The natural gas-powered appliances in your home may be
slowly killing you and everyone you love. That is the bad news. The worse news
is this: It is not clear exactly what you should do about it — if anything at
all.
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The dangers are well documented. Gas-fired water heaters —
even the more efficient, tankless kind — regularly puff out clouds of methane,
a greenhouse gas that, in the short term, traps at least 100 times more
atmospheric heat than carbon dioxide (per unit). Every minute that it is in
your house, even when it is turned off, your gas stove may be flatulating
dangerous pollutants and climate-warming gases into your kitchen.
About 13 percent of cases of childhood asthma in the US may
be attributable to gas cooktops, a recent study found — a population-level
effect similar to that of exposure to secondhand smoke.
So what is a homeowner to do? If you spend time around
environmentalists or energy experts, you will hear a simple answer: Electrify! Most
gas appliances can now be replaced with healthier and more efficient
alternatives powered by electricity — heat pumps instead of gas-fired furnaces,
for instance, or induction stoves instead of gas burners. Electrification is
also crucial to the world’s plan for mitigating climate change: We will clean
up how we generate electricity (wind, solar) while electrifying everything we
can (cars, factories, shopping malls, houses), the thinking goes. Add
government incentives and stir.
In some sectors, like automobiles, electrification is
catching on. At home, though? Despite growing recognition of the dangers of
gas-powered appliances, electrifying our abodes is going to be much slower,
more expensive and more complicated than electrifying other parts of our lives.
There is also a growing political freakout — on Twitter and Fox News,
right-wingers are swearing allegiance to gas stoves as if they were AR-15s.
But whatever your politics, I am not sure gas stoves are a
hill to die on. Some electric advances make clear sense — in a lot of places,
getting rooftop solar panels is a no-brainer. But an induction stove? An
electric water heater? It is hard to say; experts I talked to said that whether
people should adopt these climate-aiding systems depends on a lot of factors.
Houses are like people; they are all ailing in different ways, and some of them
may be just too set in their ways to be rehabilitated.
Take cooking. Researchers have been documenting the dangers
of natural gas-burning stoves for decades. Once, chefs and foodies justified
gas for its superior culinary performance, but then came induction stoves,
which use electricity to produce a magnetic current that heats certain types of
cookware. Induction cooktops can heat up and cool down more quickly than gas;
many home cooks and even professional chefs rave about them.
State and local governments have started to phase out
natural gas hookups in new buildings, and the Biden administration’s Inflation
Reduction Act provides billions in new incentives for people to electrify their
home appliances. A commissioner on the US Product Safety Commission told
Bloomberg recently that the agency will consider banning gas stoves. (The commission
and the White House later walked back any talk of a ban.)
Does that mean you should go electric? I do not know — I cannot
even figure out if I should get an induction stove.
Most gas appliances can now be replaced with healthier and more efficient alternatives powered by electricity — heat pumps instead of gas-fired furnaces, for instance, or induction stoves instead of gas burners.
In homes that already have electric cooktops, switching to
induction may be relatively easy. But in my home, as in millions of others
piped for gas cooking, getting an induction range would require extensive
electrical work and the capping of my existing gas line. Induction stoves also
tend to cost slightly more than comparable gas stoves (but new tax credits
could change that). Also, you don’t have to entirely replace your stove to
mitigate the health dangers of cooking with gas — upgrading and always turning
on your ventilation hood, if you have one, is a very good idea.
It is no surprise, then, that induction stoves have
struggled to take off; according to a survey by Consumer Reports, only about 3
percent of American households have them.
“It can be pretty involved and expensive, and I’m not sure
the payoff is there for a lot of people,” said Liam McCabe, a journalist at the
energy-advising guide EnergySage who writes often about his own efforts to
upgrade his home from gas to electricity. McCabe said the article he wrote for
Consumer Reports on his switch from a gas stove to induction could have been
headlined: “Do-Gooder Pays Through the Nose to Boil Water a Little Faster.”
McCabe also pointed out that if you want to make a
significant dent in your home’s environmental impact, cooking isn’t the place
to start. Heating and cooling is. On average, about half of the energy used by
American households goes to space heating and air conditioning; an additional
20 percent goes to heating water. Everything else — lighting, refrigeration,
TVs, computers, clothes drying, and cooking — accounts for less than 30 percent
of the average household’s energy usage.
Instead of getting an induction stove, then, it might make a
lot more sense for you to spend your money on a heat pump, an underappreciated
and kind of magical electric device that can replace both a gas-powered furnace
and an air conditioner. But there may be an even simpler and cheaper thing to
do first: Weather seal your house. Ed May, a partner at the environmental
consulting practice bldgtyp, told me that a lot of the ways to improve your
home’s environmental impact are just “really not that exciting at all,”
including “lots and lots of insulation”.
So, sure, your gas-powered stove may be out to get you. But
it is the furnace that may be a bigger menace. And do not forget to insulate.
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