Live data from Hacker News

Gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations

npr.org

91–100 of 220 posts

Re: Gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations

#91
post #12

I once read, that regularly lighting stuff on fire near your home is generally a bad for your health.

That's why furnaces have a chimney.

As far as I know, they're still bad. Especially when everyone in the neighborhood has one.

Re: Gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations

#93
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why we need a carbon tax. Your gas bill needs to be much higher.

A good start would be to have the same tax on electricity and gas. It's absurd that gas is heavily subsidized in most of Europe: https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-energy-taxa... Fortunately, I live in one of the few countries which don't subsidize gas (Sweden). When I visit the continent and see a gas stove, it feels like going to a museum. Induction stoves are so much better.

"Induction stoves are so much better."

Depends. When the electricity comes from a gas power plant, it is way more efficient, to use the heat of the gas directly, instead of heating water and steam, running through a turbine, transmit lossy overland, convert to household power -> turn the electricity into heat again.

But when you have renewable sources, it is a different story. I believe you have mostly nuclear power in sweden?

Re: Gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations

#94

I switched to electric radiant. I miss being able to manipulate the pan yes. I like that it's more efficient. Gas kicked a LOT of heat into the kitchen. I like that it didn't scorch the side of the saucepans. Ultimately I switched to avoid burning fossil fuels. Every bit counts.

How is your local electricity generated?

For 99% of the electricity in my state:

* natural gas (42%)

* nuclear power (29%)

* coal (12%)

* solar energy (10%)

* hydroelectric power (5%)

* and wind (1%)

Re: Gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations

#96
post #35

I have a gas range, gas water heater, gas logs, and gas backup heat. My gas bill is around $15 a month. My home has proper ventilation to the outside and I have no intention of converting a cheap gas bill into a high electric bill.

A big point of the article seems to be that standard ventilation does not/did not adequately get rid of the nitrogen dioxide generated from a gas stove. Is your ventilation just really good, or is this not a concern for you?

Re: Gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they cost effective? I suppose in the long term you save money by paying for electricity instead of gas, which could offset price differences. I strongly prefer gas stoves over conductive electric ranges, but haven’t tried an induction stove yet.

I'm definitely not an expert, but I would say nothing of note has changed with our utility bill since we replaced the gas cooktop with an induction cooktop. The marketing will tell you it's more efficient because all the energy goes into the cooking (heating the pot) instead of heating the room as with gas. But hey, that's marketing. One other concern was control: we did find out that the power levels on our model we…

Thanks for the detailed response, I think a plug-in induction cooktop might be added to my future Christmas list!

Re: Gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations

#98
post #5
post #3

[flagged]

After trying induction for a couple of years, I now believe it's superior to gas.

That all depends on what you're cooking. I have used just about all types of cooking contraptions there are ranging from an open fire through a pit fire, several types of "cultivated" fires (wood-fired stoves, BBQs etc), propane/butane/methane gas burners of various types, coil/cast_iron/ceramic/halogen electric and induction stoves. I normally cook on a wood-fired stove seeing how as I live on a farm in the Swedish countryside with plenty of forest on my doorstep which I also use to heat the house and whose branches I cut up for the stove. I do have one of those cast-iron resistance heated electric ranges next to the wood-fired stove but I only use it as a parking lot for pans etc. I also have a few single-hob induction plates around which I sometimes use outside when we're not supposed to light fires due to extreme drought etc. When I lived in the Netherlands I bought a "gas-free" house which meant I had to use electricity for cooking. Induction was supposed to be the bees knees so I built myself a range with an induction cooker on top and a hot-air oven underneath it. The thing worked fine for some types of cooking but it royally sucked for e.g. stir-fry cooking using a wok. Even the flat-bottom version I got did not come close to the real thing on a gas stove or wood fire.

Now, more than 20 years later I regularly use my mother's new induction stove when I visit her in the Netherlands. That thing still sucks for stir-frying, no matter which pan I use. There is just not enough power to be had on a residential induction cooker to reach the quick heat needed to make a good nasi goreng (i.e. Indonesian-Dutch fried rice). On the wood-fired stove here at home I use a Chinese wok which hangs directly in the fire and as such is close to perfect. The sad part of this is that my mother's previous range had a special wok burner which, while not as capable as the wood-fired stove, at least made it possible to quickly reach a good heat and keep it. Alas, she felt she needed to go with the flow and had that range swapped out for an anaemic induction cooker which is supposed to be able to run 2 plates at max power (~2 kW) at the same time but does not even seem to be capable of that without dropping one of them a notch down.

If you're comparing commercial induction cookers to gas stoves the comparison might hold. There are special induction plates for using a round-bottomed wok which may also lead to better results. Those are not what most people will get at home when they replace their "dangerous" gas range though.

Induction's pro's are its reaction speed, cleanliness, electrical efficiency and sometimes price (single-hob plates at e.g. IKEA are dirt-cheap) but that is about it. Its cons are the lack of power in most residential ranges, the lack of fine-grained control, the sensitivity of the ceramic top plate - it gets scratched easily when you have an 'active' cooking style as well is liable to break when confronted with heavy cast-iron skillets in the hands of inexperienced users, this is true for all ceramic cookers and not specific to induction - and the power electronics (I have repaired two induction cookers already, one of them (a commercial single-hob plate) had a blown out capacitor (literally - loads of black smoke blew out off the thing), the other (Siemens) suffered from a whole bank of broken power transistors (RJH60T4 IGBTs). Finally, confusingly in the light of my remark about single-hob plates being cheap, its often high price. Induction still seems to be priced as a "luxury" good while in reality it is fairly cheap to produce, the only relatively expensive part being the power electronics (where "expensive" means "a few tens of euro's for the requisite transistors and capacitors as well as the copper induction coils).

Re: Gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations

#99
post #39
post #35

I have a gas range, gas water heater, gas logs, and gas backup heat. My gas bill is around $15 a month. My home has proper ventilation to the outside and I have no intention of converting a cheap gas bill into a high electric bill.

Induction ranges heat up water faster and use less energy than gas ranges: https://www.treehugger.com/which-more-energy-efficient-cooki... Since you mentioned that you have backup heating, I assume you don’t live in a very cold climate, in which case a heat pump for your backup heat and water heater is your most efficient lowest cost option, not a gas system. Part of your gas bill is just paying the gas company for a…

> I assume you don’t live in a very cold climate, in which case a heat pump for your backup heat

Like OP, I also live in South Carolina. My primary heat is a modern, efficient electric heat pump. When it’s cold enough outside that the heat pump is no longer more efficient than gas (maybe 8-12 weeks/yr where I am), the system switches fuel sources and runs a natural gas furnace instead.

Re: Gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations

#100
post #35

I have a gas range, gas water heater, gas logs, and gas backup heat. My gas bill is around $15 a month. My home has proper ventilation to the outside and I have no intention of converting a cheap gas bill into a high electric bill.

Interesting, anecdotally, the builder of my town home was convinced by promo dollars to install a gas range, gas heat for a half the house, and a gas fireplace.

I pay approximately $33 a month in service fees, $1 for gas 9 months of the year, and $30 for gas 3 months (we've sort of embraced the fire as a way to make some use of the fees)

If you're doing the math, we're paying $360 a year in fees for $70 (5x the fees as the use)

Oh and the game of carbon credits a $6 a month fee that the gas company then gives us a promo credit for each month

Post reply on HN