this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (16 children)

Counterpoint: electrifying homes is also a huge cost savings in general once you are at the point where you're willing to forgo that big gas furnace in favor of an efficient heat pump system.

Cookers use very little gas. It's really only water heaters and furnaces that use a lot of it, and heat pump units are incredibly efficient for both those tasks. Though I will admit that the noise a heat pump water heater makes is just atrocious and you'll need to figure out if your can manage that in your life (e.g., by setting it to only run at night, when you're out of the house, or putting it somewhere far away from where you spend time).

Keeping a gas hookup at $15+/month for a single appliance like a water heater or range is an expense a lot of people can and should trim, but instead they treat it like a sunk cost and think "well I have this one appliance, so I may as well get MORE gas appliances". Which is intended. The whole "now you're cooking with gas" campaign and all the nonsense ad campaigns about how gas ranges cook better than electric* was a deliberate (astroturf) marketing campaign from natural gas utilities because they knew that keeping electric cookers in the house would stop people from abandoning the appliances that ACTUALLY use gas but were hard to get people passionate about. This isn't a conspiracy theory; we have the memos and POs.

* the difference is at best unnoticeable to the average cook and I truly believe the performance is worse, especially when factoring in time spent cleaning. Electric ovens are flatly better and modern electric cook tops work super well, even if not induction.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (11 children)

Gas is great if you need to boil a pot of water right now. Like in a restaurant kitchen.

Any application that is not in a massive rush is just fine on electric.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I've found induction cooktops do just as well as gas at boiling water. The frustrating thing about them right now is the market is immature, so the good ones cost well over $1000 per burner and the cheap ones are so much worse (lousy coil sizes and poor heating precision) they aren't worth using as anything more than a camping stove for tiny little pans where you don't need precision. It's like nobody in the industry wants to make these things good enough to actually replace the old technology, they just want to price gouge for all it's worth while it's still seen as the "expensive, hard to make, premium option".

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

I have both a gas and the cheapest induction range/oven combo I could find and the induction is way better.

People saying gas is better are just wrong.

Gas should be incentivized out of residential new construction, and probably banned from new multi family dwellings

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