Digital Cooking - Better Than Gas Stoves?
this video is sponsored by Foreo it's a period of energy unrest Rebel lawmakers striking from a hidden swamp in Washington DC have dealt their first blow against the evil natural gas Empire Rebel scientists performed studies stating gas stoves contribute to 13 of asthma cases in children and other air-related illnesses but spies have managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's Ultimate Weapon the induction electric cooktop the proclaimed savior of the stove Wars hold on who's the rebel scum in this analogy are we we have a little bit of fun but there is a bit of a stove Wars brewing and it might decide how you cook the food of the future whether it's Banning natural gas cooktops public anger or personal preference this story has a bit of everything but what exactly does it mean and how might it affect you and should you be worried or excited let's find out this is the stove Wars I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vinci let's start with how we got here on January 9th 2023 Richard trumpkin Jr head of the U.S consumer product safety commission said natural gas stoves are a hidden Hazard and suggested that any unsafe product should be considered for a ban he would later walk that statement back but not before social media and news outlets exaggerated politicized and turned cooking into a tribal situation where you are supposed to draw lines in the sand and pick sides most reasons for Banning natural gas stem from studies that state its impact on our health a study from Harvard in June 2022 stated natural gas contains Trace Amounts of other harmful gases outside the known harmful products of the methane combustion process natural gases largely methane around 60 to 90 percent but it also contains other volatile organic compounds vocs like alkane cycloalkanes and aromatic and non-organic compounds like hydrogen sulfide carbon dioxide water vapor nitrogen helium another study from 2022 stated the natural gas stoves contribute to 13 percent of asthma cases in children and that's the one I believe that really started the stove Wars roughly 40 of U.S homes use natural gas for cooking today and personally for me growing up every home I've ever lived in has had natural gas cooktops here in California I still remember when my parents shop for their very first house my mom specifically wanted the house that had a natural gas cooktop in a lot of ways natural gas is that ingrained in our imaginations when it comes to food with flame and Romanticism between the two in the early days we cooked directly on an open fire to wood stoves to gas stoves but the basic idea always remained the same then came a crazy sci-fi future with microwaves and electric cooktops and this isn't a change everyone is going to be happy to make but back then the electric alternative the electric coil cooktop kinda sucked they were worked by sending electricity to a very high resistance coil that glows hot as it converts electricity into heat but has the same problem as natural gas where a lot of the heat is just sent into the outside air and into the room as opposed to the pot or pan you're trying to heat radiant electric is a newer Tech where a heating element gets hot under a plate of glass if you've ever seen a glass cooktop with a really hot red glowing ring in the middle that's a radiant cooktop so if natural gas is the Empire at 40 to 55 percent efficiency then the electric coil cooktop is the Sith at 60 to 75 percent that no one likes then we have radiant electric cooktops the rebels at 80 percent but there is a new game in town the induction cooktop and it's the Jedi in this analogy at 90 percent efficiency oh I almost forgot I got a gift for my wife and what better time than now to tell you about our sponsor this week for real Freo is the premium Swedish beauty brand that makes some awesome products that might be the perfect gift for that special someone in your life this is the ferreo bear and using Pro level microcurrent and t-sonic massage the bear 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get into the real world and see how these stove moves actually work we have a little test stand where we made to measure how much of the heat is actually just going into heating this little box that we built and how much is actually heating your food what's interesting is we have a thermal imaging camera that is set to the same values for all three cooktops and here's a comparison with natural gas on the left and induction on the right what's interesting here is we are going to measure with a stopwatch how long it takes each to boil this one liter about 32 ounces of water any guesses before we speed this up yeah if you're thinking the gas is going to be the fastest you're actually going to be pretty surprised this is where that inefficiency comes in a lot of the fires you can kind of see is billowing around the pot and not actually heating the water and instead just heating up the room and in fact if you look at temperature data point number two you'll see just how hot the top of that box is getting much warmer than the induction side so now on the right you can see that the induction coil is a lot more precise and troll that's because the induction coil inside the magnetic field that heats the bottom of the pan but you can see that the top of the stove is way cooler now on the induction experiment and that's because well ninety percent of the heat you're actually producing goes into the pot instead of into the outside air all right so first believe it or not the induction cooktop wins and if you look at the bottom you'll see that the gas fire is at 300 degrees Fahrenheit while the induction is only around half that maybe 160 or so but even then all that heat goes to the pot and it actually wins its competition by finishing off in 5 minutes and 33 seconds and the natural gas takes almost two minutes longer at 731 so even though it has way more heat at the bottom most of it just kind of goes around the Potter pan this happens all the time you might be surprised and it actually warms up the room as well so in the summertime you're gonna have to cool that room as well and just for fun let's do the same thing with that old-fashioned coil electric and you'll see it actually does work pretty well because it pulls a lot of electricity and we'll get back to that here in a second but you can see it has the same problem or a lot of that heat is going into the room now a lot less than natural gas but still some unfortunately we couldn't put a box for the coil electric because the space considerations in that part of our house but you can kind of imagine with that efficiency that's kind of where we're at so here is a data of what we found the induction cooktop which was just a 50 Amazon unit that we found only pull 1500 watts but it still performed pretty admirably at 5.5 minutes and it consumed 140 Watt hours or 0.14 kilowatt hours if you go down the list natural gas converting from BTUs and therms for natural gas to kilowatt hours used more than double that at 360. and the coil Falls in between at 180. but for us to make sense of this we'd have to normalize for the amount of energy
consumed right because the coil had a much larger 240 volt plug and was pulling 2358 Watts while the reduction was only pulling fifteen hundred if we normalize the data and use a 2400 watt induction cooktop it would have boiled the water in 3.5 minutes which is pretty impressive and remember that induction cooktops go all the way to 3 500 watts and maybe even more and at 3 500 watts out of both the water in 2.4 minutes vastly quicker than even gas but the problem and the reason why there's a stove Wars and it's not just an obvious choice is the price so if you consider that the price average in America for natural gas is 84 cents per therm and that the average price of electricity is 16 cents per kilowatt hour here's how the costs break down so you can see that if you used gas in your home and you boiled water six times a day for a year that'd be 17 but on the induction cooktop it'd be 48 electricity radiant 54 and a old-fashioned coil electric 62 dollars so even though natural gas is wildly less efficient just like in gasoline cars natural gas is so much cheaper that it's still way cheaper to operate now this really matters for example in a restaurant because while the difference might only be a hundred dollars to URI a restaurant can consume 1500 cubic feet of natural gas per day and spend around forty seven hundred dollars per year in natural gas prices if they switch to induction their bill would nearly double to eighty five hundred dollars per year now that sounds really bad but it's not so simple because the induction cooktop only Heats what you're cooking and not the entire room there's a chance you would need less air conditioning for example in the summertime which is a huge amount of electricity and the difference in price might not be as bad as you think but when it comes to efficiency there's a clear winner it's the induction cooktop at 90 percent number two would be the radiate cooktop three coil and finally number four would be gas how about air quality well this is a three-way tie for all the electric options coil radiant and induction are all super clean there's no emissions in the air from the heat Source itself where as the loser here is clearly natural gas natural gas is one of those things that we've all taken for granted as a thing in our house but it is a huge source of air pollution that we don't consider and if you're thinking oh if you go electric I don't need a hood or a range vent when I cook you still do because while you cook food you're charring it and there's a potential for other Airborne pollutants while you cook so you always want to run a vent when cooking how about cooking performance well as we mentioned the induction cooktop probably actually is the best performer of the bunch and that's because you can dial in temperature and when you do the cooktop doesn't stay hot for a long period of time so if you wanted to bring something to a boil and then quickly dial it down to a lower temperature you can do that with the induction whereas with the other two Electric types the coil and radiant heat those will stay hot longer so they're not going to just be able to be quickly turned off Natural Gas you could turn it off or turn it lower and change the incoming heat very quickly but the induction gives you so much power and so much Focus Us in Precision that probably is the best how about ease of use and cleanup well here again induction is King because the induction cooktop is on a flat piece of glass it's really easy to wipe away plus because the glass and the induction cooktop itself doesn't actually get very hot if you had anything spill over it's not going to cake on and be really hard to clean you can just wipe it right off and it's quite safe for that reason as well and then finally at the very end of the list here for cleanup and ease of use you got the coil and the gas both of which you can have to move and clean out little things that fall into the nooks and cracks and they're by far the worst to clean out how about smart features well again here induction is King because induction is a digital form of cooking you can really precisely control the temperature and in fact if you picked up your pan off of the induction cooktop it would know and it could just shut off right away there's really a higher level of safety and control with the induction cooktop next up would be radiant but they are still a little bit unsafe because they remain hot for a very long time and of course coils are glowing and hot and then finally the longest to cool and the most dangerous form of cooking is natural gas my mom used to always check the house two to three times even after we left the house before a long trip to make sure the natural gas was all turned off because obviously there's a risk and a hazard for explosions with pipelines leaks bursts and everything else for example there was a pipeline that I was really close to in 2010 in September in San Bruno California where an explosion resulted in a fire that destroyed over 35 homes and killed eight people and it even registered a 1.1 earthquake on the Richter Scale really dangerous stuff and with aging infrastructure and natural gas lines that problem is just going to get worse and worse going forward so I think based on our criteria then Best Choice obviously is induction right so why the controversy well induction isn't perfect for one we've been using this induction cooktop that we showed you here for the past week my wife and I had the same feedback the food cooked so quickly that we had to retrain our cooking Habits Like if you think you have two or three minutes while you're cutting up an onion before the water gets hot you might not anymore obviously you can set the temperature down but it might require a little bit of retraining and rethinking about how you approach cooking you might also need brand new pots and pans and this is interesting because you have to have a magnetic bottom some sort of a copper bottom but you can't use aluminum for example or other cheaper cookware because it's non-magnetic and the induction coils aren't going to be able to heat it up so yes any of you that love Cast Iron cooking old is new again and you're right in shape because they work fantastic on a induction cooktop another con of the induction cooktop is it does make a little bit of a high-pitched noise now it wasn't really too much of a bother for me but it did bother one of my editors so this is maybe sensitivity to the spectrum of sound and it might affect people differently so check it out for yourself see if you can try one out at a warehouse if you have a friend who has one to make sure it doesn't bother you I'm not sure if it was just my system it was a 50 very cheap system on Amazon and if bigger more industrial cooktops that you would buy for your whole kitchen wouldn't be better I'm just not sure but double check that before you buy one what about curved bottom pots and pans and Woks and things like that well they are a bit of a challenge because you have a smaller surface area making contact they do still work and they actually do make curved induction cooktops like this YouTube video that we will link below so let's wrap this up first of all no one is coming for your natural gas cooktops all the laws that we're talking about affect the future sales and future building projects that will be rolling out tomorrow all natural gas cooktops in the wild aren't going anywhere anytime soon induction is a vastly more high-tech and better solution in almost every single way but cheap natural gas prices will make natural gas cooking the low-cost King for the foreseeable future now obviously conflicts in the Ukraine and all the other stuff happening in the news is going to impact natural gas and electricity prices so this data could change but hopefully we'll put a link to this spreadsheet you can figure out the numbers and see how much it would cost you based on which technology you'd be using natural gas don't forget is the only open flame we have in our homes and we've gotten so used to them for so long that we've forgotten how dangerous they truly are if someone told you yeah I burned my house down your first thought would be your stove right that's how dangerous they are but we've been using it for so long we don't think of it that way so do I just recommend you should get out there throw your old stove away and get an induction cooktop well well not exactly it really depends on your kitchen and what you're wired for so for example if you have a natural gas cooktop today odds are you don't have a 240 volt electrical line behind your stove which means that you'd have to hire an electrician and run new 240 wiring which can cost one to two thousand dollars before you even buy a new cooktop but if you have an old-fashioned coil electric cooktop you're going to be wired for 240 and this upgrade might just make sense for you and I think you'll probably appreciate the upgrade so we mentioned a lot of this is going to impact the future so in this way California typically leads the way when it comes to energy related matters whether you think that's good or bad is up to you and your political views but for once California is actually being pro-consumer choice because new building codes will require pre-wiring homes with 240 volt high power electric lines for appliances such as stoves and hot water heaters even if the Builder decides they want to use natural gas this means that even if your house when you buy it in the future with new building codes had a natural gas stove or a natural gas water heater you would have the wiring in place to be able to swap it out and go electric like a heat pump water heater and an induction cooktop the two premier forms of electric heating for those applications so on my old house I have neither and so for me I would have to pay a lot of money to an electrician to run the new wire to be able to make those changes I can't get an electric water heater because I don't have 240 behind my water heater and I can't get a electric induction cooktop because I don't have 240 volt back there either so yes the stove Wars are cooking but you don't have to worry because for once there might actually be more choice not less no they're not coming to take away your natural gas stove and if you prefer it odds are you can probably just keep on using it interesting when it comes to bands Republicans have been the loudest critics and 20 Republican control State legislatures have actually passed laws prohibiting the ban of natural gas a natural gas ban ban but most households in those red States cook with electric stoves not gas according to a 2020 analysis from the Energy Information Administration in the U.S the highest percentage of households that use gas for cooking are controlled by Democrat States including California Nevada Illinois New York and New Jersey a little bit ironic but I understand these things get heated me personally I'm a Believer in Freedom and consumer choice so I don't really support any kind of ban on either side I think the engineers and scientists should be the ones out in front coming up with new ideas new technologies to make our lives better and I think lawmakers are out passing bands and anti-bands and really neither accomplish as much of anything so I think when the technology gets better to a level where you'll want to make the change you will that's how technology always works when electric cars are widely available and way cheaper and everyone knows it you won't need to ban gasoline cars you just won't have much of a market for them but until then yeah this is going to be a little bit of a contested issue and it really matters mostly for the buildings of the future you gotta remember running natural gas along with electricity to homes might require running 10 20 30 miles of natural gas to a new residential development and that cost is one that Builders may not want to pay because as we increasingly become more electric natural gas is going to probably fall by the wayside naturally just not going to compete in terms of cost and when more companies make induction cooktops those prices will come down too anyways that's my take on it but what do you think are you excited what side of the wars are you on or which do you prefer do you have a Nostalgia for natural gas like I did I mean to me it was just something that I grew up with sound off in the comments below all right that is a look at the stove Wars thank you so much for watching if you like this video check out this one next I think you'll like so until next time May the force be with you star Star Wars fans I'm sure I'll I'll hear from you in the comments below looking forward to it all right I'm rigatou DaVinci catch you next week
2023-02-26 11:45
