I switched to induction holy shit it's so much better!
if you have compatible cookware, definitely try it out, you can get an external induction cooktop from Ikea for like $60. if you don't, get some and switch because the cooking process is so much more enjoyable.
you know how when you're sauteing something and you wanna get a good sniff because it's smells amazing, only to get your eyebrows singed and a lungfull of half combusted propane? with induction, you get nothing but the smell of your food, without the excess wasted heat. also, it's fast on the big eye I can boil water insanely fast, I honestly didn't know it was possible to boil water that fast.
and I can say this all only as a happy customer who paid my own money, not as a paid advertisement, UNLIKE the gas industry which has been pushing this shit through influencers and marketing for decades. [1]
> only to get your eyebrows singed and a lungfull of half combusted propane
I dare say, something is wrong with your stove if any of this is even half true. Either that, or people need to learn to cook.
This article is about the particulate being released from the items inside the pan. Such as fats/oils burning... which will happen no matter what style pan or range top you use.
I generally agree, though I did somewhat regularly singe the hair on my knuckles. A lot of the heat from a gas burner goes up the side of the pan. And turning on a vent fan can suck a surprising amount of heat away from the pan. That does kinda suck since gas isn't really very powerful to begin with.
I switched recently to induction and I'm very happy. I did have to relearn some cooking habits, of course, because induction is so much faster and more powerful than gas. The instant temperature change is super handy, too. Gas is relatively fast, too, but still slow compared to induction.
It's amazing to me to see us careening towards a future of doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling every household's electricity usage - but we're not doing anything to ensure the capacity is there to handle the demand. Every new power plant, dam, nuclear, etc is met with fierce opposition...
Induction uses a tremendous amount of electricity, and is expensive to operate. So are the other current trendy items, such as heat pumps and electric vehicles.
We have no way to support all this, even if they were objectively better (and the fact that there is debate around this subject proves just the opposite).
It's also strange to see the duality of complaining about things like bitcoin wasting electricity, while we also advocate for massive increases in consumption everywhere else.
For now, Induction ranges are a thing for those privileged enough to be able to afford them, all the peripherals required to operate them (cookware, etc), and operational expenses.
You're somehow ignoring the fact that natural gas is ... an energy source. Cooking uses energy, period, whether it's delivered in a pipe or a wire. The difference is that electricity _can_ be generated in a carbon-neutral way, but methane can't.
The other underlying question is about the conversion efficiency of, e.g., natural gas to electricity to heat (generation station -> house -> induction stove) vs directly burning gas at the stove. And the answer is -- induction often wins out, because gas stoves are pretty inefficient (they let a lot of heat energy bypass the pan). And it wins from an indoor air quality perspective. Where it may not win is cost, depending on the relative prices of gas and electricity where you live. But full electrification of your house allows you to save the costs of the monthly gas hookup and may reduce insurance costs.
I don’t necessarily agree nor disagree with your position. However
> save the costs of the monthly gas hookup
For anyone wondering how much a common gas (propane) stove costs: I have a 100 gallon propane tank that cost ~$300 to fill and lasts multiple years without a refill.
My whole-house generator also runs off the same propane tank. So I refill it maybe once a year (where we average 1-2 days without power per year).
One unspoken benefit of gas: it works without electricity.
I hate the inside air pollution, though.
I could see myself maybe trying induction. I could never switch ti electric. Personal preference but when I turn on a stove I don’t have patience to wait for it to warm up.
In Pittsburgh, my summertime natural gas bill is about $25 - That's with a gas stove, gas, water heater, and gas dryer. Of that, $14.50 is just the cost to be hooked up to gas. IOW, the connection fee is substantially higher than the cost of the energy I use to cook.
(My winter time bill is much higher; we heat the house with a gas boiler.)
But there's $174/year of savings available if we went all-electric. Which we won't do any time soon, alas.
It's more expensive per unit power but heat pumps are more efficient than natural gas boilers. I can't easily retrofit, but a very high SEER heat pump comes out to a similar annual cost as my existing 96% efficient natural gas boiler. But only a very high efficiency one; a middle of the road heat pump loses, partly because I have a very high efficiency condensing boiler and partly because PA has fairly affordable gas rates.
Induction uses less electricity than conventional resistance electric stoves, which have been around for a long time. The power usage is high but generally the stove is only on for maybe 15 minutes for most meals. Longer cooking times are more commonly done in an oven.
If you really wanted to cut down on energy used by households then the single biggest thing is making sure all homes are properly insulated to cut down on both heating and cooling.
Electric vehicles are an actual concern, but the issue there can be largely mitigated by making sure they're primarily charged off peak which is also something we have done for a long time with electric water heaters.
I have induction. The air quality is the same. It's not the source of energy so much as it is the cooking of the product itself. My air quality goes to red with induction or gas. Induction doesn't yield cleaner air. Its the smoke from the meat or vegetables changing with the oil and fats.
Perhaps that's more of a measurement issue? The combustion byproducts of gas are very real and measurable, and getting rid of those definitely helps. Even if the cooking itself contributes as well. I don't get much smoke from my cooking, though, so it could just be that.
The byproducts and smoke of cooking meat and vegetables are the real issue. What do you make? In the old days we would probably be cooking this stuff inside.
Not sealed off homes with simulated cooling or heating.
FWIW with my AQ meter it seems like how you use the stove matters more. When I boil water with my gas stove, barely anything changes. Same thing with heating a frying pan. But as soon as you pour some oil on it, the PM2.5 spikes.
I love my induction but certain types of cooking, specially anything with a wok, just doesn’t work with induction. Sometimes you need that heat wrapping up the sides.
One of your sources is selling cook tops, the other has a very specialized induction stand-alone cooktop made just for woks, and the other article is cut off behind a paywall.
The source that sells cook tops doesn't claim "it's just as good" or even provide any evidence of it being as good. You can in fact use a wok on any cook top, it doesn't mean the results will be good.
Induction can be good, but it's very expensive and uses enormous amounts of electricity.
There is nothing wrong with natural gas - other than it's trendy to push electric currently. There's no future where everyone can afford to buy/replace one, or even operate them.
> Induction can be good, but it's very expensive and uses enormous amounts of electricity.
Currently more than resistive electric, and some gas ranges. Define "enormous". Because about two-thirds of US households already use electricity as the cooking fuel source:
And induction would probably use it more efficiently since the energy goes directly to the pan. So if more folks switched from the coil-resistive electric stoves they most likely already have to induction there would be a net reduction in energy use.
> There is nothing wrong with natural gas - other than it's trendy to push electric currently.
And the fact that it's highly inefficient, throws oodles of heat into your kitchen, and methane is a greenhouse gas (GWP>>1)—but besides that Mrs. Lincoln…. See also perhaps Adam Ragusea on his own gas stove:
> J. Kenji López-Alt, who recently literally wrote the/a book on wok cooking, would disagree:
Incorrect. He states certain foods and flavors will not work with induction or would be difficult without gas in the article itself. He suggests workarounds like a propane stove or butane torch, but he never claims you can replicate those flavors with induction.
> anything with a wok, just doesn’t work with induction
López-Alt, in the article[1]:
> But for most wok cooking, you don’t need it. There’s plenty of homestyle dishes that don’t have that flavor. For my Wok book tour, I brought around an induction wok cooktop. And it works just fine.
> People have this idea that you can’t cook on a wok without a gas flame. But most of the recipes in my book work just fine without one.
So I think it’s totally fair to say he’d disagree. Not sure how you’d get “incorrect” out of that.
Everything has trade-offs. But on the whole, for most people, induction is going to be a step up over gas just purely as a cooking method. The air quality and climate benefits are a bonus.
That sounds a lot like the old "tastes approximately just like beef!" testimonies going around at the start of the last wave of vegan fake meat products. Yeah sure, some people might find the substitute to be palatable. But most of those you're arguing with have concrete and legitimate reasons to prefer a direct flame, so it's kind of silly to expect "close enough" to convince them.
That's disingenuous, Chinese households may have higher capacity burners than the average Western household but do not go anywhere near 100,000 BTU. This is reserved for restaurants. North of 10,000 is plenty for home cooking.
Oh, I agree that it's plenty, though apparently it's not enough to get restaurant style wok hei. It's also well into the range that regular induction stoves offer.
Read the article, that's not what he's saying. And it's said by someone who, if you know their history, cares to an extreme degree about what the end product tastes like.
My point is not that induction can't yield good results depending on the dish, but rather that people who care about cooking on a direct flame will not be satisfied with something that is suitable for "most" recipes. I've read plenty about this debate and if I had to pick one I'd stick with gas because of the added flexibility. But I would be fine with say, a hybrid stove that is mostly induction and has at least one high-capacity gas burner and preferably another lower-capacity one. Unfortunately, few induction "advocates" are making the case for the hybrid option and most prefer to exaggerate its suitability as a complete replacement as well as the potential environmental and health impacts of gas, which alienates anyone who simply wants a flame.
It's really not bad for you, not relative to tons and tons of other things.
The biggest thing is, if you have good air quality outside, you need to keep your windows open as much as you can. I'm using sensors on all the windows at my place, and a temperature sensor outside and HomeAssistant, which tells me when outdoor temperature is lower than indoor, so I know when I can open the windows and not use additional HVAC capacity. That keeps indoor air quality in-check.
If you live somewhere with poor outdoor air quality, you likely need a filter to clean your air up at least a little. That can be a standalone air purifier, or it could be as simple as a HVAC filter taped to a cheap box fan. Keep your filters changed every few months, never have to dust again, and enjoy cleaner air. Simple.
I have to run humidification where I am, and that's handled by the hvac which has a humidity control system in it. That has to get serviced yearly, but, other than that it stays between 40-50% without any intervention.
Generally, any HVAC system will dry the air quite a bit, but only when it's running, so if you live in, say, Kentucky, it's likely that if outdoor temp = indoor temp at night, you can have your windows open, and when you close them in the morning, the next day's worth of HVAC usage will take care of any additional humidity without much trouble.
The real downside of that is that you'll have to run your HVAC system harder, because dry air feels cooler than humid air.
I’ve also observed my kitchen’s CO2 levels consistently going from 650 to 1200 while cooking (or to 900 if using the hood vent), and dropping down to baseline 60 minutes later. This is with a gas range. CO2 monitor 70cm away.
Unclear how much is due to the combustion of gas vs. also the cooking of food, as others have mentioned. I suspect it’s almost entirely from combustion of the gas. Though, I have noticed that the CO2 levels don’t climb as high if simply boiling water on high heat.
I got a Air quality monitor that does TVOC, Pm2.5, CO and CO2 recently and even with a hood extractor its amazing the amount of air quality reduction that cooking produces. Even using an electric oven the process of browning bread will increase particles, CO and CO2. Frying with gas produces a concerning amount of everything.
Yeah, I also measured at my house. I was amazed at how much bad stuff comes from just heating food, regardless of energy source. All this stuff about gas cooking being bad for you completely ignores the impact of just heating food.
That said, anything that moves people away from gas is progress, I guess. Just would like to see priorities on transportation and heating sectors more than the tiny fraction of emissions that come from stovetops.
> anything that moves people away from gas is progress,
Where I am, our electricity during dinner time is entirely from gas power plants, and that electricity costs is several times more than the gas, not including the several thousands of dollars required to run the lines required, if I wanted to convert my range.
I do dream of induction though. Until then, I have an automatic hood fan that turns on whenever the oven is on, and vents to the outside.
It's not just the stovetop it's the entire infrastructure dedicated to distribution and production of natural gas.
Transportation needs to be addressed, sure. The reality is that shifting residential utilities to electric largely shifts the burden to residents. Cleaning up transportation gets a similar amount of pushback but burdens the government with the cost of improvement.
To be fair, parts of California (given that California is leading the anti-gas charge) are actively working on cleaning up transit. But it's slow going.
I've been interested in these backyard methane producers https://www.homebiogas.com/product/homebiogas-4. I see people make homebrewed ones out of IBC containers and stuff like that. One of these days I'll get my hands on one of these things. For as cheap as natural gas is it'll take forever to pay for itself if it ever would. But it's a cool idea for self sufficiency sort of things.
If you live somewhere with relatively clean outdoor air, it's quite possible that your own cooking gives you more particulate exposure than ambient air pollution does.
Just do the math: The average PM2.5 in New York is 12 μg/m3. As this post shows, cooking can easily spike levels above above 500 μg/m3. So if you're exposed to smoky at 12/500=2.4% of the time, that alone equals your ambient air pollution. That's around 35 minutes per day.
If you have an air purifier, this is even more likely to be true true—it's much easier for an air purifier to deal with a slow steady leak of particles from outdoors than to deal with spikes.
Our living room air purifier used to ramp up whenever we cooked smokey things but ever since we remodeled the kitchen ,which included a range hood, it hasn’t done that.
The living room air filter is an Idylis but I don’t necessarily recommend it as it’s rather old and I think there are better ones available. The range hood was just a Home Depot variety generic brand which we chose mainly because the chimney portion needed to be of a certain width but it does a decent job of venting the cooking fumes. We also are using an induction range so no gas fumes to worry about.
The level of CO2 rises dramatically when cooking using a gas stove in our house, by at least 1,000 ppm to around 1,500-1,900 ppm in the upstairs of a two-story house (kitchen on ground floor). And this is with a properly working hood above the stove.
Yeah i was shocked when we got a CO2 / VOC meter in our house to realize the impact our gas stove was having. Replacing it is high on the todo list but sadly theres a lot of other high priority items up there right now.
I'll never put a gas stove in a house again, not for the reasons most people cite - radon, fire risk etc - but for the CO2 impact.
Gas stoves are basically only safe to use if you ALWAYS turn on the fan (and even then just barely), but most people only do that if they're cooking something really smoky.
Beyond 1000ppm cognitive decline occurs. We dont have an air exchanger in our house (yet) and with us spending so much time working from home the co2 levels regularly build up to above 1000. The gas range is the easiest way to get it to 1500 in a few minutes…
I’m not scaremongering, i just don’t like working with an inhibited brain.
The short term exposure limit for CO2 is 30,000ppm, continuous exposure limit is 5000ppm. Those are OSHA's numbers, so, conservative numbers. 1900ppm isn't a big deal, or anything to be concerned about unless you like being concerned about numbers on a graph (can't blame you, it's cool).
You should, however, do yourself a favor and set your alert threshold to at the lowest 5000ppm
I have an IKEA VINDSTYRKA air quality meter and while I doubt it's as accurate as the one in the linked post, it very quickly increases when I'm cooking on the hob. It's gone from the usual 1-5 right up to 30 before. Being mid way through a house renovation and don't have a working extractor fan.
I'd love to record the historical readings in Grafana but it looks like extracting the data is quite an involved process.
Looking at your floorplan/schematic I think that the open window, next to the fan, in the kitchen, is hurting airflow.
It is likely that your predominant air flow is right in that window and right out the fan. You could probably establish a much longer - and more useful - flow if you closed that nearby window and left the dining room window open.
It's not certain - flows and turbulence do weird things - but it's worth trying.
Any on expert on induction stoves here? Alec mentioned in a technology connections video that the next generation of induction works with more cookwear/better with suboptimal cookwear, but I couldn't find any sources or information on that.
He mentioned it here [0] or in the associated video
I have an air filter that ramps up when I'm eating. I bring cooked/heated food into my room and a minute or so later my air filter detects VOCs and ramps up. Sometimes it even goes all the way up to the highest level (level 9) with scary red colors, and that frightens me - is what I'm breathing while eating really harmful, and if it is, then how about whilst cooking? And what about chefs and all others who work in a restaurant, how fucked up would their lungs be?
> And what about chefs and all others who work in a restaurant, how fucked up would their lungs be?
Restaurant cooking has been a part of human habitation for centuries. PM2.5 meters have been with us for decades. We already know the answer to this question.
Unless you are replacing the activated carbon filters every week or so, an air purifier won’t be capturing any meaningful amount of VOCs anyways. Manufacturers of filters seem to have decided it is OK to flat out LIE about how long activated carbon filtration is effective for before becoming saturated. Unless you have a massive filter budget, the only meaningful way to control indoor VOC levels is by venting in outdoor air (opening a window). If your automatic filter controller has a way to ignore VOC levels and only monitor particle counts, I would recommend you configure it that way.
Literally just stop worrying, these Chinese gadgets would detect water droplets as harmful "particulates", they're too dumb to actually give you any meaningful info.
You're breathing nastier things while walking down the street or entering a car that stayed in the sun for a few minutes and leached plastic fumes
My stove is literally under a window that I can open completely. I thought this would make not having a hood a non issue. But the fumes often don't cooperate and opening the window just causes them to blow into me. Creating a draft that blows outside hasn't been reliably possible.
It's quite annoying. I'm not worried so much about the health aspects, but the odor of fried foods lingering in the air for hours and days. Fried salmon tastes great, but it's one of the worst offenders.
I haven't rigged up a fan inside a window yet, which would presumably fix the problem. A permanent setup would be an eyesore, a temporary solution inconvenient and rickety.
One thing I noticed in many North American houses is how the kitchen is "open" directly to the living room/dining room/etc. It seems that most houses do not have doors that you can keep the kitchen closed while cooking and open the windows inside the kitchen to air it out, while preventing contamination into the rest of the house.
I tried most of the top portable induction stoves on Amazon and they all have this horrendous high pitch hum. Can anyone please recommend a good induction stove without a high pitch screech that runs on 120V?
if you have compatible cookware, definitely try it out, you can get an external induction cooktop from Ikea for like $60. if you don't, get some and switch because the cooking process is so much more enjoyable.
you know how when you're sauteing something and you wanna get a good sniff because it's smells amazing, only to get your eyebrows singed and a lungfull of half combusted propane? with induction, you get nothing but the smell of your food, without the excess wasted heat. also, it's fast on the big eye I can boil water insanely fast, I honestly didn't know it was possible to boil water that fast.
and I can say this all only as a happy customer who paid my own money, not as a paid advertisement, UNLIKE the gas industry which has been pushing this shit through influencers and marketing for decades. [1]
[1] https://youtu.be/hX2aZUav-54 [Climate Town - It's Time to Break Up with Our Gas Stoves 21:27]