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There is also a third problem with this.... what happens when shit hits the fan? If you use gas and your neighbours use electricity, and there's suddenly a pow

There is also a third problem with this.... what happens when shit hits the fan? If you use gas and your neighbours use electricity, and there's suddenly a power outage, you can help your neighbors and heat/cook their food too,... or in case of a gas system outage, they can help with yours. If you heat with gas, you don't freeze even with a power outage, and can still buy a cheap electric heater with a gas outage... if you heat with electricity, you can atleast try to find someone with gas heat to let you sleep over and not freeze. Banning everything except electricity is just calling for a catastrophy. (yes yes, i know, old heaters will stay, this applies only to new construction, but in 30 years, most old devices will be replaced too) edit: i don't know why the downvotes... probably not many people from texas here... or anywhere else in the world... or maybe people think that NY is somehow immune to such outages

amrocha 4y ago
If "shit hits the fan" to the point that you don't have electricity for several weeks then it's unreasonable to expect to be able to shelter in your own home imo.
- jprete 4y ago
  Sheltering away from home is extremely expensive, disrupts anything resembling normal life - which a power outage does not - and may not even be possible if a large fraction of the local population all tries to find a hotel outside of the outage area at the same time.
  - MereInterest 4y ago
    > which a power outage does not Things that don't work without electric power: * Refrigeration. For a 6-12 hour power outage, leaving the doors closed is sufficient. For 1-3 days, fridge temperatures may be maintained by buying bags of ice, but not a freezer. * Emergency communication. Landline phones might still function, depending on exactly where the breakage occurred. Cell phones have 24-48 hours of battery power at the most. * Central heating. Even a gas furnace requires electricity for its controller. * Kitchen ranges (conditional). For a gas range, this depends on whether you have a lighter or matches. A power outage disrupts normal life. During a power outage, you cannot cook food, cannot preserve food, and cannot heat your home. Depending on the duration, sheltering away from home may be the less disruptive option.
  - amrocha 4y ago
    I mean, ideally it should be free to go to a community shelter. If it's not a disaster and just an unfortunate situation, that's what insurance is for. I guess I don't know what a natural disaster would be like where you're from. This is why I live in Japan, where disaster preparedness is taken extremely seriously at a societal level.
- toast0 4y ago
  In the conditions where electricity is out for several weeks, transportation between your home and a community shelter may also be unreasonable.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    Not necessarily. The two times in my life when we had week long power outages, the root cause was an ice storm that brought down trees onto power lines. The ice only lasted a couple days but the damage took longer to repair. Roads were cleared within a couple days. If you live in a remote enough place where your road won’t be cleared shortly after the storm, you need to have a backup plan that doesn’t rely on any outside services.
  - amrocha 4y ago
    If you live in a remote enough place that you need your own backup plan then I would think only having to think about electricity would make things easier
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
I'm guessing (maybe hoping?) that the downvotes are for the seemingly overly apocalyptic tone of your post. But FWIW, as someone who is from Texas who lost power for 5 days during Uri and nearly a week for the latest freeze this winter, I wholeheartedly agree. Not sure how I would have made it during Uri without gas - even with gas, we couldn't run our heater (system still needs electricity to run the fans, thermostats, etc.) but we could run a gas fireplace, which kept our house temp just high enough to keep our pipes from bursting. I still shudder from all the pics of people with icicles dripping from their ceiling fans.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  I mean... it's a power outage, those happen and sometimes last a long time. In my country, we had a strange mix of humid air hitting a cold air front, so one side of the country had rain, the other had snowfall, and in between you had frozen rain... The result? This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2Gr_RKN4Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2Gr_RKN4Os (ignore the weird music). This is what the power lines looked like: https://www.postojna.si/Datoteke/Slike/Novice/123958/l_123958_1.jpg https://www.postojna.si/Datoteke/Slike/Novice/123958/l_12395... Was it a problem? Sure. But not a huge once, since everyone in the rural area was familiar with power issues even from the yugoslav era, wood furnaces are still common, even in houses with central heating (most nowadays), and well.. the country of ~2mio pop. has ~162k voulonteer firefighters, and fallen trees were removed, roads were cleared, and due to a lot of shitty wood, the toilet paper was cheap :) Now we're looking at this (article here), and germany banning gas, oil and wood heating, and many other countries following, and even a localized event or just some operator fuckup can cause a huge catastrophy. (also, I might have a slight bias, since I know how the infrastructure works and many people who operate it, and it's a miracly we don't have more outages.... same for the internet itself... the core of the internet is based on routers saying "This is me, i own this IP block, just send me the traffic" and all the other routers believing it and doing what it's said... so yeah)
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  We lost electricity due to an ice storm for a couple of weeks when I was a kid in Mississippi. No natural gas at all, but we bought propane heaters to get through it.
realworldperson 4y ago
[dead]
gwbas1c 4y ago
> If you use gas and your neighbours use electricity, and there's suddenly a power outage I got solar, a powerwall, and a wood stove. (I also have a gas stove, but I wish I put the money into buying an extra powerwall.)
8note 4y ago
An argument for backups is an argument for backups, rather than an argument for gas stoves. Gas systems could make a backup, but don't unless they're designed to, and even if they do, you're gonna have a cheaper time installing just the one system than multiple. A generator, or a community generator with rollover practice is the right answer. You don't see hospitals making every other room gas so they can survive a power outage. Instead, they have a generator
UncleMeat 4y ago
My gas furnace won't run if there's no power because it uses various electrical systems for safety controls. I am not convinced that "we'll have it if we lose power" is actually a meaningful part of the public's reasoning for purchasing gas furnaces.
- bluGill 4y ago
  A cheap inverter from a car battery will run any gas furnace
Zak 4y ago
A surprising number of gas stoves do not work without electrical power. It's supposedly for safety reasons because a user might leave the gas on after the electronic igniter fails to fire. Of course, it's possible for a sufficiently incompetent user to turn the knob past the light position and achieve the same result when it does have electrical power, so this feature strikes me as nonsensical. I had an annoying experience with this during a multi-day outage in Alaska last year. We did have other options including a generator, but I'm not a fan of being patronized by an appliance.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Why is that a feature? ...interesting :) Our stoves here usually have some heat-based protection, where you have to hold the knob pressed in until a tiny rod heats up (usually 2, 3 seconds) and after that you can release it and the gas will stay on. Without power, you just need a ligher (or anything releasing a spark) to ignite the gas. Also, the default configuration for gas stoves is 3x gas cooktop + 1x electric, so most people are covered in both cases.
  - Zak 4y ago
    I've used the design you're describing with a heat-based valve, and it's definitely superior. I've never seen a cooktop with both gas and electric - is this redundancy in case one service or the other is interrupted?
    - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      I have no idea what the reasoning behind it was then, but it was a standard carried over from yugoslav times (usually 3 gas + 1 electric or 2+2) :) So yeah, could be redundancy... https://i.imgur.com/rHDaZxm.png https://i.imgur.com/rHDaZxm.png <- something like this was standard, also back in the time the colors were browner ( eg. https://i.imgur.com/RJkq5GK.png https://i.imgur.com/RJkq5GK.png ) :) The modern variants look more like this: https://i.imgur.com/iJvKQjy.png https://i.imgur.com/iJvKQjy.png or with inductive heat instead of resistive: https://i.imgur.com/BOetXJz.png https://i.imgur.com/BOetXJz.png I remember only one gas outage (some repair work done somewhere and they closed the valves) but there were quite a few power outages, where you had to use a lighter.
amalcon 4y ago
I have a propane camping stove (a slightly modernized version of the classic Coleman model). This is the main reason why. They aren't that expensive, and you can also take it camping or set it up near your outdoor grill to prepare a side.
theshrike79 4y ago
Then I can use the V2L capability in my EV and run a microwave on it for example, while also running the ground source heat pump. I also have a gas grill and a camping stove for emergencies (and for camping).

amrocha 4y ago

If "shit hits the fan" to the point that you don't have electricity for several weeks then it's unreasonable to expect to be able to shelter in your own home imo.

jprete 4y ago
Sheltering away from home is extremely expensive, disrupts anything resembling normal life - which a power outage does not - and may not even be possible if a large fraction of the local population all tries to find a hotel outside of the outage area at the same time.
- MereInterest 4y ago
  > which a power outage does not Things that don't work without electric power: * Refrigeration. For a 6-12 hour power outage, leaving the doors closed is sufficient. For 1-3 days, fridge temperatures may be maintained by buying bags of ice, but not a freezer. * Emergency communication. Landline phones might still function, depending on exactly where the breakage occurred. Cell phones have 24-48 hours of battery power at the most. * Central heating. Even a gas furnace requires electricity for its controller. * Kitchen ranges (conditional). For a gas range, this depends on whether you have a lighter or matches. A power outage disrupts normal life. During a power outage, you cannot cook food, cannot preserve food, and cannot heat your home. Depending on the duration, sheltering away from home may be the less disruptive option.
- amrocha 4y ago
  I mean, ideally it should be free to go to a community shelter. If it's not a disaster and just an unfortunate situation, that's what insurance is for. I guess I don't know what a natural disaster would be like where you're from. This is why I live in Japan, where disaster preparedness is taken extremely seriously at a societal level.
toast0 4y ago
In the conditions where electricity is out for several weeks, transportation between your home and a community shelter may also be unreasonable.
- brewdad 4y ago
  Not necessarily. The two times in my life when we had week long power outages, the root cause was an ice storm that brought down trees onto power lines. The ice only lasted a couple days but the damage took longer to repair. Roads were cleared within a couple days. If you live in a remote enough place where your road won’t be cleared shortly after the storm, you need to have a backup plan that doesn’t rely on any outside services.
- amrocha 4y ago
  If you live in a remote enough place that you need your own backup plan then I would think only having to think about electricity would make things easier

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

I'm guessing (maybe hoping?) that the downvotes are for the seemingly overly apocalyptic tone of your post. But FWIW, as someone who is from Texas who lost power for 5 days during Uri and nearly a week for the latest freeze this winter, I wholeheartedly agree. Not sure how I would have made it during Uri without gas - even with gas, we couldn't run our heater (system still needs electricity to run the fans, thermostats, etc.) but we could run a gas fireplace, which kept our house temp just high enough to keep our pipes from bursting. I still shudder from all the pics of people with icicles dripping from their ceiling fans.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
I mean... it's a power outage, those happen and sometimes last a long time. In my country, we had a strange mix of humid air hitting a cold air front, so one side of the country had rain, the other had snowfall, and in between you had frozen rain... The result? This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2Gr_RKN4Os https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2Gr_RKN4Os (ignore the weird music). This is what the power lines looked like: https://www.postojna.si/Datoteke/Slike/Novice/123958/l_123958_1.jpg https://www.postojna.si/Datoteke/Slike/Novice/123958/l_12395... Was it a problem? Sure. But not a huge once, since everyone in the rural area was familiar with power issues even from the yugoslav era, wood furnaces are still common, even in houses with central heating (most nowadays), and well.. the country of ~2mio pop. has ~162k voulonteer firefighters, and fallen trees were removed, roads were cleared, and due to a lot of shitty wood, the toilet paper was cheap :) Now we're looking at this (article here), and germany banning gas, oil and wood heating, and many other countries following, and even a localized event or just some operator fuckup can cause a huge catastrophy. (also, I might have a slight bias, since I know how the infrastructure works and many people who operate it, and it's a miracly we don't have more outages.... same for the internet itself... the core of the internet is based on routers saying "This is me, i own this IP block, just send me the traffic" and all the other routers believing it and doing what it's said... so yeah)
seanmcdirmid 4y ago
We lost electricity due to an ice storm for a couple of weeks when I was a kid in Mississippi. No natural gas at all, but we bought propane heaters to get through it.

realworldperson 4y ago

[dead]

gwbas1c 4y ago

> If you use gas and your neighbours use electricity, and there's suddenly a power outage I got solar, a powerwall, and a wood stove. (I also have a gas stove, but I wish I put the money into buying an extra powerwall.)

8note 4y ago

An argument for backups is an argument for backups, rather than an argument for gas stoves. Gas systems could make a backup, but don't unless they're designed to, and even if they do, you're gonna have a cheaper time installing just the one system than multiple. A generator, or a community generator with rollover practice is the right answer. You don't see hospitals making every other room gas so they can survive a power outage. Instead, they have a generator

UncleMeat 4y ago

My gas furnace won't run if there's no power because it uses various electrical systems for safety controls. I am not convinced that "we'll have it if we lose power" is actually a meaningful part of the public's reasoning for purchasing gas furnaces.

bluGill 4y ago
A cheap inverter from a car battery will run any gas furnace

Zak 4y ago

A surprising number of gas stoves do not work without electrical power. It's supposedly for safety reasons because a user might leave the gas on after the electronic igniter fails to fire. Of course, it's possible for a sufficiently incompetent user to turn the knob past the light position and achieve the same result when it does have electrical power, so this feature strikes me as nonsensical. I had an annoying experience with this during a multi-day outage in Alaska last year. We did have other options including a generator, but I'm not a fan of being patronized by an appliance.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Why is that a feature? ...interesting :) Our stoves here usually have some heat-based protection, where you have to hold the knob pressed in until a tiny rod heats up (usually 2, 3 seconds) and after that you can release it and the gas will stay on. Without power, you just need a ligher (or anything releasing a spark) to ignite the gas. Also, the default configuration for gas stoves is 3x gas cooktop + 1x electric, so most people are covered in both cases.
- Zak 4y ago
  I've used the design you're describing with a heat-based valve, and it's definitely superior. I've never seen a cooktop with both gas and electric - is this redundancy in case one service or the other is interrupted?
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    I have no idea what the reasoning behind it was then, but it was a standard carried over from yugoslav times (usually 3 gas + 1 electric or 2+2) :) So yeah, could be redundancy... https://i.imgur.com/rHDaZxm.png https://i.imgur.com/rHDaZxm.png <- something like this was standard, also back in the time the colors were browner ( eg. https://i.imgur.com/RJkq5GK.png https://i.imgur.com/RJkq5GK.png ) :) The modern variants look more like this: https://i.imgur.com/iJvKQjy.png https://i.imgur.com/iJvKQjy.png or with inductive heat instead of resistive: https://i.imgur.com/BOetXJz.png https://i.imgur.com/BOetXJz.png I remember only one gas outage (some repair work done somewhere and they closed the valves) but there were quite a few power outages, where you had to use a lighter.

amalcon 4y ago

I have a propane camping stove (a slightly modernized version of the classic Coleman model). This is the main reason why. They aren't that expensive, and you can also take it camping or set it up near your outdoor grill to prepare a side.

theshrike79 4y ago

Then I can use the V2L capability in my EV and run a microwave on it for example, while also running the ground source heat pump. I also have a gas grill and a camping stove for emergencies (and for camping).