Gas stoves aren't really that fast - even standard electric is faster!

who wants to join the culture War hi so this is connectras oh my phone's not on me oh see this is how prepared I am hello again uh so this is uh I've actually made an outline because I tried to do this without it and it did not work so I have a pretty simple goal with this video I'm not out here to tell you you should get rid of your gas stove right now because that's difficult and expensive I'm also not going to tell you that gas stoves don't have any advantages because they certainly do for certain types of cooking but I do want to hopefully convince you that even a Standard Electric Stove is fine and how do I intend to do that simple they are actually faster than a gas stove now this surprised me you may remember from my uh Kettle video if you saw that that I brought this red Kettle over to my parents stove and it was significantly faster at bringing it to a boil than my gas stove that was surprising to me um so I totally get that this is going to sound like make believe but I'm here with some tests to show you that this is indeed the case now caveat they are slower in that particular way that I know the people who have used both electric and gas and strongly prefer gas are going to say and I will give you that but Counterpoint induction stoves are a thing and if you haven't used one you should give it a try but I didn't get an induction stove I will go into reasons why later so before we get into the tests I do want to give a little bit of backstory feel free to skip to this time marker if you don't care um basically I've had the little nugget in my head that gas stoves are probably not the best thing to have in your home because of air pollution concerns I've had it in my head for a while um this latest culture War nonsense I don't know why exactly it flared up right this minute but um we've had like I said my Kettle video I made that seven months ago and in that script I said there's increasing evidence that gas stoves are not great for indoor air quality and actually there's been information out since the 80s about this um this is not new information it's just coming to light now so I've been toying with the idea of replacing the stove here because this uh this building is stupidly sealed up just me and the cat being here brings Baseline CO2 levels to about 750 to 800 parts per million and um that's just me I mean the cats sell of it but it's basically just my body me existing there's so little air exchange between sign on outside that CO2 concentration basically doubles when I'm here so that has been a little bit concerning to me but I haven't made the jump because I too thought well gas stoves are better than electric stoves and I'll just open the windows or run bathroom fans I actually installed um bathroom fans timer switches so I can run them for an hour and I was getting in the habit of turning them on every time I use the stove but what finally pushed me to just get rid of it was over Christmas I was staying at my parents home and again they have a radiant cooktop and I've used it several times but it hasn't it's it's not been years since I really lived with it for any length of time and um lately I have been getting in the habit of having Cream of Wheat for breakfast I'm a very old soul if you can't tell um and cream of wheat is it's a type of porridge you might know it as Farina f-a-r-i-n-a and um you boil water or milk and then add the stuff and simmer it for a while and with an electric stove um a conventional stove you have to be careful when you're boiling things because you can overshoot that Target but I've remembered how to use an electric stove so I successfully without boiling it over made Cream of Wheat and earlier I had made rice on the stove because they don't have a rice cooker and uh actually that's a lie they don't have a small one I was just making it for myself and same thing didn't have an issue boiling over because I remembered just turn the heat down before it gets to a boil so the knowledge of how to use an electric stove has not left my brain and it the both of those processes went surprisingly quickly it seems to me like it got to a boil earlier than I was expecting in both cases and so I finally thought why don't I just bite the bullet here uh I'm out in the middle of nowhere you can kind of just do whatever you want and I have 200 amp electrical service and room for another breaker and the stove happens to be right above the area that the breaker box is in so adding a new circuit for it was very straightforward it took me about three hours and again to acknowledge that is special it's uh special for me that I'm comfortable doing that that I'm able to do that and that I have the electrical supply to do it so I'm not trying to say anybody can do this easily I'm lucky in that regard but I had the means to run a new circuit easily just buy a stove have it delivered and then plug it in because an electric stove you basically just plug it in so I took all or I unhooked the gas stove capped off the gas line and have a new stove now uh so that's where we are so the particular stove that I chose is a fairly high-end stove it is one of the ones that has a double oven so rather than have a storage drawer below the oven right should clarify for any European viewers who may be watching it is pretty uncommon in the US to have a separate oven and cooktop it is usually one device which we call a range although range is more of a technical term I never call it that I just call it the stove so here normally unless it's generally pretty high-end kitchen layouts that have a separate stovetop and oven so it's just a regular range and the feature that I really wanted because I've grown to really like this is these double oven ranges so rather than have a storage drawer below the oven which is quite typical the old one had it they use that space for a second oven but and this is why I really wanted it they flip it so there's an oven at the top which is very narrow and skinny and then a big oven down below for doing your turkey or whatever mainly I just want that skinny oven at the top because it's a more convenient height to use and uh I don't need a full oven almost ever so that's a feature that was priority for me and to get that with an induction cooktop was ridiculous it pretty much doubled the cost of the stove which again is ridiculous because induction cooking technology is not new it's not that expensive but Market situations make it what it is so that is the main reason why I do not have an induction stove I have some other reasons which I'll explain later but with all this pontificating let's just get to the tests so before I got rid of the gas range I decided to boil different quantities of water in various pieces of cookware that I have and time how long it takes to get to a boil now I did not do this the most scientific way I never again I don't know why I keep not doing this but I didn't measure the beginning water temperature however I did run the tap long enough so that way it was coming from the pipes underground so it was really cold so it should be a very similar starting temp but uh I just wanted to see how long it takes to get from cold to a roaring boil now I know that that's not the most perfect test there's more things that you do with a stove but what that is going to show is how quickly the stove can get energy into cookware which is the entire reason it exists the whole point of a stove is to get heat energy into cookware and thus into food so I think it's about the most Fair test that you can do so again before I got rid of the stove I took various pieces of cookware and tested how long they took to boil okay we're back at this nonsense again I want to see how quickly this gas stove can bring four quarts of water to a boil and I'm going to actually film this I've done some other tests but I know people will probably want to see one actually occur so I will do that and I'm also going to let you know what indoor CO2 levels do throughout this test ah CO2 levels let me just explain that the CO2 is not my biggest concern arguably you shouldn't be in a space that's above a thousand parts per million for any length of time and I intend at some point to get some better ventilation going on here but I'm using the CO2 as a proxy for the other emissions coming from the stove so the biggest things of concern are NO2 and uh there might be other nitrous oxides but I keep hearing people just say NO2 and particulate matter the fine particulate matter from the combustion and I do know cooking in general produces particulate matter but why not get rid of the kind from the stove so anyway CO2 is just being used as a proxy for that I know it's not really that harmful on it by itself but when CO2 goes up quite a lot because of using the stove then we know that those worst things are also in the air and it just gives a good idea of how hard it is to get that to get all that stuff out of the living space and if I didn't mention it in the testing because it's been too long since I did it I do have an over the range vent Hood microwave which does vent outside but the Run of piping is awful so it basically doesn't do much uh so yes anyway moving on right now CO2 as a about 800 PPM the last time I looked at the meter I'm going to start the test and I will turn on the extractor it's an over the range microwave it is vented outside but it doesn't work that well as you'll see um but yeah without further Ado let me turn on the vent that's on high and we'll start the test [Music] okay let me actually look at the meter and tell you what it says right now it is reading 8 18 818 parts per million [Music] I expect this is going to take somewhere around 16 minutes to come to a boil that is what it took on this burner with a differently shaped pot it had a wider base uh than this one but I want to do this pot on the same burner as well so what was it let me see it took 16 minutes and 30 seconds on the same burner with a different pot now when I ran that test I used this pot on the back left burner the one that the kettle is on top of right now that is also listed as a quick boil burner but it is nowhere near as fast as this one that actually took over a half hour to bring four cups of water to a boil and this is the stove this is the pot that was on that burner so yeah uh this idea that gas stoves are really fast is increasingly sounding like BS to me uh but that's that's uh that's part of what I'm doing I want to compare this old stove to the new one that I'm getting which is not induction it's just a standard glass ceramic cooktop the CO2 monitor has not registered a change yet and I should have noted I have disabled the building HVAC so nothing should run nothing should move air around throughout this test except for the extractor and again the CO2 meter is from where I am right now about 30 feet going around the corner away from the stove so about nine meters or so oh you can see my feet how good I just checked the CO2 meter and it is reading 8.45 and it is rising when I first walked over there it was 8 43 so we are already up 30 some parts per million I'm not quite 30. I good at math as we approach the 10 minute Mark I'll go ahead and take another look at the meter all right it is registered a significant jump it is now reading 960 parts per million now some of that is because every time I walk over to it I'm carrying some air from the kitchen over into the living room but uh that's a lot for how far away the meter is from the kitchen if I brought it in here I would imagine it would register probably 15 1600 parts per minute but I don't want to do that because I I want to illustrate that even with the extractor running and I know this isn't a very good one but indoor CO2 levels are going very much out they're becoming a lot words words indoor CO2 levels are very elevated from using just this one burner for 10 minutes we'll boil yet okay so from the first test we should be getting near proper boiling and you can probably see some bubbling happening my uh when exactly you reach boiling is of course going to be a little subjective my what I'm looking out for is the surface of the water to be very disturbed so right now definitely not boiling but I will stop the timer once I see it boiling in fact I'll reposition myself get closer to it it's right on the edge of where I would call it boiling [Music] [Music] yeah I'll stop it here so this pot took 17 seconds longer than the other one uh proving once again that energy is energy and water is water now this is actually I want to point this out because you may have noticed that there wasn't any visible steam until I turned off the burner me tilt the camera up a little bit when I turned the burner back on see how the steam disappears that's because there's so much exhaust going around the pot the exhaust gases from the burner are so hot that they are able to keep this the water vapor that's escaping from condensing into mist so it's visible as Steam the amount of energy that gets wasted from a gas stove by the exhaust is going around the pot is tremendous and you'll see us again as soon as I turn the burner off now there's visible Steam [Music] these aren't the best things in the world I don't think so anyway oh let me check the CO2 meter it read 1160. come with me there we go man you can hardly read that can I make the light go on it's got a light I guess that doesn't do what I thought I was gonna do now it's going to keep Rising for a while even though I've got the event going on some of it I'm near to it if I'm talking at the camera it will pick up my uh exhalation but yeah I know I didn't show it to you when I started but 8 18 is what we started at and just using that one burner for 17 minutes or so elevated it this much I'll let the camera roll for a little bit and walk away from here you can still read that right okay 1205. as you can see it is still Rising 12 35 yeah so it's not just me being here 45. as the air mixes around it is uh it's it's getting more concentrated oh hey look it's a new stove this is a standard glass ceramic cooktop this is not induction this is your old school it just gets really hot stove why don't we do another comparison I'm actually going to do two at the same time here so we have the eight quarts in this big pot and uh sorry four quarts in this big pot which is close to four liters and then eight cups in this smaller pot pretty straightforward we're just gonna do this again not going to be able to start them at exactly the I'll start them then hit the stopwatch how about that and I also got to make sure I do the right size burners because we got different options here okay that's close enough I have a higher angle so you can see more betterly um this is a higher power burner than the one on the left um if the whole burner were in use they would be equally powered but the one on the left is probably running at about two kilowatts and it is not ideal for this pot uh hopefully the pot would be better if it were a little bit bigger but we're just going to leave it as it is and for this test I'm not even going to bother turning on the extractor fan because you know what we're just boiling water that's all we're doing and we're not going to be generating any smoke or particulates or anything like that and as a matter of fact I've done a bunch of testing already and it is delightful how indoor CO2 has not gone up at all so the time we have to beat is 16 minutes and 47 seconds for this which I've already done a test we are not going to beat that we might but we're going to get close what's going to happen is fairly soon this burner is going to shut off because of a high temperature limit um it's uh drawback of this particular stove my understanding is it's fairly common these days that they can only run at full power for some set period of time and then a limit kicks in that burner though will probably not do that because it's running at a lower power setting and it's more spread out also just interesting note these look more pink on camera there that one went um because of the huge amounts of infrared that they are putting out to the naked eye they look a very dark red oh and then the time to beat for that one is actually 19 minutes it took 19 minutes for the old stoves normal burner to bring it to a boil so if this gets us there before 19 minutes then it did it faster now while we are waiting spoiler alert even the small burners in the back the one that my phone is on right now is a warming burner so it's not a true burner even the small burners at the back are faster at Boiling quantities of water like this than the normal burner on my gas stove this is exciting isn't it as we approach the seven minute Mark we're probably going to start seeing steam appear over at least one of these two this is actually something about gas stoves that I had never really appreciated is problematic I guess you could say the volume of those exhaust gases going around the pot in addition to masking the steam like I showed earlier they make just stirring things or smelling things it's much more difficult to interact with the items on the stove because you have this blast of hot air coming up from the stove no matter what whereas these because we do have a lot of infrared light especially since these pots are a little bit smaller than the elements so you do feel some warmth coming off of these but I can put my hand here comfortably even here over the over the burner you can't really do that with the gas stove that's lit high but you need a longer spoon like a wooden spoon or something to stir comfortably at least in my experience and yes I can see yeah you can see the Wisps of steam starting to come up from there you would not see that at all on the gas stove because of all those exhaust gases is it helpful for boiling water probably not but I would argue that for cooking some other things having a visual indicator of steam is helpful huh I didn't think that was gonna be a problem let me move it farther away let's move that bottle out of the way oh no foreign well hey hey we didn't lose it I'll just keep the phone away from here so we are very nearly approaching boiling on this one at the 14 minute mark okay folks I'm gonna call that boiling we're at 14 minutes 45 seconds and I'm gonna shut it off because uh the phones are not happy so 14 minutes 40 I should have hit lap shouldn't I we'll just do that so 1445 is where we were we'll say 15 minutes we just rounded to that that is still four minutes faster than the normal burner on my gas stove now in order for this to tie the gas stove it needs to get to a roaring boil within the next minute which I wouldn't say as likely at this point the gas stove had it boiling but as you can see we are really close and remember that burner was the really high-powered one where the Flames look up the sides that's the only burner on that stove that could do this I'm just about getting those big disturbances that I count as boiling I bet the next time the element pops on we'll be there yeah I'm calling it maybe we should have called that earlier but less than a two minute penalty on this stove to bring quite a lot of water to boil on a burner which isn't even sized ideally for that pot and which is power limiting itself electric stoves are not slow folks okay and now for funsies I'm going to test the tea kettle again but this time on the more moderate burner my original testing I I'd have to go look at the video to see exactly what it did but I know that this burner right here it's what I it's the only what I call normal burner but this one is actually only a little bit more powerful than this one uh but anyway so I'm going to give it that Advantage this time around and let's bring the CO2 meter into the kitchen so we can see exactly what's happening in this room so I'm going to pour in one of these bottles worth of water this is extremely close to one liter probably a tad more than I'll do the same amount later when this stove is out of here uh where's the lid there it is in this case we can have a more objective when it starts whistling it's boiling turn the whistle so it's not pointing right at my phone trying to Center that reasonably well okay and I will turn on the extractor fan again giving us all the advantages we can get for the CO2 it is on its high speed by the way and let's go I'm actually very curious to see what the CO2 meter does because I have not done this before oh and also this burner is more directly underneath the microwave so it should do a better job at extracting but I I don't have a lot of faith that it will [Music] okay I first heard the whistle so now obviously I want to see what happens when I turn off the extractor yeah I know you shouldn't do that it's a bad idea to leave an open flame without some sort of ventilation well we know our while I write down the times for these tests you keep watching that meter actually I'm going to walk let's go walk back and forth a couple times to move here a little bit okay now it's rising this may just have more of a delay than I was expecting [Music] okay some minutes later and it's leveled out at 12 20 and the temperature is more in line with what it actually is in here so I really don't know um but definitely it was at about eight was eight 18 when I started this test sitting over here so um I guess that back left burner the uh extractor fan is actually getting the majority of the exhaust out but certainly the front right which it makes sense is not even underneath the microwave the front burners aren't uh that really adds to indoor CO2 levels so um anyway this video is I'm certain all over the place unless I really added it down but this is just for connectors so you know it's allowed to be all over the place I make the rules how about we get even more all over the place so editing me realized that talking had me forgot to tell you that after I did these tests I did them before I made dinner that evening and after making dinner which required using the oven and I believe one of the burners on the stove though I don't remember for sure whatever I did ended up peeking indoor CO2 at 1560. that is like just holy yikes that's pretty much double the typical Baseline level now granted that was after the test that I did but still that just goes to show you how high it can go and I can tell you from experience um previously just making a typical meal I would easily get above 13 1400 especially whenever I use the oven and after a solid hour of leaving the extractor fan on and the two bathroom fans we got down to 11 10 parts per million which honestly is a better showing than I was expecting but still that is still pretty elevated even after an hour of all those fans running so really if I wanted to get Co2 levels down I would have to just open a window for a while and then heat the air back up so yeah it's uh it's pretty bad okay one final test of the kettle uh on this three Zone burner we'll do the medium setting and one thing that I should stress I have been starting all these tests with the burners cold this time I will prove it to you by touching the stove it's Stone Cold uh the hot surface indicator light is not on anyway let's get to it actually since I just touched that with my oily hands before we start I gotta clean that off foreign number one rule with this type of stove top is keep it clean if you let oily residue get on the burners and then turn them on you will regret that so normally I'm just using glass cleaner day to day really I use glass cleaner for practically everything but there are specific cleaners like ceramic bright for a cooktop like this our one liter test volume or close to it anyway the same bottle [Music] and remember I'm considering it done in the kettle the moment I hear peek from the whistle maybe add like one second at a time so I've opted to use the middle burner because the six inch intersection is a little bit smaller than the kettle's bottom and so most of the middle section is just going around the kettle although the sides yeah it is actually about the same diameter as the kettle itself but of course most of that heat energy is just being reflected into the kettle so sums may hit it in but most is just going up top and I can feel the heat from the burner although honestly less than I would have imagined so anyway now we wait 7 15. all right okay so now that you've seen the tests that I actually recorded for the camera I did several other tests off screen and I want to run over the results with you now um unrelated to the stove top this is just interesting to note the gas range took 8 minutes and 59 seconds so nine minutes to preheat to 400 degrees this new range and I'm surprised it took this long to think of this strategy my uh the one thing about electric ranges or Ovens that I thought was a disadvantage to gas is they tend to be slower to preheat at least that's been my experience my mom and dad have a wall oven because they have a separate cooktop to cook top and that thing is it takes a while to preheat I've never timed it but it feels quite slow so the old range was about nine minutes to get to 400. this new thing both of the ovens heat to 400 in under eight minutes because what they're doing is they're using both the broil heating element and the main heating element to preheat it's called rapid preheat on this particular model which seems so obvious I don't know why I mean maybe that's been standard for a while but now that what I thought was an advantage of a gas oven also gone electric ovens are faster to preheat at least these days maybe it's a tie for some models but certainly that's not a disadvantage anymore so moving away from the oven let's go back to the cooktop so remember the big Ikea pot with four quarts one gallon close to four liters of water in it was the only thing that the new stove did not beat the old stove on Old stove did 16 minutes 47 seconds the best time on the new stove was 18 minutes so really it's a small disadvantage but it was there everything else the electric stove is doing more quickly than the gas stove and also important to remember is that only that one quick boil burner that produces massive Flames managed to beat the time I also put that pot with four quarts of water in it over the back left burner and on that particular stove it took 35 minutes to boil so huge loss there uh these smaller pots with eight cups of water in there on the front left normal burner it took 19 minutes so just about 20 minutes to get eight cups of water to boil on the new stove even in the back burners the smallest ones eight cups of water took uh 16 minutes and 45 seconds the smallest burner on this gas or electric stove the smallest burner which is only 1200 watts of output beat by two minutes and 15 seconds the normal gas burner on the gas stove thinking back to the stove that I grew up with that thing just had four identical burners and I don't know what the output was but given judging by the size of the Flames very similar to that stove so I that blew my mind more than anything the slowest burner on this electric stove is faster than what I would call a normal burner on a gas stove that same pot moved to the front left burner set to the medium setting it reduced down to 14 minutes and 20 seconds uh the best was the best time I also had a 15 minute run for that same thing uh and then unrelated to comparing to the gas stove but I do just want to point out that weird power limiting thing that I mentioned the stove is doing the back left burner by numbers is actually 100 Watts more powerful than the back right however it restricts itself more severely so doing a race with two very similar pots from Ikea 15 minutes on the back left and 13 minutes on the back right so and affect the back right burner is a bit faster just because that power limiting thing doesn't kick in quite so early um and I should note I suspect the reason why it's doing that is it's a crude way to prevent the stove from tripping a circuit breaker I don't think it's actually necessary for the function of the cooktop uh my mom and dad's cooktop I'm pretty certain does not do that the burners only ever cycle on and off when you have them set to something other than high but if you add up the wattage of the burners on this stove it's three thousand three thousand thirteen hundred and twelve hundred so that's 6 and 2500 so that is 8 500 watts just from the burners up top and on a 50 amp breaker the most you can pull is 12 kilowatts so if you had all four burners running and both ovens on I think this stove would actually pull more than 50 amps so I suspect the main reason it has this feature is to basically keep you from over loading the circuit for more than a few minutes at a time but that might not be the case it may just be that a built-in oven the cooktop can't get so hot I don't really know this is the first Stout range with oven and stove that I've lived with I've used them before in like hotels extended stay hotels but I've never actually lived with one until now so I don't know exactly why it's doing that but in the end it doesn't matter because even with that power limitation which cuts the 3000 watt output of the biggest burner down to effectively 2000 Watts it's still almost as fast as the giant burner on the gas stove and faster than any other situation that I can test with the gas stove so just by numbers the electric stove the bog Standard Electric Stove is faster than the gas stove so then now for some speculation why does it feel slower than the gas stove because I will be honest even to me when you turn on the electric stove it feels like oh this is going to take forever I now think this was largely psychological because when you turn on a gas stove you know it's the tick tick tick and you get a flame and you can see and hear that flame whereas an electric stove a conventional stove and induction as well but more electric you turn it on you hear a faint humming and then nothing appears to happen the newer radiant stoves you know you get the glow within a few seconds and then it's pumping out as much heat as it ever will but there's no noise there's no visible flame it just seems like nothing's happening so I think this is largely a psychological thing that still affects me whereas you you turn on that stove and you feel like nothing's happening but in actuality once you let that thing get warm it's gonna heat faster than any gas well most gas stoves uh in most situations right the kettle forgot about the kettle uh so this kettle on the back burners is slower than on the gas stove the back burners the times were 10 54 on back left and 10 minutes and seven seconds on back right uh the old stove managed to get it in eight minutes on the back left it would have taken a little bit longer I think on the front left burner uh I could go back to my Kettle script because I timed it then I think it was around I think it was less than eight minutes so it's probably a little bit longer because the water was colder because it's winter time now rather than uh was that summer or still spring whatever doesn't matter um however the new stove with the uh front left burner on the medium setting it got the kettle to a boil in seven minutes and 15 seconds so it is still faster than the Gap than the gas stove at least on that one burner however the mega burner I didn't test it however I do know all over the place in the past if I had used that burner with the kettle I never timed it but I have done in the past the handle would be too hot to touch from all the Heat going around the kettle making it to the top so I never used that burner and then of course I got an electric kettle because there's no reason to boil water in a kettle on a stove electric kettle remains faster than this stove no matter what just because there's losses involved with transferring heat from the burner to the kettle to the water we've been over that okay so now that we've gone through all that testing I want to talk about some of the other advantages of an electric stove as well as the big disadvantage that I'm sure lots of you have been yelling at your screen for a long time I want to preface this with two things however first I am not that culinarily adventurous I will just put that out on the line the most complicated thing I do with my stove or cooktop is Stir Fry things like vegetables or making some sort of a stir-fry dish for the most part I rarely go out to eat but I buy a lot of stuff from Trader Joe's which is basically mostly pre-prepared I don't do a lot of cooking from scratch so take what I'm about to say with a massive grain of salt if you are someone who really enjoys cooking from scratch that sort of thing it's not my bag but more power to you if you like that but the other thing that I want to say before we get into this is only 38 percent of homes in the US have a gas stove the majority of American homes have electric stoves and because induction cooktops have barely penetrated this Market probably 58 percent of homes have a traditional electric stove so for the majority of us here we are living with this type of stove day to day most people know how to use them for most culinary purposes there are some that definitely they have huge disadvantages for but it is a majority of Americans that are using conventional electric cooktops so for those that are worried about how awful it would be to live with one most of us are already doing it and we are fine but with that out of the way here's the big disadvantage which I'm sure most people are aware of and that is thermal inertia this is probably the big reason why it feels like electric stoves are slower than gas stoves and it is the reason why they are slower to react that is the thing you have to plan for what the stove is going to do when you are cooking because a gas stove can go from zero to a hundred percent to zero instantly its heat output is completely modulatable is that a word modulatable sure and you have find control over the whole range and it reacts instantly I will however say I have never used a gas stove where the knob has a linear uh rate of change to the flame size it's usually quite stepped so I usually have to watch the flame to see what it's doing to judge how I've actually changed the heat output but anyway an electric stove because you have the thermal mass of either the heating element or the glass ceramic cooktop and I actually think a regular coil top stove might be a little bit better in this regard but it's been too long since I've used one and the little cheap ones you can buy that plug into the wall they don't have proper um duty cycle controls at least from what I have experienced so I can't say that for certain but in any case there's a there's the thermal mass of the heating element itself which has to be overcome when you are increasing temperature and then hangs out there when you're decreasing temperature so rather than that very Square graph you can have of heat output with a gas stove a conventional electric you turn it to high and it's going to slowly start climbing in temperature and then the thing that people find really difficult to deal with is when you switch it to low it's going to still keep Rising for a while and then level out and start falling it's probably parabolic like most things seem to be in nature for certain culinary uh techniques and or certain brains this is very difficult for me it's not this is just something that I know is going to happen and uh I think I already said it but I've been taking so many takes of this I may have forgotten I just know that when I'm bringing something to a boil that I then need to simmer you need to turn the heat down before it gets to a boil you need to look for the early signs of boiling then turn it down and you'll be fine but I understand that other people have brains that are built differently and that is really hard to manage so I don't want to be dismissive of those folks but I do strongly believe that that thermal inertia is something you can learn to deal with and the other thing which I feel like is obvious but I'm gonna say it anyway if you have something on an electric stove that is about to boil over or is it getting too hot and you need to get heat away from it pick it up that's all you have to do just pick it up once it's not in contact with the stove surface heat will stop going into it instantly but if you ever need to remove the heat from something just pick it up it doesn't even need to come up more than a couple inches it's going to stop boiling so again I've turned it off it's still hot enough to make this boil but pick it up you always have that option and you can just put it right next to where you need it or put a hot pad on the counter I realize that's not perfect I'm not trying to sell you one oh amazing just you can always do that if something's about to boil over pick it up is that as elegant as just turning it down no but you can just pick it up and it's going to solve that problem for you yes you're going to need place to put it or just hold it in the air I guess so it's not perfect but that option is there you can take it I have used it you will be fine however some people find that thermal Mass helpful I can't say that I do but as a matter of fact it is helpful to how the stoves modulate their power because their duty cycle based so when you set it to full power it just stays on if you have it to 90 it'll be on for maybe 30 seconds and off for three seconds and then turn back on so you if the control is is uh good enough you can have a very linear reaction on the dial but it is going to be slow because you have to deal with thermal Mass but anyway you know if it were that instant reaction like gas that would be awful if you just turn the burner on high for 30 seconds then turn it off for 15 seconds you basically don't have any heat control but because you got that big thermal mass of an electric stove yeah it's probably doing a little bit of Rippling as you go but you can like I've heard people say they can't get a simmer on an electric stove I can I don't know if we have very different definitions of simmer but um I can that's like I said you turn it like for making Cream of Wheat turn it to high start to see oh I'm getting bubbles around the edges go down to like three and then what do you know it comes to a boil and then starts simmering so I don't really understand that particular complaint but I'm to reiterate it is a thing it's a thing you have to learn how to deal with some people may not be able to learn how to deal with it and certain cooking Styles flat out will not work with it uh which I don't want to dismiss is not important especially if it's a cultural thing uh the one thing that keeps coming up when I have discussions online is cooking with a wok uh there are now induction walks which exist but they're very expensive and most conventional electric ranges just do not work well with the walk um I've never really used a walk I don't know how to use one properly so that is not a thing that I'm aware of but I'm not going to [Music] I mean I trust that that is a thing all right I almost forgot this advantage of a gas stove and people would be really mad if I didn't bring it up and that is they work during power outages and uh in my past in my childhood that is a thing that we did a few times just light them with imagine it works however I'm not sure how many new stoves will work without power I have experienced a couple my brother had one that if they had a power a brief power Interruption it would then say verify all uh burners are off and then press start it had a safety valve which would kill gas to the burners and I don't know if that would like I don't know if that valve is normally open and it closes when it has power or what it might not work without power I don't know I'd have to see if I can arrange to try that but assuming a regular stove you can use it during a power outage which I will grant you is a cool advantage and it might be important depending on where you live however two things uh if that's something you absolutely want to have you can get a camping stove for emergencies I would probably recommend like a little propane powered one with the little bottles or if you have some sort of backup power solution you can get a portable plug-in burner induction or otherwise so for me at this point I am beyond that being important because I have other ways to cook should I need that and actually to plug the really cool thing that electricity lets us do because of my new car and the vehicle to load adapter like I'm not going to ever have a generator because so long as my car has some useful charge I can just plug a little burner into it plug the microwave into it uh the fridge freezer whatever I need to and use my car for that purpose but anyway I did just want to not forget that's a cool thing if you are prone to power outages and you still want to be able to cook on your stove a gas stove lets you do that but personally I wouldn't cling to that because you can get a camping stove if you really want to or some sort of a battery backup solution or a generator there's lots of other options besides just that so I wouldn't put too much weight on it but I will admit it's cool and useful but now let's talk about the advantages because this is the other reason why I decided yeah let's just get rid of the gas stove so after all the testing that I've done guess what indoor CO2 levels did they stayed flat because there's nothing emitting CO2 in the building other than me the furnace is properly vented outside so even when it runs for two hours indoor CO2 does not change now not worried about that at all that source of air pollution is gone but other than that let's talk about more quality of life things hate in the kitchen in the summertime cooking with a gas stove or especially using a gas oven sucks it just sucks I have never changed my opinion on that because it produces quite a lot of heat I'm going to show you this clip from the kettle video this is the tea kettle on top of the gas stove in the thermal camera you can see that so much energy is just going around the pot that little 9000 BTU burner is something like three kilowatts of heat that is the most powerful burner on the electric stove so the most powerful burner on the electric stove can only produce as much heat as a fairly weak burner on the gas stove gas stoves are just so bad at getting the heat energy from the fuel they combust into the cookware that a lot of it goes around the cookware ends up in your home and in the summer that sucks the oven is particularly egregious in my experience because gas ovens have to vent their exhaust out so usually it's underneath the control panel if you feel back there um there's a lot of hot air or hot gases coming out of that spot whenever the oven burner is on because it has it's combusting fuel it has to get that exhaust out of there that adds heat to your kitchen in addition to the actual heat of the oven cavity whereas electric ovens they can actually be insulated because the electric heating element doesn't need to be vented so you preheat an electric oven it doesn't heat up the kitchen nearly as much as a gas oven and I actually think it might even do less than a toaster oven but I haven't done much comparison on that so cooking in the summer with any electric range induction or not is so much nicer next thing related to that go back to the clip on the Heat going around the tea kettle I have this pot here because these cheap uh sauce pans I use quite a lot um and they they're from Walmart they're not the greatest quality however if you look at this handle it has this lovely design Quirk where it will collect exhaust gases from the stove and then they'll travel up the handle so when you use these pots on a gas range this gets too hot to touch virtually any anything you're doing uh even just using that little simmer burner to heat up like some baked beans you cannot touch this with bare hands you need a uh something like an oven mitt to use it to actually hold it that never happens with an electric stove and it's not just this pot I have plenty of cookware that on the gas stove including a nice it's not quite a walk but a rounded frying pan type thing that I cannot use with bare hands also related to that and again this is one of those brain nuggets that once it gets in your brain you're like wow why do I want this uh let's go back to the cooking Cream of Wheat example you have to stir that constantly while it's simmering on a gas stove if you I just Stir It with the spoon I'm going to eat it with because why make two things dirty when you are stirring with something like a spoon it hurts because all those gases going around the pot are searing your hand a little bit that's just the thing that I've been used to and figured well that's a consequence of cooking it doesn't happen with an electric stove even if the pot is a small one you just use the small burners you might feel a little bit of heat coming around the pot but mostly it's nowhere near as hot as stirring anything with a gas stove also more complicated things cooking on the gas stove say you you have your face near the the frying pan something like that tons of exhaust gases are shooting up around the pan and going into your face which makes it hard and I've mentioned this online and people thought I was nuts but to me that makes it hard to smell what's cooking because you have this volume of hot air coming at you and it's uh dispersing the actual odors from the food sense whatever and it just in addition to making more uncomfortable it's harder to see how the food or harder to experience how the food is cooking also this is from if I didn't already show you I'm going to hammer this point in or I'll go back to it now with the gas stove you cannot see water vapor coming up from water as it gets close to a boil all those exhaust gases going around the pot prevent the water vapor from condensing and turning into visible steam whereas on an electric stove because you don't have that huge amount of gas going around the pot you can see that so you also have better visual indicator of how well your food is cooking the whole Heat going around the pot thing is a huge disadvantage that I had never really considered until I bothered cooking on my parents stove again and realized this is actually quite nice so those are my main advantages as far as cooking from on the electric stove perspective handles don't get hot you don't have a bunch of gas coming to you you can see things when they're about to boil it's easier to smell things you can get your face up nice and close into whatever you're cooking without singing your hair also there's no open Flames that's plus two you don't have to worry about your hair catching on fire so there are a lot of advantages that I for me outweigh the disadvantage of the thermal inertia thing I have been completely disillusioned from gas stoves as being so much better and then another thing I didn't even mention was the noise the noise from the burners this is a small thing but like on an electric stove the noise is the food cooking so if you start to hear some boiling sounds or the Searing those sizzling that's all you hear whereas with the gas stove you also have to deal with the noise of the flame the reason why I don't think this is a big deal is because that noise is also a good indicator of the heat output so I'll call it a wash but aside from cooking there are some other advantages as well you know what's really cool about a conventional radiant cooktop it's a big flat surface and when you're not using it to cook you can use it as a work surface for something else same goes for induction stoves I've never had a gas stove which isn't either the old-fashioned kind that has the little individual burner things or just a big grate on top they get discolored over time they're hard to clean it's just a pain to live with and you can't set things on them that you can with an electric stove because it's just a big slab of glass or whatever the material is on induction stoves another big advantage and I not to mention easy to clean a radiant cooktop a lot of people complain about them because you know they do get extremely hot and if you do not clean them regularly you can get oils that kind of smear onto the surface they get discolored but if you clean them regularly it's not a big problem thinking back to my mom and dad's stove they use ceramic bright on it regularly it looks perfect even though it's 15 years old at this point the only literally the only cosmetic defect is it has a big scratch on it now that showed up like a year or two ago according to them so I don't know to me that doesn't seem like a big deal I think people just like the biggest thing is if you cook something that is splattering oil you need to clean the cooktop before you use it again because if you trap that oil underneath the pot and then turn it on it will leave a mark so that's the big thing but you can get that out just by buffing I don't think it's that big of a deal uh so yeah food for thought right now final discussion after all this family nonsense so I kind of talked about it before why didn't I get an induction range why did I just get a conventional rating at cooktop uh mainly I'm a tortured midwesterner who doesn't need the best of the best and is allergic to spending a lot of money on something like a basic kitchen appliance however I did want that double oven thing so to get that with an induction cooktop was something like three thousand dollars whereas getting without with a radiant cooktop was about 1400. I something about spending double the money just to get an induction cooktop didn't sit right with me and the only option that I could get quickly uh was a Samsung model that they have a weird door situation for their double oven model so just was not a priority to me but there's two other there's three other reasons um for one thing again I don't find cooking with a regular electric stove to be all that difficult so the advantage of induction is not something that I that I truly feel like I need but secondly I have quite a lot of cookware that doesn't work with induction um I do have an individual induction cooktop I've tested it and basically I have a set of Ikea cookware one other thing and this tea kettle and that's it these sauce pans don't work I have a couple of Skillets I use that don't work I have a vegetable steamer that doesn't work um it's one of the downsides of the fact that in the U.S induction is just barely moving here there's a lot of cookware for sale that does not work with it and then the other thing is the cookware that I do have is very loud and it makes an unpleasant noise on induction cooktops and I now know it's not just the one that I played with it is better with a different cooktop but it's still pretty loud so it's a very unpleasant noise for me I didn't want to deal with that I'm sure there's better cookware that doesn't make that noise the tea kettle is practically silent but all of the cookware that I have has the sides are not magnetic but the bottom is and probably the way the bottom is bonded to the pot it's resonating in some way it's loud but here's the biggest reason why I didn't bother getting induction these exist so if for some reason I want the benefits of induction I could just use this thing and going back to the flat work surface of the electric stove so long as the stove isn't hot I can just plop this on top of one of the burners and still use the vent hood that I currently have so and again this is part of the going back to these things are like 60 or 70 dollars so the fact that it cost fifteen hundred dollars more to get basically the same oven but with an induction cooktop I'm a midwesterner I can't justify that that's awful plus I will be honest I have some reservations about how reliable induction cooktops might be I know they've been around for a long time they're probably pretty reliable but I am concerned that if I lose a burner or there's some sort of electronic fault in the stove that it's going to turn into a nightmare to fix and the disadvantage of us all having stoves combined with ovens is if you have that problem you might not need to spend more money than you would otherwise so we basically don't have any cheap induction options here except plug-in burners and since these exist and they are about as powerful as most induction ranges well I shouldn't say that a lot of induction regions do have crazy high power burners but this thing I timed that big pot of water to boil it was about 19 minutes on an induction plug-in cooktop so it's about as fast as the fastest burner on a radiant stove uh so yeah if I want that greater control that instant on and off I can have that in addition to the radiant cooktop so that's why it wasn't a priority for me these exist they're plentiful uh if I want to start playing around with more fancy cooking techniques I can just get one of these um but certainly if you are in the position to replace your stove and you want to go induction you might consider it for me it's just not worth it yet with all the cookware I have that doesn't work with it the fact that conventional electric really doesn't bother me the fact that some cookware I've used is really loud and unpleasant to use and the fact that these things exist if I really want to go with it I just couldn't justify the purchase anywho I think that's all this is a very long video and I can tell I had my coffee and I've been rambling really fast so we'll see how y'all like this one but uh to reiterate I'm not telling you you should hate your gas stove but I am saying maybe it's worth being a little more critical of some of the disadvantages that right now you just accept as a fact of cooking life which don't have to be less heat in the kitchen easier to touch cookware without needing an oven mitt and easier to clean there's a lot of advantages to even a conventional cheap radiant cooktop that might be worth losing the fine control of gas and even if you want that these are there for you so I do think it's time we consider breaking up with our gas stoves folks because we have the technology

Channel: Technology Connextras

Views: 475,902

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Id: eUywI8YGy0Y

Length: 68min 15sec (4095 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 30 2023