159: It’s a Gas Gas Gas (stove) – Electric vs. Gas

Hey, everybody on today’s episode is still to be determined. We’re gonna be talking about how your appliances could be evolving. That’s right. We’re going to eventually reach the point where to cook food. We’ll just take a few of our refrigerator magnets off the fridge, put them on the pot, let everything cook up, and then bob’s your Uncle

As usual. I’m Sean Ferrell. I write some sci-fi. I write some stuff for kids and I’m just generally curious about technology and luckily for me, my brother is that Matt Ferrell of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which of course is the spawning point of all of our discussions here on this podcast. Before we get into Matt’s most recent episode, which is about cooking with magnets and just generally avoid.

Older technologies that are slowly having an impact on our lives and the environment around us. Wanted to share some comments from our previous episode. This is from episode 1 58 on fixing our plastic problem, which of course was a long form interview between Matt and some genius artists who had created a means of recycling plastic in a way that would get it out of our hair.

There were comments like, From Larry Cox who wrote My parents now 92 and 89 in Maine have a basement and have been trying to give stuff away for over five years. Every time we go back to visit, most homes back there have basements to initially accommodate storing garden vegetables. I think this is linking into Mets and my recurring conversation.

The spelunking we had to do into our parents’ basement as they were trying to move from, yeah, Western New York to Western Massachusetts. Every few years they’re planning on moving further east. So they’ll be in the Atlantic soon, and then maybe on the continent, we’ll find out soon. . There was also this comment from Vera Fleck who wrote, the fumes are really dangerous, but maybe better than letting all the pile up in the oceans and on the land.

The self handling, of course, could lead to more awareness. Side note, you’re 50?! So that’s a comment on like, what do we do with all this plastic that’s piling up and, and the potential for fumes for, as a byproduct of the process of recycling? Well, maybe we figure out some better way of handling the fumes instead just letting stuff pile up.

I agree with you, Vera. It’s not always, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Take steps that help things and figure out solutions.

And the fu and the fumes aren’t that. The fumes vary based on like what the kind of plastics that are getting recycled. So it’s like some plastics give off really toxic fumes and are really dangerous.

So those obviously you can’t do right now. Do something else with those. The proper ventil. Yeah, proper ventilation and things like that. You can do a lot of this stuff pretty safely. And yes, I am almost 50

and anybody watching on YouTube is not gonna be surprised to find out by looking at the video. Who the older brother.

I’ll just let my gray beard do the talking for me. That’s right. Before we get into our conversation around Matt’s most recent video, which as I mentioned before, is about the potential of cooking with magnets and avoiding older appliance technologies, that might not be as great as we’d hope they would be.

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Now back to our conversation about Matt’s most recent video. This is the episode that dropped on March 14th, 2023. Is it time to start cooking with magnets?

Question mark. That’s right. We’re talking about how do you get an appliance that seems like, well, this is fine. How do you get a large enough number of people to move forward into cooking with other models of appliance? We’re talking about stove top. We’re talking about ovens. We’re talking about induction cooking versus gas, or even electric appliances.

And this is, as Matt points out, has become somewhat of a hot topic, no pun intended, here in the United States as it became a political. issue. Mm-hmm. in basically, uh, the history of, of US politics. You can see recurring again and again and again. The argument about the nanny state and the argument about individual rights to.

Do things that, you know, if you take responsibility for it, you should be allowed to do it. And there’s this constant swinging pendulum back and forth in the us. This is also taking place, I’m sure worldwide, but Matt and I are gonna focus mainly on the US context. That recently came to a head around, strangely enough gas stoves when the US government started to promote the idea that maybe gas stoves were not something we wanted to hold onto.

and just like light bulbs before it. There’s a surprising number of people who jump up and say, you can have my stove when you pry it for my cold dead hand and . Yeah, seems like quite an interesting hill to die on, but some people are willing to go toe to toe over their light bulbs and their stoves. I can’t say that I care enough about either, but there are people who see it as an infringement somehow on their rights, so, yep.

It became a big topic, and Matt’s video tried to break down some of the science behind the conversation because right out of the gate, the political conversation boiled down to. They wanna take what you have and Yep. Ultimately that is not what was being said in the reportage. That was not what was being said in government documents and policy approaches.

And that’s not what’s being said in Matt’s video. And I think this boils down to my, my response to your video was this really does boil down to, I think, if enough people start to be educated around what’s going on with these stove. and there’s enough, I think policy incentives put in place similar to solar.

Mm-hmm. , if the government starts helping people buy a different type of stove, because the stoves you talk about in your video as being the next generation, the induction coil are more expensive. So do you think that there’s a policy approach that would be similar to solar of government saying, look, look, we’ll help you buy that new stove to lower the cost to you, and that it improves not.

Individual family health, but overall environmental health? I think there is,

but there’s a little note to this, which I didn’t really hit on too well in the video, but this really is a United States issue. We’re not the only one, but like we’re the main one that’s having an issue with this induction. Is commonplace in Europe.

Uh, in fact, I just had a call yesterday with some of my patrons and one of them has been using induction for 25 years and he lives in Europe. And he, he, he was laughing about it, saying like, this is

nothing new for where I

live. Right? Like, everybody kind of does this. And so it kind of brings it back to why is this a political issue here?

It’s like, it makes no sense, uh, un unless you think about here in the United States, electricity costs have, you know, been slightly, have been more historically more expensive than natural gas. And natural gas has been artificially. The prices have been kept artificially low here in the. , our gasoline prices are artificially low here in the US compared to everywhere else in the world.

So there’s a reason why we haven’t transitioned from a gas stove to electric by and large because costs. Um, but as electricity is getting cheaper, you got solar panel on your home. It’s like, I can cook from free sunshine on my roof, . It’s like, why would I not wanna do that? It’s gonna be way cheaper than using natural gas.

So I think that’s where the script is starting to get flipped here in the us uh, compared to some other areas of the. But yeah, policy I think would be the big thing. And the other thing I wanted to kinda raise is, I wasn’t completely aware of this, but a lot of comments had brought up the cost of like, the cost I was citing were like crazy high.

Like over where I live, it’s only like $400 or 400 euros. And it’s like, I should have clarified here in the US we use these things called ranges. It’s an oven with a cooktop as one giant unit. And typically in Europe it’s often just. cooktop, right? And the oven is a completely separate thing. So when you’re talking about the cooktop for 400 bucks, it’s like, that’s great.

But here in the US most pla most people don’t do just the cooktop. It’s you’re buying a range and the entire range costs a thousand dollars or $1,400, right? So it’s not exactly one to one. You can’t really compare those numbers to each other. . But yeah, bring it back to your question. It’s interesting you think here in the US it’s gonna be policy, it’s gonna help to like flip the script.

I think there does need to be some, you know, here’s a, here’s a rebate, an instant rebate of $200 off if you get an induction cooked up. I think there needs to be stuff

like that. And I think it’s interesting as you point out that there is this relationship between design style and mm-hmm price. , the introduction and ad adoption of these new technologies in the us.

If we did have the separation between the stove top and the oven mm-hmm. , it’s entirely possible that we wouldn’t be having this conversation today. But for affordability and culture, we Yeah. Have this process of the two being one. When you think of, like in your conversation on your video, it never occurred to me that stove top would be separate from the, the.

So it’s interesting cause we’re the US cause cause you know, I, this is what you grow up with in the us you grow up with the stovetop is right there. And when you think about some newer models of home design where the stovetop is separate from the oven, it seems unusual. And there is some pushback from house purchasers who say like that, I don’t like that.

It’s, it’s cultural as well. So it’s an interesting aspect of. Yep. Yep. And

on top of which, here in the US, since there’s been so much natural gas in homes, there’s gonna be an additional cost to switch to electric. Yeah. Because you probably don’t have a 240 volt outlet behind where your range is. Right? So not only are you changing the appliance, you’re also having to get new electrical run.

So it’s like it’s creating this additional cost, which is where we kind of come spring back to the policy here in the us. If you’re transitioning from gas to electric, I think there probably is gonna need to be some assistance to help people get.

I think there’s also the issue of rental versus homeowner in Oh yeah.

In the city. Like I live here in New York City, huge percentage of the population doesn’t actually own their appliance. So it’s, there’s that issue as well. And you’re not gonna see a lot of landlords who are gonna be willing to say, well, I own 10 properties and each property has three appliance. Because it’s three apartments per property, therefore I’m gonna go out and buy 30 induction stove tops.

That’s not likely to happen unless the government really does offer those, those opportunities and those tax breaks for, for, uh, rental improvement in that way. And I’m curious, when you have that separation, it doesn’t then necessarily have to be, if you did go the root of saying like, well, I’m gonna, I’m gonna switch to an induction stove top.

You could put an induction stove top into your home and stay with a gas. Yeah. There’s nothing stopping you

from doing that’s, you can do whatever you

want. It’s like I hit on, you still have video. Same, you’d still have the same byproduct issue, but you wouldn’t have, yes, you would,

but, but you have the, it’s like what I brought at the end of the, the video, which is you don’t have to change your entire thing.

You can get these like, Countertop individual induction burners or electric burners. So it’s like you could be renting an apartment in New York City and it’s all as a gas range, but then you could just buy one of these induction cooktops and use that most of the time. Right. So it’s like it’s, it’s in your power to do whatever you want, just roll your own solution,

It’s kind of what

it is and something that occurred to me while I was watching the video and I actually. Unusual for me. I jumped into the comments on your video, so I’m gonna read my own comment. This comment comes from Sean Ferrell. is the dangerous byproducts from the GRA gas stove. even while off only for stoves with pilot lights.

Cuz I couldn’t figure out how you would get that byproduct if a pilot light was not burning. And I’m thinking of my own stove top here in my apartment where I do have natural gas, but it is an electric starter, so there is no gas burning when the stove is off. There’s just

leaking. It just leaks. , it’s, that’s the thing that I don’t think people realize.

Yeah. All of these gas ranges, they just leak it doesn’t matter if you really wanna stop the leaking, you turn off the gas line to the range. That’s like the one way to completely stop it. Hmm. In fact, one of my patrons was telling me like his, his parents were elderly and I think it was his mom, he said, wasn’t completely there.

So she would sometimes go turn on the gas stove without letting a pilot light or lighting it up or something like that. So it was a dangerous thing. Yeah. And he put a, basically a smart shutoff on the gas. So that it could be automatically turned off when it wasn’t in use. So if she went over there and turned a dial, it wouldn’t actually come on.

Hmm. So he could help control it. And he said, so the side effect of that was he was actually helping the health of her home because he was turning it off kind of at

the root. So it’s, that’s

interesting. It’s just a sad reality of how gas ranges work that I don’t think, I didn’t know this. Yeah. Like this was news to me when I found this out.

I was like, you gotta be kidding. I didn’t know that that was a thing, but it. So enjoy your gas stove. Sean ,

after watching your video, I had a very sobering conversation with my partner. The two of us sat there and we were just like, so what do we do? and there is a part of me, I’m unfortunately, as I mentioned, living in New York City, renters are kind of stuck with what they have and one of the side problems.

One of the issues I’m also dealing with with my kitchen is we have limited counter space, but I can’t help but keep going back to the idea of going and buying an A portable induction burner just for this issue. It does seem like. The difference between it leaking when it’s off and it, I can’t even imagine what percentage increase there is when you’re actually running it versus just the minimum leaking.

It’s high. Yeah. It’s gotta be like in thousand percent. I brought

up, yeah, I brought up the YouTube channel technology, Conex Extras, which is like the second channel of technology connections. His name’s Alec. Highly recommend watching his stuff. It’s, he has got the dry sense of humor ever when

you talked about That’s amazing.

Him. I actually, I kind of like sat up in my seat because I love his channel. He does. It’s fantastic. Fascinating. He does some fascinating deep dives into things that you would never think were worth a deep dive. He has a thing about, oh yeah. Trip coffee makers. That is his thing about drip coffee makers is absolutely fascinating because he goes into the science of how they work, not just, here’s a tube that pulls this up and then drips the water here.

It’s literally talking about the reason that works is because as you heat water, the metal expands and contracts and allows the water to drip, and then cool. And like he goes through this whole process and I’m just like, That’s all going on in a Mr. Coffee. Like, and, and he breaks down. He did the same thing for dishwashers.

He, he created multiple videos about dishwashers where he even had a dishwasher where he cut a hole into it and put plexiglass so you could see how it works. And he described how the whole thing works and how we’re doing it wrong with how much soap we put in. And we shouldn’t be using this little pods.

We should be using the shake. Like he goes so deep. Yeah, so nerdy deep, but it’s entertaining as hell. Yeah, it’s really worth watching, but really, really good. This video. technology connectors. Where he went into this, he took, was taking CO2 readings of him using gas stoves and how much it was affecting the house.

And it is shocking like when you’re running a gas stove, like how quickly it impacts the entire house. Yeah. That’s.

It’s problematic. So there were comments like this one from Sergio Messina who simply wanted to weigh in and say, thank you for not gaslighting on this issue. Well done Sergio. . Well done. Yes.

That’s awesome. . There was also this from John Rogers who wrote, after Cooking with Gas for 44 years, Induction cooking was even better than I had expected. Clean, fast, safe and easy to set the same intensity of heat each time. Five for pancakes, three for corn, beef, and the pressure cooker, et cetera. What kinds of cooking alternatives, this is my question now.

What kinds of cooking alternatives would you suggest to someone who just can’t let go of their gas in the kitchen? There is of course, Crockpot, there’s things like that that are completely free of, of air fryers, but what are the things would you suggest to somebody who’s like, how do I limit this? I get a

really good toaster oven.

Like this is not an advertisement. I love the Breville toaster oven. It’s my favorite toaster oven used. Yeah. There’s a higher end smart one that I’ve been eyeballing for myself called the June oven, which is supposed to be really good, but if you get a toaster oven, it, it takes, it takes less electricity to heat that little, small space.

90% of my oven cooking can be done in a toaster oven. I don’t need this massive range to do it right. Uh, air fryers, same thing. It’s like it’s small, it’s fast. It’s basically just a tiny convection oven. So it’s like all of these things can help reduce your electricity use and of course it reduces how much gas you’re using cause you’re not using gas.

So any kind of like specialized small appliance is going to be far better than trying. Use the Gas, gas ranger

gas oven. There’s also this comment from Chris Nell who wrote here in the uk, four burner induction Hobbs can be had for under 200 pounds for some of the cheaper models, price year ones are of course available.

That goes back to your comment about people saying like, why are they so expensive in the US? 400 pounds? Roughly? Yeah, 200 pounds, roughly. 400 US dollars would not be too much, but if it didn’t come with an oven, you’re not gonna see a lot of buyers. No. He goes on to say, I’ll openly admit I used to be a bit of a gas snob.

Whilst I do have a gas hub, I recently bought a two burner portable induction hub and I’m totally converted. As soon as it’s practical, practical to do, the gas hub will be going. Thank you, Chris, for that comment. I think it’s, it’s a nice indication of try. You might like it. I also think it’s a wonderful use of the word hobb.

I think that that is . Yeah, a lot of fun for me in my American mouth to try and read without stumbling over, but I do appreciate the comment. Thank you. I’m

curious, but that, that’s actually, but one thing is, that’s a great example of you don’t have to think about changing your entire thing at, just go buy a single induction cooktop that you can plug into a regular outlet and use on your countertop.

Just try it out. Yeah. Like I’ve got one off Amazon for 60 bucks. I love that little thing. It works super well. Yeah, it was 60 bucks. It’s a, it’s a great little experiment that you can do and see how

much you. And I can’t help but wonder, is there a product, and I say this without, Matt and I are not looking to push a product.

Matt and I are not in any way sponsored by a product right now to say this. Yeah. But I can’t help but wonder, is there a company making an induction, uh, cooktop that would be built to literally be set on top of a US style range? I don’t know, because that would be, A great product. Yeah, just saying there’s your million dollar idea for the day.

Maybe Matt and I run with it and we actually start doing something about that. So Matt, before we close out of the conversation, I’m just curious, what are some of the symptoms of the various chemicals that are leaking from gas usage in the. Like things that you would experience as a person Yeah. That you might experience as a person, just as like a general warning for people.

If you have these symptoms consistently and constantly, maybe there’s something in your home that you could take away to have a positive impact. I assume things like something as simple as headaches. Yeah. If you get

headaches, if you feel sluggish. Um, those kind of things that’s like, that’s like co.

Issues or carbon monoxide issues where it’s like your, your, your cognitive thinking gets a little slow. You get a little sluggish, you get a little tired, you’re run down you, and you can’t explain why. It might be that your oxygen and carbon monoxide levels are all outta whack in your house. Yeah. And if you had an air monitor, they could tell you that it’s outta whack.

The other symptoms would be if you have asthma. Like me personally, I have asthma, people with asthma. are going to have breathing issues when this stuff is going on. You’re gonna get asthmatic, you might get attacks, you might start coughing a lot, um, or having trouble breathing. So there’s. Those kind of symptoms.

But the one that, to me that’s the more scary one, is that just a dull headache that kind of starts, or you kind of feel sluggish or you’re kind of feeling a little out of it, but you’re not quite putting your finger on. I feel weird. It’s like, cuz it’s like, it’s like a slow transition. Yeah. Where you don’t realize you’re being cooked alive in a , a pot of boiling water.

It’s like things are getting a little weird when you’re not quite realizing it’s happening. That’s the stuff that

I would be more concern. Yeah. This goes back to something Matt and I have talked about previously. I don’t know that we’ve talked about it on the podcast, but he and I have definitely talked about this.

I started allergy shots recently and when I went Oh yeah. Into the allergist’s office and had the initial testing done, and they did it via. Small pricks of, of allergens into my skin in a grid pattern down both, both of my forearms. And then they waited for the reaction. And then when the doctor was talking to me about the things that I was responsive to, he very casually said, let me describe to you how you’re generally feeling.

and then he described it to a T. He described the times of year that I feel worse, the times of year that I feel better, but not a hundred percent. I’m always dealing with an issue. So he went through all of this and said, you know, here’s what your life looks like. Is that accurate? And I said, it’s uncanny.

It’s like you’ve been watching me. And he said, and it’s been getting worse over the past two years, three years. And he and I was again, I was like, that’s uncanny. How do you know? And he said, do you normally work in an office? A large office building in Manhattan, and I said, yes. And he said, pre pandemic, you were in an environment for eight hours a day where the air was being cleaned around you, and then you go home and during the pandemic, you then worked for 24 hours a day, live for 24 hours a day in that home.

And not that my home is dirty, but it just can’t be, the air can’t be cleaned in the same way. that allowed a slow buildup during the pandemic of allergy symptoms that as the weeks and months went by, I couldn’t understand why am I getting more migraines? Why am I feeling so bad? Why is this building over time?

Mm-hmm. , and it was simply because the environment in my home is slowly trying to kill me. So maybe small changes can lead the big, big. .

There is one thing I wanted to add that got cut from the video. I was mentioned as in the side, but there was an entire section where we went in depth into how ventilation hoods in above your stove.

Don’t work as advertised. Right. Uh, they are not good at evacuating the air and we, it’s like a, it’s almost like a placebo a lot of times that you think it’s doing more than it is. Yeah. It might be a 500 change, you know, C F M or a 800 c f m fan and it’s doing all this stuff. There’s been studies that have been shown that show that it like, does an abysmal job at cleaning the air in your house, getting that, getting all those nasty fumes out.

It’s not as good as you think. Um, and it takes a long time for it to get them all out. So it’s not like, oh, I turn this fan on and I can use my gas stove. No problems. It’s like, no, you’re still gonna have a problem, . It’s, it’s not doing as well as you think. So it’s, it’s something to be concerned about

too.

Yeah, I’m wondering if maybe that should be a standalone video on its own, because I thinking’s very important indoor

air quality kind of video. Just

a channel. I think indoor, yeah, I would, I would highly support that as a viewer of the channel. I would be very interested in that because that came up in the conversation with my partner when we talked about the guest range that we have in our home.

And she said, well, we could just run that vent. And I said, Matt said, it’s not good. , but I didn’t have any more details than that. And it would be worthwhile, I think, to have that information. You should definitely run

it. You should definitely run it.

But it’s running it better than running easy. Yeah. But exactly the other things we talked about, like, well, clearly we need to be cracking the window even in the middle of the winter.

Yeah. And yep. As we record this very conversation, I sat here thinking, wait a minute, why is the window behind me not.

So listeners, what do you think about all this? Do you think Matt is just full of hot air or do you have experience with induction? Do, would you make that switch? Have you already made that switch? I’m particularly interested if any of our LI listeners here in the US have made that switch, and how did you go about.

Let us know in the comments. As usual, the comments are one of the main factors. That, uh, drive the show. They help provide con content not only for this program, but also for Matt’s main channel, undecided with Matt Ferrell, which is of course the mothership. If you’d like to support the show, please consider reviewing us on YouTube, apple, Google, Spotify, wherever it was.

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