Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What a gas stove ban means for restaurants

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 614 posts

Re: What a gas stove ban means for restaurants

#341

Post by colin_mccabe »

hristov wrote: post #208

Wow. So much bullshit. Where do I start. Most importantly, the motion only bans gas appliances in new construction. Now think about this and re-read the article with this important fact in mind, and you will discover that nothing in the article is actually the least bit relevant for the proposed ordinance. Everything they talk about refers to existing restaurants in existing buildings, which will not be affected by t…

> ...avoiding the need to build the gas infrastructure results in significant savings and so does skipping all the chimneys, vents and fans needed to remove the smoke from the kitchens

I agree that skipping the gas infrastructure will save some money. However, you can't skip all the chimneys, vents and fans for the kitchen because heating foot produces particles and sometimes smoke.

> Thus, for example, wine that has been casked in wooden barrels is often said to have a pleasant smoky smell, even if the barrels are not actually burned.

Those barrels are always burned. There are various levels of "toast": light toast, medium toast, heavy toast.

> And to create initial demand in new buildings, where you are actually making significant savings by not hooking up gas at all, is just an easy slam dunk decision.

I mean, it saves money for the builders, but will probably cost more money for the people who live or work there. Unless electricity prices go down drastically, which doesn't seem likely.

On the plus side, it's nice not to have gas lines around if there is an earthquake.

Re: What a gas stove ban means for restaurants

#342

Post by jeffbee »

russdill wrote: post #302
KingMachiavelli wrote: post #275

A large reason electric (restive and induction) are seen as inferior to gas is that portable units are limited to 120v/15a (few are 20a) so the total possible power is technically less than a gas stove; 2800w effective. However, gas stoves are very inefficient so in reality it's not a huge problem and 240v electric stoves could even be hotter (~4000w) than a gas stove. > Xie estimates that he pays around $500 to $700…

Commercial induction woks go up to ludicrous power levels. I've seen 15 and 20 kW models online.

Yeah but commercial gas wok cookers are also just basically broken-off gas mains with a foot pedal valve. They're probably up into the tens of kilowatts effective, too.

Re: What a gas stove ban means for restaurants

#343

Post by elil17 »

kec wrote: post #285
elil17 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's absolutely short sighted. Gas appliances are more efficient than electric appliances powered by natural gas fired power plants. While hydrogen might be a way's away (plus it requires redesigning everything), people (for example, Oberon fuels in California) are already mixing renewable dimethyl ether (similar to propane, but the central carbon atom is an oxygen atom) with propane in tanks for gas grills. St…

This isn't really true. Electric heating is as close to 100% efficient as is practical in the real world. I would also be shocked to learn that gas turbines at a power plant extract fewer watts per unit of gas than a simple (likely poorly maintained) burner in a residential setting.

That may be true for stoves where heat goes into the air but it’s not true for other appliances. Most modern gas furnaces have an efficiency of about 80%, meaning 20% of energy is lost as exhaust. Some newer systems have efficiencies as high as 98.5%, and older systems might go as low as 56% [1] Natural gas combined cycle plants (they have have multiple turbines for increased efficiency) around 50% efficiency (efficiency is limited by the thermodynamics of converting heat to electricity) [2]

So even with the worst furnace and the best power plant, the furnace still has similar efficiency. In the average case, furnaces are more efficient.

[1]: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/furnaces-and-boilers [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/natural-gas...

Re: What a gas stove ban means for restaurants

#344

Post by viraptor »

dlisboa wrote: post #307
pao wrote: post #288

Seems like a lot of the interest in these bans is coming from new research like this [Stanford study]( https://news.stanford.edu/2022/01/27/rethinking-cooking-gas/ ) showing gas stoves emit more methane than previously thought. They say all residential stoves in the US emit GHG equivalent to 500,000 cars. There are 276 million cars in the US. So, this problem is about 1/500 of the car problem. If you eliminated all s…

This relates to a difficult topic, which is: should modern civilization be 100% carbon neutral? Some things are inherently difficult to make electric, yet we need them to have what we'd call a "modern civilization". Planes are the biggest one: there is a drive to use more trains instead of planes, but should we give that up? It is definitely a step backwards in civilization, as large parts of the world are now imposs…

> there is a drive to use more trains instead of planes, but should we give that up?

If you have good trains it's not giving things up. Apart from long distance travel HS trains are just better is almost every way.

Re: What a gas stove ban means for restaurants

#345

Post by elil17 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #187
elil17 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's absolutely short sighted. Gas appliances are more efficient than electric appliances powered by natural gas fired power plants. While hydrogen might be a way's away (plus it requires redesigning everything), people (for example, Oberon fuels in California) are already mixing renewable dimethyl ether (similar to propane, but the central carbon atom is an oxygen atom) with propane in tanks for gas grills. St…

Doesn't that omit the impact of natural gas on climate change?

I mean it impacts the climate whether it’s burned in a burner or in a power plant. We shouldn’t do either, but if you stop just the appliances you’ll just end up burning more in a power plant.

Re: What a gas stove ban means for restaurants

#346

Post by bcbrown »

brewdad wrote: post #319
jacquesm wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it's not just about energy transfer, it is also about temperature stability, ability to ramp up and down in a short time, ability to deliver that heat gradually. You can't compare an immersion coil with an induction plate or a gas stove directly by only looking at the energy transfer efficiency. There is much more to it than that.

I'm still not seeing the problem. Remove pan from the immersion coil and heat delivery ceases immediately. Adjusting the rate of heat delivery also happens quickly. There may be some cases where you have to alter technique a bit from what you are used to but, aside from wok cooking, I can't think of anything that you can cook over gas that you can't cook on an induction top.

You can't use copper or aluminum pans on induction stoves, so you're not going to be able to have a pan that has both high thermal conductivity and low thermal heat capacity. This is important for cooking things that need to go quickly from high temperature to off, for example hollandaise/bearnaise, caramel, roux. Even deglazing a pan to make a sauce benefits from being able to quickly stop heat transfer before whisking in the finishing butter for an emulsion. You can take your steel-clad pan off the induction coil, but there's still a lot of heat capacity in the pan that will continue transferring to the food.

I mean, I think you're mostly right, in that I wouldn't have to make that many sacrifices in switching from a gas stove to an induction stove, other than having to replace the majority of my pots and pans and learning some new techniques. But there's certainly a non-trivial amount of recipes and techniques that rely on the characteristics of a high-conductivity low-capacity pan over a gas stove.

Re: What a gas stove ban means for restaurants

#347

Post by Mikeb85 »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #313
chrisseaton wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many (most?) restaurants are electric-only. Are you in the restaurant industry? Maybe you know more than me, but about 3/4 of restaurants I go to in Europe have open kitchens, and I mean it's completely obvious that every single one of them is using gas, as you can literally see the flames, and I guess those with closed kitchens it's similar, so I can't square what you're saying with my own eyes.

Second. It's just not cooking with electric, it sucks. It's not an adequate substitute the way electric heat is a substitute for gas heat. Not equivalent. I think it's ineconomical, takes too long to cook for a restaurant, just fucking sucks. It fucking sucks. Big gas ranges are the best, especially if they produce a huge flame and you can cook your bacon quickly and really get it nice, crispy. With electric the baco…

>Plus it takes for ever to boil anything

Tell me you've never cooked on induction without telling me.

If there's ONE thing an induction range does quantitatively better than a gas range, it's boil water...

Re: What a gas stove ban means for restaurants

#348

Post by brewdad »

ars wrote: post #238
krallja wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> water heater…slow it goes in an insulated tank? why does the speed matter? the tank is always at temperature. if you run out of hot water, that’s a tank size issue, not a heater technology issue.

A 40 gallon tank can provide 2 showers per hour. You can get 80 gallon ones for residential use, larger than that is in commercial territory. But that's still just 4 showers - if you have a bunch of people all getting ready for an event, and you also have laundry to do (which uses double what a shower uses, although takes longer) and run the dishwasher, etc. It's not enough. You would need a truly mammoth tank. Inste…

Congratulations on creating a scenario in your mind that will never happen. If you are all less than an hour away from leaving for an event, why are you washing clothes that won't be ready in time? Did you really have to run the dishwasher right before Kim's wedding or could you have set it to run while you are gone or after you get back if you somehow have a dishwasher without a timer setting? If you know you need four people to shower, maybe don't all wait until the last minute.

Re: What a gas stove ban means for restaurants

#349

Post by ramtatatam »

chociej wrote: post #218
AlgorithmicTime wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Induction stoves are seriously inferior to gas, in every way. They are slower to heat. They are more expensive to operate. They are more fragile. They rely on complex electronics vs. simple mechanics. They require specific cookware made out of only certain materials. They require direct contact with the "burner" to work. In what possible way are they superior?

Consumer Reports, for one, is happy to report that "No other cooking technology we’ve tested is faster than induction." I would think a lot of the advantages of induction are really obvious, so I don't think your statement that they are "inferior to gas in every way" is particularly in good faith. No gas in a building should be obviously advantageous. Reduced ability to cause burns or fires too. Reduction of use of a…

In the past 15 years I happened to rent in many cities and use all three technologies to heat my food (that is, gas, resistive and induction) and indeed, induction heats in shortest amount of time.

Re: What a gas stove ban means for restaurants

#350

Post by freeone3000 »

wrycoder wrote: post #298
Tiktaalik wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Vancouver, where 54% of CO2 emissions is natural gas use in buildings, the City has recently banned natural gas use in new building construction, however they did leave the door open to allowing natural gas use for cooking and fireplace. I suppose the dominant amount of CO2 is coming from water heating and home heating. Perhaps there are some allowances for restaurants as well. I think that would make sense to me.…

Does that include the CO2 from power generation?

Sure. BC is 87% hydro, 5% biomass, 3% wind.
Post reply on HN