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New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

nytimes.com

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Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#311

Post by topaz0 »

whiddershins wrote: post #247
topaz0 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many ways that outrage can be fake, and a variety of them apply to this situation. For one thing the conservative talking points were all about a sense that the feds were coming for your freedom, and not in any way about the merits or otherwise of being able to burn gas in the place you live. For another, this was being talked about as something that would impose a heavy burden on normal people, which is si…

You are wrong. Most normal people in nyc have gas stoves and they are massively superior in every way to a typical electric range. Induction cooktops can be nice, but they are more expensive last I checked, and impose lots of limitations on what cookware you can use, including making it infeasible to use high end copper bottom French sauté pans, which also happen to be very hard to match the performance of. It is abs…

If you try to do exactly what you were doing on the gas stove in the same way, you will have a bad time, but my and many other people's experience is that a decent electric stove is perfectly capable of making good food once you figure out how to use it. Electric stoves in general can heat faster than gas, and in my experience heat more evenly (no hot spots), so you don't need the crutch of a copper bottom to conduct that heat across the surface. It's certainly true that there are a lot of crappy cheap electric stoves out there that are not nice to cook with, but there are also plenty of crappy gas stoves that don't work well too. There's a ton of propaganda out there about how cooking with gas is better (much of it funded by the gas producers and distributors), but it doesn't hold up well under inspection.

You are right that most people in new york have gas, but new york is an outlier in that -- one of only five states that are majority gas. Most of Tucker Carlson's audience have electric stoves.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#312

Post by 8note »

wtallis wrote: post #305
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. But, how much of the US gets below 17F? I think it’s a lot.

17°F isn't the point at which my heat pump stops working. It's just the lower temperature conventionally used as a point of comparison on the spec sheets for such devices. There's another column on the spec sheet for 47°F (where my heat pump model is listed as having a CoP of 3.6). And as for the question about colder climates: it's not a matter of whether an area can occasionally experience temperatures below eg. 17…

The question is what the cop is at -20C though, which is a fairly common winter temperature, and you really need heat at -40

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#313

Post by PM_me_your_math »

hotpotamus wrote: post #53
rayiner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you ignoring the title and first paragraph? > The facts and strategy behind the outrage over rumors of a ban on gas stoves > The conservative media was in uproar last week over speculation that the federal government planned to ban gas cooking stoves and possibly seize them. The aim is clearly to dismiss the concern as manufactured outrage—note the words “strategy,” “speculation,” and “outrage”—rather than a…

I seem to remember at one point that conservatives celebrated federalism - something about the states being the laboratories of democracy. Who knows, maybe New York will show how successful such a ban can be and the federal government can take that into consideration, but for now it seems like this is just New York.

Having lived in the metro area for quite a long time, I am qualified to tell you that few things NY does is exemplary of success. Most energy or public works projects turn into a total debacle. Shoreham Nuclear Power station is a good example. Billions spent, and they never even turned it on. Residents are still paying that down. Endless road project cycling. I'm not sure there has been a single transportation project that wasn't at last 3x over budget. Public corruption, kickbacks, bribery, influence peddling, patronage... The entire state apparatus is rotten to the core and rife with incompetence. I'd like to believe in the state's benevolence and concern for the well-being of its residence, but then I'd have to start or join a new religion (on blind faith alone) with its dogma being the bullshit that the state feeds to its residents.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#315

Post by ricardobayes »

Aunche wrote: post #272
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #166

I don't often like to take a "both sides" approach when assessing specific issues, but this one just seems to highlight the stupidity, or at the very least shortsightedness, of both sides. On one hand, for those pushing for a ban, this seems largely performative, a la banning plastic straws. Gas is used for 2 main reasons: for cooking, where it represents a miniscule amount of overall energy use, and for heating, whe…

>Gas is used for 2 main reasons: for cooking, where it represents a miniscule amount of overall energy use Gas cooking makes sense when the infrastructure costs can be amortized with that of heating. One of these costs is the 2-3% of gas that leaks, and this loss will occur even if you heat your home with heat pumps so long as you're connected to the gas grid. If your only use of gas is cooking, it makes much more se…

In my area I got a 50k quote to get connected to mains gas even though it's less than 200 meters away. They can pound sand, even the a state-of-the-art heat pump system is a fraction of that.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#316

Post by lelanthran »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #195
topaz0 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of the reason for banning gas is not energy but indoor pollution. There's pretty strong and growing evidence that cooking with gas leads to substantial health risks because of various combustion products that end up in your air (especially if not properly vented).

The total effect on health seems rather debatable, and even if so there are better solutions (e.g. minimum ventilation requirements) for that. Total bans on products people use and can enjoy responsibility due to potential health risks is nearly always a bad idea in my opinion. Just look at smoking in the US, for example, which recently hit an all time low. We could have gone the prohibition route (and we can guess h…

As far as I know, the lower levels of smoking have not made the US health outcomes any better than places where smoking is at ridiculously high levels, like France.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#317

Post by Zak »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #176
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #166

I don't often like to take a "both sides" approach when assessing specific issues, but this one just seems to highlight the stupidity, or at the very least shortsightedness, of both sides. On one hand, for those pushing for a ban, this seems largely performative, a la banning plastic straws. Gas is used for 2 main reasons: for cooking, where it represents a miniscule amount of overall energy use, and for heating, whe…

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...…

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.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#318

Post by ricardobayes »

blindriver wrote: post #286
dadjoker wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As California has shown multiple times, dependence on electricity alone can be disastrous.

California's strategy for electricity is non-existent. We have been perpetually at peak electricity use since 25+ years since I came here. Meanwhile electricity use from EVs has soared, and we don't have enough electricity for everything. AND we attempted to shut down nuclear power plants but that appears to be on hold for now. Plus, I'm paying over $0.50/kWh when I hit Tier 3, which I hit after 2 charges of my EV. E…

Well, holy smokes, I thought electricity was cheap in the US.

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#319

Post by magicalhippo »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #181
jillesvangurp wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat pumps are about 250-300% efficient. Relative to resistive heating which is of course 100% efficient. Gas is about close to 100% (you loose some via exhaust). Ground source heat pumps work pretty much anywhere. Air source heat pumps can be more challenging but can also work at more extreme temperatures. They don't stop working but their efficiency drops a bit. And of course resistive heating doesn't stop working.…

> Heat pumps are about 250-300% efficient. Sure. When we’re talking about the temperature band they work in. Once it hits 0C the efficiency is very low, and by -10C is almost doing nothing at all. At that point you have two things happening… 1. You are using electricity to warm your coils outside to keep frost and snow off them. 2. You are using drastically inefficient heat for your home. 200-300% in their band under…

This guy[1] ran a test on his home during last winter, and found that his mini split had a COP of around 1.5-2.5 down to -10C.

The data wasn't terribly correlated to temperature, though he didn't have a mini-shed for the outside unit to protect it from snow, so it probably had to defrost more often during the less-cold, snowy days.

FWIW here in Oslo, we've been using a mini split as the main heat in our home, where it's often -15C for long stretches during winter, and can get down to -25C. It's in the main livingroom, and we do supplement the upstairs bedroom with resistive foil floor heating during the coldest periods. Other than that it's doing great, and comparing the electricity bills with friends and colleagues who don't have a heat pump it's definitely helping a lot.

[1]: https://youtu.be/fxEqVuiHhM0?t=523

Re: New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

#320

Post by 8note »

abigail95 wrote: post #231
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Heat pumps are about 250-300% efficient. Sure. When we’re talking about the temperature band they work in. Once it hits 0C the efficiency is very low, and by -10C is almost doing nothing at all. At that point you have two things happening… 1. You are using electricity to warm your coils outside to keep frost and snow off them. 2. You are using drastically inefficient heat for your home. 200-300% in their band under…

What heat pump model are you using for your numbers so I can confirm its specs?

For pretty standard specs, you should be able to look at any old heat pump
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