I’d rather have health than maybe marginally better cooking experiences
It’s not marginally. It’s a superior all issues aside.
I just like being able to put tortillas directly on the flame burner.
Staying indoors during rain can dramatically cut wetness.
Gas stoves have a place, and I’m not about to take away anyone’s choice on the matter. With all that being said, to the title of this article, I say “duh”… Honestly, who thought that cooking using an open flame inside your home was somehow safer than the alternative?
I use electric, I’ve pretty much always used electric. I will continue to use some form of electric stove. I want to have complete control over the heat going into my cookware, and while it may not be as flashy or as quick to use electric, I can’t see any situation where electric would not be safer.
real men use diesel stoves
Indeed, we’re going with an induction stove top and a speed oven. Adios gas!
Growing up we usedgas. Mother’s home (not our childhood home) also has gas. I’m in a home that is wired for either but had electric when I moved in. We had to replace the stove and I choose to keep it electric which surprised my mom. “But gas baking is so much nicer!” And no it’s not. Electric interior was much easier and nicer to use. But she didn’t bake much so lol.
gas baking is so much nicer!
This is odd to me, as someone who has owned both gas and electric. Baking is pretty comparable between the two. Preheat oven, put in item for amount of time. Though, our gas oven’s exhaust would really heat up the kitchen, which was not so great in the summer.
Usually when people praise gas it’s about stovetop performance. As gas instantly changes temperature and lets you use things like woks. I have also heard people praise them for working in power outages just fine.
The glass top electrics are so damn easy to clean though. That alone has made them the winner for me. On the other side, every exposed coil electric I have used sucked ass and I would pick a gas well before I pick one of those.
A quality electric makes a big difference fwiw. I’ve gone through several types depending on where I lived. I gotta admit that gas is my favorite to cook on. Just so many ways to control heat, where the heat is, and how quickly the heat can be changed. Most electric cooktops and ovens are shit unless you buy an upper tier brand, and even then heating a big coil under a glass top is inefficient AF.
Just switched to induction. While not the same as gas, and it does have a few peculiarities, it is by far better than standard electric cooktops. Way fast, more efficient, easy. These need to come down in price to help win over people used to gas.
I have found gas consistently shit for cooking at low temperatures because you can’t turn it down low enough. Minimum power on the lowest ring, nope, still far too hot right in the middle of the pan.
So put the pan on the edge of the burner…
Now the edge burns instead, while the other side remains cold. How is this helping?
Seems like a pretty shitty gas stove, to be honest.
Guess I was lucky? Our burner had a very low setting, perfect for low heat and reducing things like jams or whatever.
Electric is horrible. It’s either full on or off. No moderation other than time.
Huh, never seen an electric cooker that is full on/off. That sounds terrible.
Yeah, a good number of electrics do that. 100% or 0%, and they pulse between the two.
I think the core thing I have learned is getting a decent gas stove is easy. But it’s real easy to get a shit electric.
I had gas stoves my whole life until about 5 years ago I when I moved into this home I live in now that doesn’t have gas lines in the neighborhood. I have a glass top electric stove, not induction and after about a week of adjustment it suits my purposes just fine and I got used to it and it wasn’t a big deal at all. I cook pretty much every meal my family and I eat at home too with 0 issues.
Cheap 90s era induction stoves in apartments that are still kicking give induction a bad name. New ones are the closest thing you can get to temperature control and speed of a full burner stove. My ideal would be an induction stove with one zone rounded for a round bottom wok. For a home kitchen, it’s the best choice because you’re not going to get the amazing jet burner stoves you get in commercial kitchens
I’m suprised there are developed countries were gas stoves still are used, unless power is non-existant or in low quantity due to poor grid or fully off-grid.
What’s even more sad is that in the USA it’s seen as woke to give up your gas stove.
Well because it is woke. And that’s a good thing. Acknowledging that gas stoves cause indoor pollution is woke as fuck.
So sick and tired of “woke” being used as a negative term, because the republicans labeled it as such. They hate it so much because they hate change, even if it’s positive change for the betterment of society.
Stay safe. Stay woke.
it’s like they consider asthma a badge of pride.
these fucks are making their kids suffer, again, for their silly stupid ideas
Hahahaha, well, its a spectacle to observe.
you don’t say, captain obvious is on it again today
but i guess it’s nice that we now have quantitative data on it
How often are yall getting power outages?
Regardless of that, higher end modern gas stoves won’t allow you to use the stovetop during a power outage anyway even if you match light them, because they have electronic flame presence sensors for safety. And no modern gas range or gas oven with electronic oven controls will allow you to use the oven without power.
Every month or so. Every two if I’m lucky
Once a year maybe? Almost always due to storm damage.
A couple days a year typically, between hurricanes, tornadoes and winter ice storms.
the question might be more properly phrased as:
what is better, using electricity + backup power generator, or using gas stove in the first place?
A backup power generator that will run a household stove is kind of a tall order; most of the portable gasoline models on the American market won’t put out 220v.
I’ve got an electric stove, and I’ve got a backyard grill that runs on propane and propane accessories. Ain’t no power outage gonna starve me.
and I’ve got a backyard grill
yeah that’s what i meant with “backup generator” :-)
One long enough to be worth considering in the last 7 years.
We had maybe one in the past 12 years where I live. A lot of people around me have had more, but my house specifically hasn’t had a major one that I can recall. We’ve been thinking about switching away from gas stove eventually.
I’ve had one in the past 2 years.
I wish someone pointed this out 20 years ago (enough to be heard). I raised two kids with occasional asthma in a house with gas stove, and maybe that could have been different.
I recently converted from gas to induction, and find it a much better cooking appliance in every way. Pans on the stovetop heat up faster than with gas, and I can boil a pot of water faster. The oven has more options and more consistent heating, especially on the broiler.
The only problem was the cost. Way too much money to get a new circuit installed but also the range was double or more what I would have spent on gas. There were very few options at appliance stores, and I never did find one on display, of any brand. In the US, it’s unnecessarily difficult to make this switch.
When I was shopping for one I was told to pay attention to coil sizes. Sure enough experimenting with a large skillet on small coil shows very uneven heating. I did find one or two reasonable priced ranges but with only tiny coils. Even at spending way too much, I only have one coil that works well with 12” skillet or stock pot. I know ikea now sells an induction range for more reasonable price but coil size is critical and the first thing I’d look at
Having a proper exhaust hood that sucks air outside mitigates this to a huge degree, but a lot of us have hoods that “filter” the air through nothing and then shoot it up towards the ceiling.
The flippers who did my house disconnected the outside air vent, I’m still pissed and mean to get it fixed, cause I can’t afford an induction range either.
If you think you can’t afford an induction range, you also can’t afford to hire contractors to have your new ductwork put in and/or unborked.
Much as I hate to recommend Frigidaire for various reasons, the FCFI3083AS is I think the most economical freestanding 30" induction range on the market at the moment and has an MSRP of $1099. You can probably score one from some discount or independent appliance retailers (i.e. not Home Depot, Lowes, or Best Buy) for a little under a thousand.
As a taller guy who wears glasses, I’ve had the horrible experience of some of these filters blowing greasy air in my face and settling on my glasses. Not pleasant
Mine has a vent, but no hood so there’s only so much it can do. And the way they built out the kitchen means there’s no good way to install a hood without remodelling.
But now I don’t care as much. The current vent (and window) is good enough for induction
A lot of us
Everyone I know has a microwave. Is that a class thing?
It’s a failure to read the manual thing. Every OTR microwave ever manufactured functions as a hood by definition, and basically all of them (I can only think of like two exceptions) have the option to be configured for either recirculation or to duct outside. It’s just that most models come out of the box already configured for recirculation and most people ('s contractors) are so averse to reading that they fail to realize you can flip the blower motor over and thus cause it to actually accomplish something (provided a duct is in place) rather than just blowing stale air back in your face.
The ducting behind a microwave is not that common in my experience. It makes sense for microwaves to come preconfigured to recirculate instead of trying to exhaust to a sheet of drywall because most people are going to install it how it comes out of the box. I’ve installed dozens of microwaves and only twice has ducting existed to flip the venting for. Higher end houses typically have dedicated exhaust fans and lower end houses never seem to have ducting for a microwave. I installed a dedicated fan that exhausts out the roof at my house. Even with ducting those microwave exhaust fans barely provide anything of value. I’m sure my experience is very regional but it seems like a really niche middle ground where someone would bother venting out of the kitchen but also not care enough to have a purpose built exhaust fan.
Part of the problem there is I have guys just absolutely insist at me that a microwave “can’t” be vented outside so they don’t bother to install a duct, and tell me that in order to vent outside you “have” to get a hood instead. This is obviously bogus.
This also leads to the inevitable Contractor Special where a duct was there, often when the user is replacing an old hood with a microwave, but the installer just shrugs and slaps the microwave on the wall as-is where A) it is inevitably too tall and now way too close to the stovetop, and B) covering the duct outlet while still recirculating back into the room. Whenever I unearth one of these in my travels it makes me want to track down whoever the hell installed it and then punch them so hard they come clean out of their socks.
People are for some reason hyperfixated on getting appliances off of their countertops, which is why the over-the-range microwaves became so prevalent in the first place. (And then they all immediately filled the spot where their countertop microwave used to be with a countertop air fryer instead, but that’s a whole different discussion.)
Yeah that would drive me insane to run across. It’s not even particularly hard to tell that the exhaust fan motor is reversible just by looking at the top/back of the microwave before it is installed. Every one I’ve seen looks pretty damn modular in comparison to the rest of the microwave shell.
Edit: reversible is the wrong word, able to be unscrewed and rotated, I’m sure you know what I meant but on a reread of my comment I wanted to clarify.
I have gas and would fight anyone who tries to tell me otherwise. I rented a place with an induction range and now I want one so bad.
Are induction stoves shit in the US because of the lower voltage? Honest question
The stove doesn’t use the wall outlet, its wired directly to the fusebox with a 30 Amp current. (wall outlet is 15 Amp).
Honest answer: Induction stoves aren’t shit in the US. They don’t run at a lower voltage because our homes are wired for 240V same as Europe.
Honest explanation: The American power grid closely remembles anyone else’s, we’ve got the big long distance power lines up on those big pylons that transmit power in the megavolts, those get stepped down at substations to a dozen kilovolts to snake into neighborhoods, and then those pole mounted transformers step it down to 240V to make the couple hundred foot trip from the pole to a few houses. The difference is that in America, the transformer is connected to the house with three wires, not two. The third wire is a center tap, so you have the two outer wires and a center wire.
Measure the voltage between the outer two wires, you find 240V. Measure between the center wire and either of the outer two, you find 120V.
Most of the normal outlets throughout an American home or business are wired between one of the outers and the center, to deliver 120V. But, we routinely wire some circuits across the two outer wires for 240V, we even have special plugs for this to make sure you don’t plug a 120V appliance into a 240V outlet. Things such as electric water heaters, HVAC units, clothes dryers, electric car chargers and electric stoves are indeed wired for 240V here.
Induction cooktops took on a low reputation in the US because early models were hilariously expensive (Westinghouse was selling an induction range in the 70’s for $1500, that’s about $10,000 in today’s money) and not particularly reliable. Another factor was all the trendy cookware from the 60’s on. CorningWare and Pyrex (ceramic and borosilicate glass) was huge in the 70’s, Calphalon (anodized aluminum) and Revere Ware (high-nickel stainless steel) was on all the wedding registries in the 80’s, and solid copper was big in the early 90’s. None of which work on induction stoves. Which means, for decades, Americans perceived induction ranges as gimmicky crap that required “special” cookware, that to buy into an induction range would require throwing away all your pots and pans. Americans continued preferring resistive coil electric or natural gas stoves.
Well, we arrived into the 21st century, teflon-coated steel and tri-ply stainless pans come into vogue, Corning stops making consumer ceramic and glass products, Revere changes their stainless formula, and now we find that most cookware on the market is induction compatible. Induction stoves are the fastest growing market segment in kitchen appliances in the US, everybody wants one.
In Germany we have 230V for normal appliances and 400V for stoves.
Why?
The same reason you use 240V for stoves instead of 110V
To make food hotter fasterer.
My induction stove is actually insane.
It can get a gallon of water boiling in 2 minutes (11kW power).
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In the us, wall sockets run on 110v, but it’s standard for all residencies to also have specific appliance wall sockets specially wired for 220v, usually two areas of a home, for washer/dryer and stove/oven. It’s a totally different plug design, too.
I don’t personally have induction, but I know people that have them and say they love them.
We’re actually split phase and higher power appliances like stoves, EV chargers, water heaters run on 240 volts.
But the “standard” wall outlets are 15 amps at 120 volts.
Electric stoves run on 400v in Europe, so they are still faster
faster
pretty sure that’s due to the spoiler and racing stripe.
And how many amps? My search says in Europe 230-240 volts at 32 amps are most common.
Just switched to induction. They work great.
What nobody is saying is that they’re viewed and priced as premium items, almost double the cost of a cheap electric cooktop and even more than gas. For instance, cheapest I could find for a basic multi-burner in-countertop cooktop with a quick search: Gas $175, Electric $199, Induction $330. This gets worse for a typical range that is found in most homes (cooktop/oven combo). You can get a cheap gas range for under $500. An induction range starts at just under $1000.
No, they work really well because they run on two phases so 220v.
220v isn’t achieved via two phases; we get 110v out of a single phase by center tapping the transformer. The center tap wire is called the “neutral” and is at ground potential, and then the two “hot” wires. There’s 110v between the neutral and either one of the hots, and the hots are 220v apart. It’s still one phase.
Note I used 110/220v here and 120/240 above. peak-to-peak, root-mean-square, ask an actual electrician, I’m just an asshole on the internet.
You’re correct. I tried to keep it short and misspoke. Two hot wires from previously split phase.
You’d presumably install a 240, a NEMA 6-20, so you can get all the power you need. So a 6-20 gets about 5k watts, versus 3k for standard British plug, versus 2400 on US standard. And these numbers are all fudgy because for some reason it all varies.
