Replacing a gas hob

Eh? Loads of kitchens don't have an external door to the outside. Presumably your kitchen still has a door?

Pronably makes no differwnce but have a read of

"Gas cookers in internal kitchens - Ventilation requirements as applied to England, Wales, the Isle of Man and Guernsey".

Sorry, I stupidly misread your post. If you now have /no/ opening to the outside you may well need more. See the flowchart at the back of the Technical Note.

What is the volume of the room?

The main room is about 40m^3 Plus an anteroom with no doors about 18^m Plus the stairway to the ground floor about 6m*3

(It's a basement kitchen in a house on a very steep hill so the front is underground and the back has normal doors, windows and a porch.)

Nick

Mine's very high when I'm using the deep fat fryer and it gets really hot. I have to turn the telly up.

Bill

Depends how airtight your kitchen is. Surely there are vents hidden away somewhere since otherwise a kitchen would be full of steam at times. Brian

You only need 10m^3 for combustion air :)

Is there ventilation out of the room - e.g. an extractor fan or ventilation up the stairway so air can pass to the ground floor? (A 10mm gap under a door counts.)

Even with the door at the top of the stairs closed (which it seldom is, there's plenty of draught - it's an 1800's house. There is also a working fireplace in this basement kitchen and when it's lit it unhesitatingly draws air from the surroundings. The DG windows may be draught proof but I reckon the whole of the rest of the house is porous :-)

Nick

Mine's a draughty 1700s house. If I'm doing very much on the hob then the extracter hood is usually on. I assume you don't have one?

The working fireplace alone sounds fine for background ventilation if there's no damper to shut it off. Only needs to be equivalent of a 125mm flue.

I think that just leaves "purge" ventilation - the equivalent of the cook just throwing open the kitchen window wide after burning your breakfast. That's why I asked about extractor fan/hood. But you may get away with opening the kitchen door/window to the porch and then porch window/door.

Ah well... my extractor hood just extracts the cooking smells, passes them through a carbon filter and recirculates the air that they had been clinging to.

Nick

I have no problem with ventilation: even if I closed all the doors that could be closed - which I seldom do - there's plenty of fresh air in the kitchen. Living in the frozen north, if I burn something on the hob I just open the back door, the porch door and nip up the stairs and open the front door before the smoke alarm triggers and then the howling, ever-present gale-force wind (did I say I was half-way up a hillside?) sucks all the smoke right out - and tries to drag the table and chairs out after it.

I've no real concerns about being found dead one morning from asphyxiation: I just wondered whether a box-ticking exercise would find against my current kitchen situation.

Nick

It seems unlikely - especially if DIYing a new hob!

It's building regulations and AIUI purge ventilation by doors/windows doesn't have hard and fast rules. But with a gas hob you don't have to let a BCO in: notification ain't compulsory (in England that is).

It's not what you asked but I changed to induction some years ago, I wouldn't have anything else now, I **love** it.

I'm content with what I have at the moment but if we were to have the sort of upheaval in energy supply to the home that's being threatened, I'd certainly consider switching to induction before changing to hydrogen or ordinary electric hobs. I spent a week with friends who have induction hobs and based on that, I've nothing negative to say about them.

Nick

My only problem with induction hobs is that none of the ones I have used actually turns down low. In fact all of them 'turn down' by switching on and off with the 'level' set by the on/off ratio.

While this may work if your pans have large heat capacity it's not always very good when cooking small amounts in small pans.

We have an old Ilve hob with five gas burners and an 'old fashioned' solid metal electric plate which is *brilliant* for simmering stuff on. At its 1 or 2 levels it keeps pans just boiling and (as far as I can tell) its levels are set by series/paralleling the heating elements, not by turning on and off.

I'm not sure what our model is, it's not a particularly fancy one and was under £200 but it is much better than the one we had circa 5 years ago, the settings go from 1 to 9 per 'burner' and the lower ones are barely there.