decent efficiency out of gas.

jeffbee 4y ago
Buying cookware that works better on gas but is specifically incompatible with induction cooking seems a bit like rigging your Ram to roll coal, at this point in time.
- marssaxman 4y ago
  How's that? Most people who have serviceable gas ranges are not going to rip them out and replace them with induction any time soon. Someone who wants to go electric badly enough to spend thousands of dollars installing a high-current power outlet is not likely to balk at the cost of new pans.
crooked-v 4y ago
There's still a huge amount of energy that gets dumped out into the kitchen by any non-induction cooktop, no matter what pot you use.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  I always wanted some kind of "collar" that I could put around a burner to try to direct that excess heat back into the pan/pot.
  - socialismisok 4y ago
    The problem is you need airflow or you generate carbon monoxide instead of carbon dioxide. So simple solutions can get more heat but also kill you.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      minor side effect
      - BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
        Death only increases the amount of carbon emissions this method saves.
        socialismisok 4y ago
        Lower carbon emissions with this one weird trick!
        Temporary_31337 4y ago
        Product idea: a broken CO detector that saves up to 100% of person’s future emissions. Saves money in the future too.
        Tepix 4y ago
        But your decomposing family will release CO2!
        paranoidrobot 4y ago
        It's offset against the future CO2 emissions of the family and their descendants. (Gee, this thread got dark. Like carbon-black dark)
carabiner 4y ago
Crazy. Like a Jetboil for your home stove.
modriano 4y ago
What efficiency (in terms of energy transfer to the intended material vs to the environment) is observed with gas? IIRC, gas achieves maybe 35-50% efficiency (depending on the surface area and material of the pan) compared with ~80% for electric resistance heating and >90% for induction. Adam Ragusea did a water boiling comparison and the gas stove was dumping so much energy into the air around the pot that his thermometer melted [0]. I just don't see how any pan geometry could extract much of the energy from the quickly rising hot gas produced by combustion. [0] https://youtu.be/Xn1LUo5ra_A?t=249 https://youtu.be/Xn1LUo5ra_A?t=249
- stephen_g 4y ago
  The claim on the site is that the heat exchanger base boosts efficiency up to 60%. You still of course do have the problem that home rangehoods usually aren't powerful enough to create enough air-flow to properly deal with the NOx and SOx produced by burning gas, which turns out to be a big health risk...
  - amluto 4y ago
    Most home range hoods are too powerful. Go to any site that calculates commercial range hood requirements, enter in your parameters, and then try to find a nice range hood that matches. Those 700 cfm or 1000 cfm beasts the appliance stores sell are entirely inappropriate. There may well be a problem with a poorly designed range hood and exhaust that inevitably isn’t captured. And people might not like using the hoods all the time.
- heisenbit 4y ago
  Comparing gas with electrical efficiency is not representing realistic end-to-end efficiencies wrt. co2 as long as the vas majority of electricity is generated from primary energy. Power plants tend to have efficiencies lower 50%.
  - zwirbl 4y ago
    The gas end-to-end "efficiency" will not improve drastically ever, while for an electrical stove it is tied to energy production. Arguing with end-to-end efficiencies and power plants is misleading, as I can power my induction stove from my solar panels
namuol 4y ago
I have a gas stove in my studio apartment. I still use an electric kettle to get water boiling before dumping it into a preheated pan to cook noodles/whatever. Highly recommend this approach if you are stuck with gas.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > Highly recommend this approach if you are stuck with gas. My partner, who cooks more, bemoans that our new apartment has electric. Grew up using gas and claims that it’s better for cooking. I prefer not to intentionally dump gas into our house and welcome the minor benefit of energy efficiency. Funny how different people see the world (and technology).
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Get a (high power) portable induction hob. If you have an outlet that can supply a 1.8-3kW one, it's better than gas unless you're using a wok or simar.
  - diordiderot 4y ago
    Watch this video about how the idea that gas was better for cooking was a marketing ploy with no basis in reality and how they used lobbyist to force has connections into building codes https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54
    - leoedin 4y ago
      "no basis in reality". Do you cook? Gas is functionally superior than traditional electric resistance cooking. That's not some evil lobby, that's practical experience. You can instantly control the temperature without juggling multiple burners at different heats. That makes it better. I'd take gas over electric (resistive or halogen) all the time - and I've lived with both. Induction is on par with gas in controllability - and although there are some downsides, the upsides (so easy to clean!) Make it worth it (imo). I'm not saying that because big induction paid me to either.

ReptileMan 4y ago

>Though induction stovetops can be faster yet, and just as clean. You have the mother of all hotspots on the pan (less relevant for boiling) where the induction ring itself is and getting simmer right is harder. Induction as implemented right now is on/off with full blast for the duration and just increased downtime. It is not the same as low constant output.

kergonath 4y ago
> You have the mother of all hotspots on the pan (less relevant for boiling) where the induction ring itself is and getting simmer right is harder. Not at all. There is no significant hot spot as heat is actually produced by the bottom of the pan and not the coils themselves. > Induction as implemented right now is on/off with full blast for the duration and just increased downtime. It is not the same as low constant output. Again, not at all. All the devices I have used were perfectly fine generating a low, constant heat. what you describe may be the case for bargain basement ones, and it was the case for most resistive cooktops, but is definitely not the case for inductions ones.
- masklinn 4y ago
  I guess you could have a hot spot on the pan if the coils are ill-designed or you’re putting a large pan on a small burner? The pan will only heat up near the coil, so if the coil covers only the center third of the pan, only that will heat up (though some pans have a heat-spreading layer to mitigate this, and sometimes to add some more inertia depending on the pan’s purpose).
  - kergonath 4y ago
    > I guess you could have a hot spot on the pan if the coils are ill-designed or you’re putting a large pan on a small burner? Yes, but then it’s hardly a problem with the technology if you put a large pan on a small burner. As for the rest, in all cookers I have seen, the coils cover the whole surface, except for a small spot in the centre. Besides, induced current does not happen only where the cookware is closest to the coil. The magnetic field is more spread out than that and the heating surface is larger than just the surface of “contact” (there is no real contact, but anyway). I assume there could be an exceptionally badly designed induction cooktop with hot spots (it’d have to have a very weird geometry, though), but that would take some effort.

thaumasiotes 4y ago

> While the time savings is modest, if you have an electric kettle it's a no brainer to prefer that over gas. Not quite. Water is heavy and boiling water is dangerous; if you're boiling your water in a teakettle you then have to transfer it to a pot on the stove without scalding yourself. (This isn't the exact problem I'd experience if I adopted your advice. I have an electric teakettle, but it is low volume and is also sharply limited in the rate at which you can pour out water from it. That's fine if you want to prepare individual servings of tea. It's unworkable if you want to prepare a bunch of boiling water to boil stuff in. But fixing that problem will immediately cause the "boiling water is dangerous" problem.)

SECProto 4y ago
Presumably you mean you have a gooseneck kettle, which I agree is not well suited to this task (though if it takes 30s to pour out the kettle, it's not really a big deal). Regardless, pouring boiling water out of a kettle is far less dangerous than pouring the cooked pasta + boiling water out of the pot and into a strainer. If I'm looking to boil say 2 litres of water, I'll put 1.5 l in the electric kettle, 0.5l in the pot on the gas stove with a lid on. Generally the kettle boils first.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > Regardless, pouring boiling water out of a kettle is far less dangerous than pouring the cooked pasta + boiling water out of the pot and into a strainer. I don't think this is true. The mechanics are essentially the same. But the colander receiving the pasta + boiling water is situated inside the sink, which will catch the water that is in that case intended to spill out. The pot is situated on the stove, which is a raised platform that can't catch water at all. Any spill there will splash all over.
  - SECProto 4y ago
    Well, with my sample size of one, I've splashed boiling water on the floor when trying to drain pasta or potatoes, but never while pouring out a kettle. Perhaps related, a kettle has a cold base in addition to a cold handle oriented more appropriately for pouring.