I hear that NY wants to ban gas home appliances including gas stoves and dryers. Recently gas stoves have been questioned about causing health problems, but I am at a loss of banning gas dryers, so I’ll make that my poster child.
The alternative is resistance electric which currently is powered by a grid that is 20% coal, 40% natural gas, 20% renewable, 20% nuke (using national numbers). This means that due to thermodynamic efficiencies of fossil fuels that we will be burning more and emitting more than if we just use the gas dryer, as well as using renewable capacity and creating nuke waste. Also increasing the load on our grid which we will need for thing like EV’s and the above mentioned electric stoves. Unless we are expecting a big breakthrough or perhaps building lots of nuke plants I really am left scratching my head on this one that seems to have all negatives across the board.
Stoves, aside from that afore mentioned health issue, also seem to have that same negative results. Water heaters and furnaces/boilers at least can use/be replaced by heat pumps which can be very efficient.
I also see the switch to heat pump only heat seems very problematic for long term power failures, which may have mass pipe bursts in very cold weather. Being able to use fossil fuels at those extremes would seem to take load off the grid and perhaps help preserve it.
So are we going stupid with all these switches to electricity for everything or is there something to it in the bigger picture and plan or are we headed to a world of hurt and plumbing bills?
I don’t know much about the reason for changing from gas appliances - but about the heat pump? I suppose it might be problematic for long-term power failures - but I’ve never had an electric outage that lasted for 3 days , not even in the summer.( and any winter outages were very local, like a pole or wire coming down) I have however, had to wait three days for an oil delivery or service more than once. And even with no heat for three days , my pipes didn’t freeze.
The State of New York gets most of its electricity from hydroelectric, nuclear, and other non-fossil sources.
The source mix varies wildly from one jurisdiction to the next; I’m next door in Ontario, and most of our power is also non-fossil, but it’s much more nuclear than New York; nuclear plants are about sixty percent of all our power. We could use batteries for almost everything without using fossil fuels.
According to my idiot congressman (Biggs) it is because electric is “woke”, And liberal communistic socialist fascist democrats want to take your Jesus-given right to gas appliances.
I’m in that area and have 2 homes and if we want to take it more local, which is fair , one location uses basically 70% natural gas, 30% nuke no hydro to speak of as we are already at 100% , the other is about 35% hydro, 31% nuke, 26% gas.
Problem with hydro is its limited, and much of NY’s hydro comes from your side of the river which is also ramping up electric use and will be needing more of its own hydro in coming years. However there is the potential for some of these sites to become pumped hydro as well, so at least can shift demand by storing water and increase capacity that way, but we still need the power to do so.
You seem to be making the same mistake that many RWNJs make, that is by assuming that because the NY Governor has asked the state Legislature to investigate a prohibition on gas stoves in new residential construction that the entire state wants to eliminate all gas appliances. Personally, I don’t think that a ban on gas stoves in residential kitchens is practical and would be difficult to enforce, even if there are potential health benefits to future New Yorkers.
Should such proposals be investigated? Absolutely. The more that is known about the pros and cons of using natural gas, the better decisions can be made on how to address its use in the future. It is obvious that changes are necessary to combat climate change and looking at all options just makes sense. That includes using heat pumps for heating homes and water, where it makes sense. Obviously, with no investigations, we won’t know where it makes sense.
On Tuesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York proposed that the legislature phase out the sale of fossil fuel heating equipment in existing residential buildings beginning in 2030 and require new residential and commercial buildings be all-electric by 2025 and 2030, respectively.
The per unit efficiency of induction Cooking Tops is about 5-10% more efficient than conventional electric resistance units and about 3 times more efficient than gas.
With gas so much of the energy goes to heat the kitchen, just like with internal combustion engines so much of the energy goes out the tailpipe.
Just FYI, even if you do have mostly gas appliances, most of them won’t actually work without electricity. Modern ones are still electronic, even though they use gas to create the heat.
We found that out the hard way when we had a power outage- gas furnace wouldn’t run, gas stove/oven wouldn’t light (safety check valve that requires electricity), and so forth. The only gas appliance that actually continued to work was the water heater, and that’s because it just has a pilot light and a thermocouple- if the thermocouple is hot and generating current, the safety valve stays open, and the gas continues to flow. If it goes cold, the gas shuts off.
I guess my feelings on it are like this: Gas heating, dryer, and oven could relatively easily be replaced by electric equivalents without much performance difference, assuming efficiency is better.
But gas stoves are absolutely a different animal than an electric one, and IMO a superior one. The ability to just turn the heat up or down instantly is a huge advantage- electric stoves have a certain degree of thermal mass in the heating element that you have to work around. And they don’t require specific metals like induction ones do.
I’d have to agree with this, though in the winter not such a big deal. But gas ovens in particular are already part convection ovens due to the needed chimney for exhaust. And this is why my poster child is the gas dryer, not the stove.
Many people with gas have found ways to keep the place warm during power failures. Such as plugging their furnace into an inverter and running it off a car battery, or use a generator which can easily power a gas appliance but not the electrical equivalent, and most every gas stove ever made can be manually lit. For myself I actually had a gas line installed so I can get a gas dryer instead of the electric one so my generator could run my whole house. I have had a handful of week long power failures over the years.
But more to my point, as weather gets colder, heat pumps are less efficient and thus require more power from the cold + loss of efficiency, which by itself seems to have a greater chance of overloading the grid thus increasing the frequency of power failures.
We had gas stoves for 50 years (and yes, I am asthmatic, thanks Mom). We now have an induction top and it is superior in almost every way, especially in how quickly you can change heat levels. Our model does have 10 discrete levels, so not infinitely adjustable like gas, but some are. The pan thing is trivial unless you have thousands in copper or aluminum pans. Heat pump dryers are becoming a thing, although I wouldn’t be an early adopter.
50 years ago homes were not as ‘air-tight’ as they are now, I suspect that it’s more because of increased air sealing that we may be seeing increased cases of ‘sick building syndrome’ now more than in the past. So while it’s always great to thank one’s mom, perhaps not so much for this one.
And we had all electric, heat, hot water, cooking … and I still had asthma. No smokers in house, didn’t tend to go out to eat when I was a kid … so claiming everybody growing up with gas ended up ill doesn’t cut it when someone with no exposure ended up with the same thing …
Huh. My furnace goes off because the thermostat and pump use electricity, but I’ve never had a gas stove that i couldn’t light with a match during a power outage. I do that routinely. (We often have short power outages in the winter.)
And if you are heating your kitchen with your gas burner, i suspect you are turning the burner up too high. I get very little heat leakage, and most of that radiates off the hot pot and hot food. My newish (maybe 20 years old, now) oven is enormously better insulated than any oven I’ve previously owned, including the electric oven i grew up with. It also has thinner walls. There must have been some huge improvement in insulating technology.
Also, i borrowed a friend’s induction single-burner cooktop and i hated it. “it doesn’t work with most of my pots” is easy enough to fix, but “it’s freaking noisy when it runs” and “the interface is surprisingly complicated” are not.
I have used induction in places like air BnB’s and it’s far away better then other electric stoves but I wonder how it compares with a high end gas stove as I have not used it that much to really know it.
I have a question, do you know how well induction plays with try-clad pots (basically a pot made of stainless steel/ aluminum/ stainless steel ‘sandwich’)?