Slightly off-topic, but pertinent to greenhouse applications - the use of propane vs NG is a common debate on boating forums - more typically among sailors in cruising communities. Propane was installed by the mfg of my last boat to fuel the on-demand hot water heater, cook-top and oven. This is the most popular fuel for boaters, since it's readily available around the globe. Some proponents of NG however, in spite of questionable availability, choose it because of it's safety, relative to propane - which is heavier than air. Therefore, the gas could settle in the bilges if a leak ever occurs, risking explosion. Unless it is piped directly to the home as an underground utility, sources of NG are sometimes difficult to find. Additionally, if proper exhaust vents, auto-detect shut-off valves and propane sniffers are installed, propane is a very safe fuel. We've never had any problems in the 25+ years of using it on our boats and if NG was not available, I would not hesitate to select it as a heating fuel for my greenhouse - if/when we ever build one.

In 40+ years of marriage I've always had a gas clothes dryer. Zero problems. Gosh, my mom once had a gas refrigerator! I prefered gas cooktops in the past -- think most professional chefs use only gas. Are newer convection, etc. electric cooktops gas-comparable? Reach higher BTU's? After having some asthmatic troubles I switched to electric for cooktop and ovens. One oven is a combo microwave/oven, so it's electric anyway. What I really miss is my old Thermador VENTED broiler! (Switching didn't help the asthma, BTW.) We piped for both electric and gas in the kitchen when we built. We have natural gas available; it powers our HVAC, water heaters and clothes dryer. Looked into gas hookup for fireplace, but we so seldom use the fireplace it didn't seem worth thousands to build plus ineficient use of fuel. Here the two power sources are rapidly drawing even on cost . I have the perfect south-facing roof just waiting for affordable solar power!

I've got a p61 that supplements my forced air oil furnace. While I like my stove, I will say that there is a learning curve to using it effectively and I have had a few bugs that I've had to work out. As you run into them post your questions- the internet has been a great resource (check out iburncorn.com). I say that I supplement my furnace with it, but really, I supplement my pellet stove with my furnace. Most of the time, the stove will heat my 2000 sf uninsulated farmhouse pretty well. Now that it's down in single/negative digits, the furnace is kicking on from time to time. Air circulation is key for me- I had to cut a vent in the ceiling of the room the stove is in to allow the warm air upstairs- my downstairs floor plans is pretty open. The ceiling fan in the room the stove is in helps a lot. Also, I rarely run the stove at the highest pellet burn settings. Now my stove is running at a feed rate of 3-4. In the spring and fall it was around 1-2. I run the distribution blower at full tilt. When I'm running the stove at the higher settings 2-3 bags a day is pretty normal (it gets pretty cold where I'm located). In the spring and fall 1-2 is the norm. I've burned some pellet/corn mixes with pretty good results, but right now there's not much of a price incentive to do so. Good luck!

The comments about ten-power settings got me musing on the subject and about Amy's initial question about logarithmic power controls. Here's where that lead me. Nobody really has logarithmic power controls, but there can be power settings spaced to sort of approximate a logarithmic curve -- a number of settings at the low end with only a couple of additional points needed to define the steep side of the curve for really high heat. In theory, that can be done with a ten-step power curve and some folks do find 10 power settings fine for what and how they cook. Others do not. Is anybody else here old enough to remember the GE stoves and cooktops from 50's and 60's with ten mechanical pushbuttons for heat settings? Those pushbuttons were literally "digital" controls, meaning that you punched them with one of your digits. GE sold a lot of them for a couple of decades, so some people found them adequate. Some did not. For the current digital electronic ten-step controls, others here besides loonlakecamp have reported satisfaction with a ten step set-up. Others, like me, would find them inconvenient for my cooking with, say, my pressure cookers. With only ten heat level steps, I would have to be constantly switching settings to maintain the correct pressure. Power setting "1" might be too low, setting "2" might be too high. Switch to 1 for a while until the pressure drops a little too low, switch to 2 for a while until it gets a little too high, then back to 1, etc., etc. With in-between settings, I avoid that annoyance. You don't use pressure cookers? Then maybe having in-between steps won't matter to you. This is just one example of how cooking styles can differ and how more settings can matter to one cook and not to another. Much fuss is sometimes made about the supposedly infinite adjustablity of gas burners. As a practical matter, though, we mostly try to get the burner to the same relatively few settings. Searing is pretty much searing, isn't it? If you deep fat fry, how often would you care if if the oil were at 352° instead of 350°? But maybe somebody is working with sugar syrups where, say, it might matter if a syrup is at 325° and not 360° and then maybe it matters if the induction burner only has ten settings. That said, the subject of induction power settings and controls can be more complicated than just the number of settings. The need for finding "in-between" steps for induction cooking can reflect two different aspects of ways that manufacturers design induction burner controls. One consideration is the power cycling that all induction burners use for settings of less than full power. A technical term for this is "pulse width modulation. or "PWM." It is the same kind of thing a microwave does for low heat levels---momentary pulses of power that average out at a particular heat level. With most PICs as well as some brands of induction cooktops and ranges, the PWM is pretty crude. I've seen this somewhere described as firing up the burner for a second or two of omigosh hot and then switching totally off for three or four seconds. While these pulses average out at a certain heat level the timing can be problematic for, say, the srambled eggs that Amy mentioned at the outset. Combine that kind of "low frequency" PWM with the crude power controls found on many PICs, and you could have a reason that Amy would find herself wanting steps in-between power level "1" and "2" for scambling eggs. Some full size induction ranges and cooktops work this way. I noticed a lot of pulsing at the low heat settings on the Maytag induction range I saw demoed several years ago when I was stove shopping. From past threads on PWM, I gather than Whirlpool's induction ranges and cooktops (which include Maytag and Kitchenaid brands) have used crude PWM. For searching out past threads here on this subject try a search strings like "induction + pulsing + gardenweb" and "induction + cycling + gardenweb." A few of the expensive PICs (Cooktek, Garland, Vollrath) and many full size ranges and cooktops use much higher frequency PWM. Instead switching on and off for a second or more at time, the power switches on and off many times per second. The higher frequency of switching yields much finer power control that more closely approximates a steady heat level. The other design aspect that can lead to wanting "in-between" settings is in how the engineers program the electronic controllers to space the power settings on the appliance you are using --- that's the kind of logarithmic curve I thnk Amy may been thinking about when she posed her question in the original post. . For manufacturers, the least costly controls use simple linear spacing. Setting "1" would use the PWM to average 10% power, setting "2" would be 20%, etc. Even with a high quality PWM, though, 9 or 10 linear settings may be too crude, A thing most induction users discover pretty quickly is that they do most of their cooking in the low to medium range settings. The highest setting can be used for boiling. One or two medium high settings takes care of high heat applications like searing. There seem to be three strategies for induction manufacturers to address the crudeness. One is to add half-steps between the numbered power settings. The other is to program the stove's controllers to put more steps in the low to medium range and fewer in the high ranges. The third strategey combines the first two. Without using the particular induction stove or cooktop, it can be hard to find out whether the particular unit was designed to use one or the other or some combination of them. In my own somewhat limited experience, it seems that the GE induction appliances and Electrolux's Frigidaire/Kenmore ranges seemed to use a modified-half step approach with some concentration of steps but also using half steps for finer control. The Electrolux-branded models use a slightly different approach with quarter-steps at the lower power ends and fewer steps at the high end. Miele cooktops seem to use a similar kind of mix with the option of switching on more steps. I'm not sure how BSH (which includes Bosch) handles this except that their induction appliances manuals show that half-steps are available. The Samsung freeestanding induction ranges seemed to follow the GE model (19 half steps). The reports about Samsung's ten-step "Chef Collection" model seem to conflict, some seeming to say that stepping is linear, some hinting that the settings may be skewed to the lower end. There is a yet another strategy which is the near infinite stepping of of potentiometer-like controls. These control systems seem to be very expensive so, AFAIK, they are used only for the commercial Garland/Manitowiac PICS and maybe the new Miele induction range have this. I say "maybe" for the Miele because there is nothing about it in the product literature and the display shows only whole-number settings, but a couple of posters here -- livinginseattle is the name I recall -- have reported finding that the knobs can be turned to provide fine gradations of "in-between" settings. Some folks would find that ideal. Then the question becomes: how much are you willing to spend for the "ideal" (and are there other design compromises that have to accept in order to get that ideal function for the burners?)