Kitchen range-switching from gas to electric 240v ?

[Tony]

One thousand dollars to run a gas line? Is your house a couple thousand feet long, or are they using gold pipe?

[Tony]

Wow, I pay 0.098 per kwh, close to half of what you pay. Plus that is my entire bill. No added extras, no taxes, no nothin'. Just 0.098 per kwh. Around here LPG is only a little cheaper then electric resistive heating, maybe 10%. I don't think there is natural gas down in the city. If I get a heat pump I'll save a lot over the winter, or I'll stop being a miser and just have the house warmer for the same price.

[HeyBub]

It was the linemen who installed the infrastructure that fails for two weeks when a larger than average bird roosts on the wire. Who cares if they die?

Heh! During hurricane Yikes we were without power for almost two weeks. The sad part was that all the gas stations for 60 miles were also without power and couldn't pump fuel.

[The Henchman]

I live outside of a Toronto suburb, and the electricity here is generated mostly by nuclear power with coal and wind backups. In Canada the word "hydro" means electricity in general, not just hydro-electric.

Here is the full rate sheet that I pay. We have to pay for the utility's debts and transmission charges in addition to the kwhr usage charge. Normally it's .058 per kwhr CDN dollars.

For the last two months my electricity was $128.35 for 1019 kwhr. I paid

62.05 for actual electricity and $66.30 for all the fees and utility debts and delivery charges.

[krw]

That's what the gas company quoted. It's at least 100' of pipe. Of course it has to be buried.

[hallerb]

There are 2 types of self cleaning ovens.

The first a continious cleaning catalytic coating that works poorly. The spills kinda absorb into the coating. which discolors

The good system which I have seals the oven for your safety and raises the interior temp to over 1100 degrees F, cycle takes a few hours

It literally burns off and spills, and when thru leaves a light grey ash thats easily just wiped up

[Pete C.]

I spent about $800 on a generator, about 25 years ago. Maintenance consists of $4 worth of synthetic oil each year. It has provided power during many days worth of outages, including a ~72hr continuous run. Many of these outages were in the winter in the northeast where frozen pipes would have been a threat had I not had the generator. Being portable, the generator has also been used on a number of remote construction projects as well. So yes, a generator is a very inexpensive and reasonable investment.

[Pete C.]

Perhaps. But the fact is that there has never been a single documented case of a utility lineman being killed by an improperly connected generator. In every single lineman fatality related to a generator, the cause of the death has been the lineman not following procedures which specify that every line must be tested and grounded before working on it.

[Pete C.]

My generator that cost me ~$800 some 25 years ago had a ~72 hour continuous run during and in the aftermath of that nice ice storm that hit northwestern CT somewhere in the 2000-2004 range (I forger exactly when). It has had many other outage runs in the 1 - 12 hr range as well. Indeed I just used it for around 4 hours about a week ago.

[Pete C.]

Well, I guess all the various electric ranges I've used over the years must be using some alien technology then, as that has not been how any of them have worked.

[Pete C.]

Nope, not in most cases. No nat gas here anyway, so it doesn't matter. Just my lowly little 20# LP tank feeding my dual fuel range.

Nope, I do the math. In the case of nat gas, what kills your theoretical savings is the monthly service charges for the many warm weather months months when you are using hardly any gas, particularly here in TX where the heating season is short.

[Pete C.]

The induction ones are interesting, but they limit your cookware choices and can obsolete cookware you already own. I've considered getting a single induction burner to play with. BTW, the induction burners *are* resistive, they basically cause the pan to be a shorted transformer secondary winding and the resistance to the current circulating in the pan produces the heat.

[Pete C.]

Perhaps I'm the magic element, since I have never had that issue on at least a half dozen different electric ranges I have cooked extensively on.

Electric resistive heating, or electric heat pump? A heat pump is 3-4X the efficiency of electric resistive heating. I drastically cut my heating costs when I replaced electric resistive with electric heat pump.

[Pete C.]

I've cooked on a few of them and they have their good and bad points.

The smooth tops are somewhat easier to clean if you clean them as soon as something spills, before it has time to bake on, i.e. no waiting for the top to fully cool, and interrupting cooking to clean if you have to continue to use that burner position for a while. Since the top is smooth, instead of spills dripping into a recessed drip pan area somewhat away from the heat source, the spills just get solidly baked on, and if you let them bake on they are difficult to remove without scratching the surface.

One advantage of the smooth top is that you can slide a pan "off the burner" to the side without it tipping or spilling and you can position it anywhere on the cooktop.

Another advantage is that the smooth top provides additional counter / workspace for small kitchens, similar to how RV stoves have covers to serve the same function.

There aren't any big negatives to them really, they don't seem to have as high output as good conventional electric or gas ranges, but they are sufficient for most things. Not so good with a wok, even a flat bottom wok, probably not very good with one of the double burner cast iron griddle pans either.

[Doug Miller]

People who don't use a range for anything more complicated than frying hamburgers generally don't have any problems with the slow response time of an electric burner.

[Doug Miller]

If you're incurring monthly service charges because there are months in which you use hardly any gas, it's your own fault. Replace your electric dryer with a gas dryer. Replace your electric water heater with a gas water heater. You'll be using more gas, obviously, but a whole lot less electricity.

[Han]

"The Henchman" wrote in news:hsnj7f$f3i$ [e-mail]:

That seems more than what I pay here in Bergen county, NJ for the equivalent in natural gas. For 90 therms (2700 kWH equivalent) I paid US $80

[Han]

"Pete C." wrote in news:4bef7d01$0$23532 $ [e-mail]:

That's relative. Until a month or so ago, we never had more than a few hours of power outage at a time. For that an expense of $1500 today plus the maintenance and risk of storing gasoline etc is NOT worth it. To me .

[Han]

"Pete C." wrote in news:4bef81d8$0$23533 $ [e-mail]:

Correct, but I still would call it inductive heating rather than using a resistive heating element. .

[Ed Pawlowski]

"Pete C." wrote

My two favorite pans are a Falk copper and a Woll aluminum. They are deal killers for induction, but the concepts is interesting.