Worth a read:
a buddy built a new house and received an award for being some kind of super green house..
https://www.hartfordbusiness.com/article/glastonbury-home-wins-zero-energy-challenge That's him..
Anyway.. We made fun of him for having this high end house and buying a cheap electric range.. He wouldn't also put in a working fire place.. No gas heating.. cited indoor air quality concerns.. maybe he wasn't so crazy.
Interesting read. We deal with CARB and indoor air quality a lot in the cleaning products business, it's interesting to see something like that on another point source issue.
Very good read.
Yea, no. I'm still going to install gas specifically for a range in the not so distant future.
Electric ranges/cooktops just can't compare
RevRico said:Yea, no. I'm still going to install gas specifically for a range in the not so distant future.
Electric ranges/cooktops just can't compare
I felt the same way until I moved into my current house.
The old exposed coil electrics, suck. In my last fancy apartment, the $2k+ fancy BOSCH, sucked. In my current house, where it was all renovated before I bought it, the cheap GE range works pretty damn well.
The only real negative for me is that if it's not spotlessly clean, it looks like crap.
Thanks for the article. We have gas but I'll make sure that the vent hood is on everytime we cook now
Fueled by Caffeine said:a buddy built a new house and received an award for being some kind of super green house..
https://www.hartfordbusiness.com/article/glastonbury-home-wins-zero-energy-challenge That's him..
Anyway.. We made fun of him for having this high end house and buying a cheap electric range.. He wouldn't also put in a working fire place.. No gas heating.. cited indoor air quality concerns.. maybe he wasn't so crazy.
No air to air heat exchanger? That is part of the deal up here for the last 40 years on energy efficient homes. Gotta get rid of the farts somehow.
RevRico said:Yea, no. I'm still going to install gas specifically for a range in the not so distant future.
Electric ranges/cooktops just can't compare
I love cooking with gas.
But if I were to do it all over again, I would go induction. And normal electric oven. I've seen enough tests about induction that it's speed is good enough (or better) relative to gas. And since it only heats the pan, it's a lot more efficient. Which means less waste heat in the kitchen area.
Our camper we are rebuilding is all electric- no gas at all- ac/dc fridge (which is massively efficient), electric cooking, electric water heater. All of which would be easily fed via solar and battery pack if we so wanted to. Saves the need of having a CO and HC detector inside the camper, too.
RevRico said:Yea, no. I'm still going to install gas specifically for a range in the not so distant future.
Electric ranges/cooktops just can't compare
I am way too cheap to replace a working appliance just because I don't like it, but I look forward to the day that my electric range fails in some way that will cost me more then about $75 to fix so that I can plumb gas to the kitchen and upgrade to a real stove. In my last house, I had the cheapest gas range that I could find and it worked so much better than the fancy GE glass-top junk that came with this place.
Obviously, the same concerns would be present if you're using non-vented gas logs, which I do have, but use only occasionally and for emergency heat in the event that we lose electrical service after a winter storm.
Serious issue. I've got a gas stove and furnace. No external vent, and that might not work much to alleviate the problem.
In reply to Floating Doc (Forum Supporter) :
I was unaware that an unvented gas furnace was a thing? I thought they all used a heat exchanger and discharged products of combustion up a flue.
great article and I'm sure it's truly an issue.
Gas furnace here. Adding a gas stove, and possibly a gas water heater if I can do it with the size of my supply line. Also finishing up a new installation of a gas and wood burning fireplace. I like my hydrocarbons.
I grew up on gas. Love it. I've had some apartments and rentals with electric coil. I hate it an vowed to never go back, but...
My current house had electric induction. I have now vowed to never leave induction! All the speed and precision of gas w/o the risk of an open flame. When I saw the title here of...especially if you have small children, I immediately thought this was going to be a thread about the merits of induction. The first being no hot surfaces. Sure, the pan gets hot but the glass cooktop does not. This means no burned little hands from a still warm cooktop like you have with coil electric glass tops. Also, never a grease fire. Grease fires often happen from the hot oil making contact with the hot flame or coil. With induction there is never either.
For camping, get a cheap $60 table top unit like this on Amazon. I have one similar that I paid $50 for and I think I got it from Aldi. Just be sure to get one that is 1800 watts. That's the max you can get with a 110 plug but some units are only 1500 or 1300 watt max. This means they do not "get as hot" as the 1800 watt version.
On my real kitchen cooktop the 2 small burners are 1800w and the biggest is 3500w.
My daily drivers are cast iron pans via induction.
Interesting read.
Throughout the entire article they kept saying natural gas or gas. I wonder where propane falls. We have a gas stove/electric oven and gas logs but both are propane fired.
In poking around the internet, it seems that this controversy has been raging for decades. The appliances (non-vented gas logs and heaters) are popular because they are effective and cheap and cheap to install. The gas industry, naturally enough, has been fighting a PR battle while the medical evidence against ventless appliances mounts.
It wouldn't be the first time that an industry fought to suppress information that made its product look bad.
Not saying we need to ban them, just saying that people in the market should be aware of the potential harm.
In reply to alfadriver (Forum Supporter) :
I would be ok with induction, but the cost is still way too high for me. For $1000 I can get a tank, used gas range, and get it all connected up. When I looked in the spring it was almost $2500 for a 4 burner induction cooktop.
I'm replacing the coil tops cooktop thing with the electric flat top convection oven I bought for my mom's house soon, and begrudgingly keeping the in wall electric oven. The flat top on it, with 2 of the "power burners" is a nice middle ground. There's just a sizing issue I'm not good enough with carpentry to DIY that needs taken care of first.
The thing is, I have trouble with temperature consistency on electric vs gas. If I set a gas burner to 2, it's the same heat the whole time. If I set an electric to "medium" it goes high, then cools down, maybe maintains a while, then keeps fluctuating, and it seems all brand regardless of element wattage have different ideas of high medium and low.. I don't know if induction solves the temperature fluctuation problem.
That was an interesting read.
In reply to RevRico :
When I moved into my house the GE Profile induction cook top was 17 years old. A couple of years later a coil stopped working then the big coil quit too. I survived for a while on the small coils. Two years ago, around Black Friday, I bought a Fridgedaire induction cooktop 30" from AJ Madison, online for $689 and then $150 rebate so net $539. Super easy self install...kill power and attach 3 wires under cabinet.
This same model but todays price is $1400
Interesting read.
I wonder what the comparisons would be between drafty older homes and newer tighter ones with less air infiltration...
Also, a huge percentage of vent hoods are not actually ventilated. They just filter air through a poor quality filter and return it to the room. These less expensive unvented hoods are vastly more common in lower income homes.
Fueled by Caffeine said:a buddy built a new house and received an award for being some kind of super green house..
https://www.hartfordbusiness.com/article/glastonbury-home-wins-zero-energy-challenge That's him..
Anyway.. We made fun of him for having this high end house and buying a cheap electric range.. He wouldn't also put in a working fire place.. No gas heating.. cited indoor air quality concerns.. maybe he wasn't so crazy.
I think the real question here is, does he have a build thread?
Honestly though, I think this would be some VERY interesting stuff to read about. I'd love to see and hear what he did. And yes, when you make a house more airtight to increase heating and cooling efficiency, you really do have to start worrying about inside air quality.
SVreX (Forum Supporter) said:Also, a huge percentage of vent hoods are not actually ventilated. They just filter air through a poor quality filter and return it to the room. These less expensive unvented hoods are vastly more common in lower income homes.
Good point. Many homeowners may be completely clueless as to whether or not their range hood actually exhausts cooking fumes via a duct to the outdoors, or simply runs them through a rudimentary filter and blows them back in their face. The latter is far more common.
I know that mine is useless because it's built right in to the bottom of my microwave oven!
We have gas everything here. Not changing out, because they all work. But I want a flat top stove. Whether that is induction, a gas griddle, or just standard electric, I really prefer the look and ease of cleaning on a flat top stove. And growing up with flat top electrics, not induction or anything, I've never had the bad experience most seem to. I did have that with the cheap coils. But not a nice flat top.
Toyman01 (Moderately Supportive Dude) said:Interesting read.
Throughout the entire article they kept saying natural gas or gas. I wonder where propane falls. We have a gas stove/electric oven and gas logs but both are propane fired.
since natural gas and propane are very close in many ways, I bet their emissions are similar too.
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