Citation needed please for the health effects being bogus. NOx emissions from gas stoves seem to be consistently reported as quite high indeed. For example:
All the vents in places I've rented have seemed hilariously ineffective even on the highest and super loud setting. Maybe good ones make a difference but how many people actually have good ones? And how many people actually use them every time the stove is on?
FWIW every single rental I've occupied had never had the screen on the hood cleaned/replaced. They get clogged with grease and stop working, it's an oft neglected maintenance item.
Every rental I've lived in has not had ventilation.
It has had a range hood with a fan... and zero ductwork. The fan pulls up from under the hood, and blows it straight into my face, out the top of the hood.
There are extractors that work without a vent, they filter and release on the same space. I am not saying that was your case, or even if it was, the filters were properly maintained, just saying that those hoods exists. Searching for Recirculating Range Hoods would give more info about those
I find it utterly implausible that these filters have any substantial effect on NOx. There are specialized filters consisting of large beds of modified carbon that will remove NO2. Regular activated carbon AFAICT does not, and these recirculating stove filters do not have massive filters.
I would believe they remove particulates and odors, and that’s about it.
While they have filters (which I've never known people to replace, but that's not necessarily the hood's fault) and I believe they do something with what passes through them... they unambiguously miss the vast majority of the fumes. Even if you cook with the back burners, a massive amount of heat and steam will flow right around every hood I've run across.
Boil some water and watch where the steam goes. Because it's pulling air from around the pot along with it, including the hot waste gasses that heated the pot in the first place.
Even on the highest settings, I've never seen one that even makes a dent, or moves the column at all. They're snake oil and fashion, nothing more. And that's before talking about the ones that don't have any ductwork, and just blow it back out into the room.
Commercial-grade ones that move ridiculous quantities of air definitely work, and a tiny tiny handful of people have these in their homes. The rest have essentially nothing.
Hm, that's not my experience: I used all three options (no hood [student dorm], circulation hood [currently in our house], outside duct hood [parents; last flat]). There is a huge difference between each. Having no hood is obviously not nice, since water vapor and fat end up everywhere. The circulation hood at least reduces the amount of fat. Not sure if by 20 or 80%, but there is a significant difference between turning it on or not. Especially the amount of fatty haze when making hamburgers is reduced a lot. Now for water vapor it does not help so well. It's okay for one pot of water (boiled eggs or pasta with pesto), but when doing some heavy cooking still a lot of water ends up condensing on the windows. With an outside duct (about 2m of duct work) water vapor becomes a non-issue and the amount of fat haze is reduced much better than with the circulation unit.
Also this isn't biased by "I don't cook". Quite the contrary :)
I've heard the grease thing quite a few times, especially with hamburgers, but... tbh it hasn't ever happened to me. And my past two apartments haven't had a range hood at all (just a microwave with a fan we never use).
Is it saturated fats or something? Burgers are definitely a rarity for me, but I cook plenty. It's just generally lean meat and veg/oil/etc.
Regardless of where the steam goes -- if the hood is not vented, it'll just spill the air back out in to the kitchen. The cabinets above our non-vented kitchen hood are always covered in grease from the cooking. I doubt a simple filter will make that air much healthier to breathe in.
interesting... i wonder if it's because of the height constrained by aesthetic inputs.. i'm pretty sure if you stuck the vent like 50cm above the stove it surely can be a bit more than useless...
I think it's really just because there are no objective and enforced standards for it. I used to have a kitchen with a pretty high ceiling and a fume extractor mounted way up high, so high it was controlled by an IR remote, and it worked great while making little sound. Currently I have one of those integrated with a microwave oven that makes a lot of noise, blocks my view of half the range, and doesn't work at all. Plus even if it did work, it would vent right into my eyes, not to the outdoors.
My vent is about 5 feet above the stove. We had to build a little soffit to get it just within code regulations. It has a huge blower that is located in a small attic space about 20 feet away. 100% recommend! You can’t hear it at all and you can watch all the vapor and smoke from the stove waft right up and away into the unit.
The remote eats a pair of CR2450 cells every three months, so that could have been done better.
That sounds like horrible usability; it's going to be in the way all the time, especially if you're a tad tall. I bet that's the far more important reason than aesthetics. I already don't like the regular ones because I need to be careful not to bump my head in to it.
> Pretty easily mitigated with a vent hood which all these tests don't have running.
Almost nobody in New York City (where the NYT is based and focuses its coverage) has a vent hood that vents outside the apartment.
Older buildings don't have a hood at all, and new buildings have hoods which circulate air within the apartment, which doesn't really address concerns about accumulation of environmental pollutants.
>Almost nobody in New York City (where the NYT is based and focuses its coverage) has a vent hood that vents outside the apartment.
Thanks. If this bit of context was clear from the get go it would have been a lot easier for those from EUR where we would expect vents outside the apartment to be the norm. ( Not speaking for all EUR, so there may be places this is not the norm )
As a matter of fact this is the first time I hear about vent circulating within the apartment, and to be honest this sounds quite scary.
They're supposed to be used with a charcoal filter as well as the usual metal filter. They're mostly to trap odors, doubt they do much for air quality.
Many people in the US don't even realize their stove vent is just a filter. They look almost identical to outward venting hoods. Which means the filter medium is never replaced after it fills up with oils either.
> If this bit of context was clear from the get go it would have been a lot easier for those from EUR where we would expect vents outside the apartment to be the norm. ( Not speaking for all EUR, so there may be places this is not the norm )
It is the norm in newer buildings, but there are plenty of older houses or flats blocks in the EU that don’t have a good ventilation system. It’s similarly expensive same in the UK and I cannot say about Norway and Switzerland, but I would think that it is not better in the other non-EU bits of Europe.
I've seen that noted on PSA posts on social media for immigrants - that you should make extra sure that vents lead to outside and not into cupboards when renting a room, because it's rather common where people don't do more than boiling water but hard to realize without prior knowledge.
I could see vent hoods helping, but I don't assume they mitigate the risk. They may not capture the gas sufficiently, quickly enough, etc. Maybe vent hoods in homes are not generally effective.
Also doesn't take into account greenhouse gas/global warming affects on human and global health. (this assumes using more green energy in future to power induction electricity).
Natural gas for cooking is a negligible contributor to climate change. 2.8% of natural gas in the US is used for cooking. On a per-BTU basis (which isn't fair because natural gas has fewer carbons), the natural gas/oil split of US consumption is around 40/60. You're looking at around 1% of CO2 emissions in the US coming from natural gas used directly for cooking.
The thing is "I absolutely must have gas installed in my house for cooking" turns into "well let's buy the gas water heater, and the gas central heating, and the gas dryer" and all of a sudden you're using was more piped-in gas for for non-cooking things than you are for cooking, but "cooking with gas" was the hydrocarbon foot in the door at your house.
Otherwise you might opt for an electric tankless water heater, a heat pump HVAC system, and just an electric dryer.
I've read that the gas industry uses the cooking specifically in advertising and lobying to keep this toehold for the even bigger emissions. [1]
And 2-3% isn't nothing either. Such an easy win. we desperately need to rack up easy points yesterday...
Relatively as in compared to say utility scale production/storage or hell even replacing home heating like you mention.
I wish we could replace our 110 year old giant cast iron steam heater thing. Would have to either replace all the radiators with electric board things (i hate them) or find an electric boiler (which would have to plasma cut apart the old boiler to get it out lol).
Heat pumps sound cool too but all those options have upfront costs which some of my hoa neighbors can't afford. We couldn't get a loan for other repairs we did with longer term than 3 years.
I feel like we live in the same building with an ancient boiler and HOA neighbors who are extremely cost sensitive!
I do wonder if there's a reasonable heat pump retrofit for old buildings with boiler-based heating. Ultimately you're just heating up a liquid and pumping it through everyone's radiator, right? Seems like a sensible product given the number of old buildings with this kind of heating.
Ha are you in denver? A ton of people in cities are in the same boat.
I wanted to get an electric car. But not only do my neighbors not want to split cost of a charger station but also I'd have to pay over 10k to upgrade/fix the electricity - or so I was told.
It seems like it could be even simpler than a heat exchange that I think puts pipes into the ground?
Like it's just creating steam. Can't we just scale up an electric tea kettle? Seems like it would be pretty efficient.
On the west coast there are frequently power outages from downed trees. Gas doesn't go out if you have a tank, so anyone even a little bit rural uses gas if they can.
Hmmm. I grew up in rural Northern California and we had propane that would be trucked in. Is that what you mean by having a tank? I don't live there any more, but my old neighbors tend to be buying backup generators now so they can keep their fridge and internet running when PG&E cuts off power so their distribution lines don't start fires. (This cuts into a whole other issue about people who want to live in the forest asking for extreme subsidies on all the costly electric infrastructure it takes to serve their low density lifestyle.)
Electricity is overall more plugable, versatile and evolvable than appliances that directly consume hydrocarbons. You can meet your source needs using some combination of grid connection, solar, backup generator, backup batteries, etc... - and you can evolve this source side of things over time without being forced to constantly retrofit the load-side systems in your house.
Yes, propane tanks filled by truck is common anywhere it doesn't make sense to run a pipe and the usage is more than makes sense for a hand-carried bottle.
Where i live in the Midwest everyone has gas installed for the furnace and then the builder asks if they want a gas or electric stove. If you ask you can get a heat pump instead of just air conditioning, but it is extra cost and you still need gas heat for the really cold days we get every winter.
Reducing climate impact from energy production requires both reducing it at the point of production and at the point of consumption. By switching to electric energy at the point of consumption, you reduce demand for gas, etc. The production can then be switched to something zero-impact.
> The production can then be switched to something zero-impact.
There's no such thing as zero-impact. Wind farms have an environmental impact. Building solar-sensitive cells require dirty processes that also create pollution and waste as they don't last forever.
In most countries is changing rapidly as renewables ramp up and it’s not uncommon to hear about major countries having entirely renewable days.
The important part to remember is that natural gas infrastructure is always polluting, and tends to leak a fair amount of fuel which is never even used (around me, there are estimated that this is as high as a third of the total usage). That’s all locked in when you use gas, whereas an electric stove can be powered by a mix of sources which change hourly without the owner even having to know about it.
The other thing to consider is that a professionally-managed and monitored power plant is usually better than equipment as maintained by the average person. Lots of people don’t even get their gas appliances checked once a year on average, and you’ll pretty regularly hear about leaks or fires caused by poor maintenance at apartment buildings where you’d think they’d be at least a little more responsible.
doesn't matter. gas pipes leak, and shall appliances aren't efficient, so even if the grid was 100% fossil fuel (which it's not), it still would be more efficient to use electric in the home.
> it still would be more efficient to use electric in the home.
Efficiency wise you may be wrong. Carrying electricity is not efficient (you lose energy with distance) while gas (as long as leaks are limited) is a more efficient store of energy from start to end.
https://jacksonlab.stanford.edu/publication/methane-and-nox-...