People talk about switching over to solar, but it would mean changing over from gas. Just bought a new gas range ($4,000), have gas water heater, . So besides replacing the water heater, HVAC, range, installing solar..... that would go through ALL of our savings!

The air quality thing is real, but a well designed and operated raange hood helps a lot. I have such a hood over a gas domino and small induction. Our climate is such as to not need an HVAC make up air solution—opening a small window does the trick, and the house iss insulated but bot tight. It shocks me that other places just give up and don't have hoods, whereas even old cheap aapartments here do (though I think newer ones may have the abomination microwave, which even if properly vented out, can't actually do the job right). I contend that the cooking effluent is as bad for you, though aa different process.

That said, I wouldn't want to give up my little gas cooktop, but I use the induction around 97% of the time. If you choose it well, with controls that suit you, I think you coukd be happy switching to induction. So long as you can learn to use numbered levels, rather than looking at the flame.

I can't provide any info on testing devices, but have switched to an induction range and an electric water heater, but still have a fairly new gas furnace. I do ilke cooking with induction and baking in an electric oven. It was pretty easy to adjust to; giving up some of my skillets and pans was harder. It is definitely cleaner than gas and safer.

ETA: by safer I meant not starting a fire from a burner left on; it will automatically go off if nothing is on the burner. It might also shut off if pot goes dry-can't remember.

I have a gas range, and a very effective hood. I see zero health issue if the air is exhausted to the outside.

We just had a bad wind-snow-ice storm here. Hundreds of thousands of people lost electricity for days, with temperatures in the teens (zero with windchill). I know people who were without power for 8 days. With a gas range, you can cook and heat water. With a gas furnace and a smallish generator, you can keep the house warm and water hot. With all electric, you’re toast. Even a big battery bank won’t run the house for more than a couple days, and solar panels are useless when covered with snow and ice.

EDIT: I was talking with my doctor about this. He has the ideal combination in my opinion - gas range and furnace, with solar and battery and heat pump. His battery bank will run the furnace blower (only takes about 500 w) and some lights (LED preferably) for weeks (and weeks), even if panels are snowed over. and during normal periods he runs uses the heat pump for heat/cool.

We're all electric except for a wood-burning stove. We too would be stuffed if the power went out. I liked cooking with gas, but didn't like cleaning up after. Induction is so quick and easy.

Electricity can be a bit iffy at times where I live and I’ve had a gas stove and oven for over thirty years. I have used induction stoves but haven’t really cared for them as I like the instant increase/decrease in heat you get with gas. We have good ventilation so I’ve never been concerned with air quality.

Range hoods are good when you’re cooking but I’m gonna assume lat62’s range has pilot lights burning full time. Not sure how much that factors into the concern.

I use gas. With a brief exception when I lived in an apartment, I always have and I always will.

Back when I was forced to cook on an electric stove, I burned a lot of stuff. It was in my early 20s so I was still learning but I just didn't like it.

When I was shopping for a house, one of the requirements was gas cookiing. The house I'm in now, I bought back in 1998. It had gas in the house but the cooktop at that time was an electric JennAir. I promptly had it replaced and then subsequently did a complete remodel in 2004 which of course, included my current gas cooktop.

My oven is electric - I got talked into that during the remodel. But I have to be able to see the flame to cook on the stove.

I am thinking of getting a countertop induction burner to complement the gas range. Mostly just to try out induction. We have a lot of copper pots so I'll need a hob.

I have gas only outside on the patio. Gas grill, 4 burner gas Camp Chef stove, and a charcoal grill. I have to replace the charcoal smoker this spring. I do not like gas in the house.

I had to replace my GE coil stove in 2019. I bought a GE glass top, not induction, and I have found that it is very responsive to changing the temp much quicker than the coil burners.

John, the countertop induction units are mostly pretty weak. I think you have some 240V with your various machines. If you can arrange that for your countertop area and get a professional unit, or even a residential domino—you can build a housing for it since most are meant to fit in very shallow spaces—it'll be a much better test.

We currently have a gas cooktop but looking to change to induction.

This is very helpful, thanks to everybody for sharing... and yes, foodonastump, our pilot lights run all of the time.

My son is close to choosing a detector and will post our results - that might take a week or two I'm guessing.

I do have a countertop electric oven (GE) and an induction burner (greenpan) on the way to reduce our use of gas while we assess/measure the situation . We've got a Waring toaster oven and it works fine but is just too small (it has a built in slot toaster taking up width). Now I need an electric kettle too,

Some of the points regarding power outages are well taken, and that is definitely a consideration for us as well. I've used induction only a few times and I think I'd miss cooking on gas, having always enjoyed seeing the flame as some have mentioned.

Thanks again for sharing your experiences and opinions as we considser this!

The house I grew up in is a medallion home - all electric from the 1950s, and I've cooked that way pretty much forever. I've used gas ranges in restaurants, at church and at friends' and relatives homes. I do like how the heat stops immediately when you turn it off, but that's about it. I find it to be slower than electric cooking - especially the oven part.

I've read and listened to the newer findings on gas stoves, and it does make me concerned for my sister and her family. They have a gas range - and gas heat too.

Another part of the concerns isn't just for people's personal health, but the fact that gas delivery and storage systems leak and contribute to our global climate crisis.

We have gas heating and hot water, which does have a pilot light. But our gas cooker (with electric oven) does not have a pilot light. I haven't seen one of those. The gas ignites with a starter button which creates a spark. Gas is the commonest form of heating and cooking here.

My stovetop, water heater and furnace run with natural gas. There’s a pilot light on the water heater, but the unit is in the garage so I don’t worry about air quality degradation from that. The stovetop doesn’t have a pilot light and I have a good quality exhaust fan that is vented outside, so again, I have few worries about air quality.

I've cooked on gas most of my life. My mother had gas stoves and everywhere I've lived, except for 2 apartments, also had gas. Current stove does not have pilot lights.

Tankless water heater is gas and is mounted on an exterior wall.

Central heat is gas as is whole house generator.

Both of our stoves have gas cooktops, but the one in Cathedral City has an electric oven, which I have decided that I like better than gas because I can set it more easily. There are no pilot lights, and so if the electricity goes off, I would have to light the burners with a match. After an earthquake, however, we lose both electricity and gas, as we need to turn off the gas for safety reasons. Large earthquakes are relatively rare - the last two in L.A. were in 1994, 1971, and 1933, and so they can be from 23 to 38 years apart, or about 30 years on average, it seems. It's been 30 years since 1994, and so we might be due for another one in the next decade.

Water heaters are required to be outside the house here.

Our heating is gas, which is a lot less expensive than electric.

I have a couple of portable induction burners (one at each house), and I have found them to be sufficiently powerful for my needs. If you want to experiment with induction, I would recommend going ahead and getting one. This was very useful during my kitchen reno in Cathedral City.

I also have a gas cook top with electric double ovens. My tankless hot water heater is gas. Our heating/cooling is geothermal, a full loop that goes out into the pond, and uses gas as a backup. We have a generator and a pellet stove that we use for heat when we lose power. Because we don't have natural gas available, I use propane and it's expensive, so I try to use the Nesco roaster/air fryer/crock pot/electric kettle/etc. when I can.

ANnie

I was going to suggest getting a portable induction hob if you want to try. We take one camping and it's great. Colleen, modern induction hobs are jujst as reactive as gas. And cleaning a flat piece of glass is bliss compared to cleaning a gas hob.

If gas cooking is a serious health problem, all the people who live in NYC would all die young.

The extreme high density of apartments and gas burning automobiles day in day out ------.

I don't think electric infrastructure is reliable in the US. With the push to electric cars coming and weather pattern getting more and more extreme, if your electric is cut off for a few days a few times a year, it may not be very pleasant.

I don't live in the city, and I enjoy cooking with gas, except sous vide. I have installed off-grid solar system, just in case I have electric cars.

dcarch

ain't giving up my gas stove ... no way no how

I have a gas range but am planning on replacing with induction. Not because of health concerns, but because both DH and I are getting older and leaving the burners on more often, I'm concerned about burning the house down. Second reason is from what I've read induction is way, way easier to clean. Let's fact it, gas stovetops are a PITA to clean what with the grates and needing to remove them and all that.

For anyone worried about losing power and not being able to cook, simple work-around if that happens = butane camping stove. They're small and easily stored away when not needed. Or, gas grill outside.

Re easier to clean, there's no awkward and heavy grating to deal with. The most important part of easy, though, is clean as you go. The induction itself only heats the pot. Heat from the pot can make the glass it sits on burn your pinkies hot, but the area right around it just gets warm. Spill or drip, clean it up, right now. And that's a good habit to be in, because crystals, like salt or sugar, when dragged across the surface with force, like scooting a heavy, full pot, can etch the surface like a glass cutter, which can spread to cracking, and eventually breaking, in the way glass does. That's rare, but easy enough to develop the clean as you go habit. It's also extremely rare to get fossilized baked on crud, the way radiant heat (Gas or electric) under similar surfaces does. It would have to be under the pot, or seeping under the edge, and ignored. Using a fairly dry sponge, so you don't boil your fingers, you can even lift your pot, wipe tge spill under it, and set the pot back to cooking before the auto-shutoff is engaged.

Why do you need to clean induction cook tops?

Get a thin silicone sheet to put on top and cook. :-)

dcarch

Induction here. Hate gas as I can smell it or its additives and immediately get a migraine. I can always smell it in other people's places as well.

It's like fireplaces and wood stoves as well the person who cooks the most ends up with the most problems from it.

Dcarch that only works if there is a lip on a silicone sheet. Otherwise you still end up with a mess around the sheet if it's liquid.

Try a silicone trivet. Some are big enough to cover the cooktop.

dcarch

I find cleaning the glass easier than the silicone. Whatever floats your boat. The good one is putting down newsprint (I save packing paper for reuse thus) when frying. Catches the drops and spatter. There's still a little bleed through, but makes it much easier to dispose of the mess.

I put the silicone in the dishwasher.

dcarch

Any hints? How to position it in the machine, I mean.

I use medium size paper clamps and hang the sheet from the dishwasher top rack, away from the rotating water jets.

dcarch

I switched about a year ago to a flat top convection oven . . gave up my gas double oven and miss it every day, but it was broken and I could not get it repaired. I could have gotten a gas convection but then the news about gas being bad was being announced. Next time I need to replace I think I will go back to gas cooktop and maybe electric double oven . . IF I live that long!

As fall arrives, I wanted to follow up and say thank you to everybody for the ideas and sharing their setups.

My son is one who can smell the gas and it bothers him terribly, so we are minimizing the gas use in deference to his needs/concerns (I am with those who have said they would always prefer cooking on gas, that is soooo me)

We have been cooking with an induction burner, toaster oven (the airfryer setting is surprisingly helpful), and a LOT of outdoor grilling - we are upping our outdoor 'kitchen' area to include a grill (breeo outpost) for positioning over our rustic campground-style firepit and will enjoy an outdoor paella soon. My husband would like to upgrade our weber to a kumodo style grill, but the Weber has done amazing as an oven to roast chickens, bbq brisket, and a small spatchcocked July turkey. so we will see if that seems redundant or not - any thoughts? Or maybe that should be a whole different thread.

While I very much miss using the Garland on a more regular basis and will not give it up (its pilot lights are turned off, should have done that years ago, burners are so easy to light with a match, sadly, not so much the oven), the silver lining is that we have become a bit more creative on cooking multicourse meals without it and cooking more frequently outdoors is a blast.

We have one induction burner, iSiLER brand (it was inexpensive) and it has worked fine, better than I expected, even for frying on high heat. It is 8 inches wide and I am going to research and try to find a wider 2-'burner' version, not sure what brand yet.

Just kind of a free-association update/followup, cheers as the fall cooking season approaches,!

I have had a gas stove for decades and gas is my preferreed cooking fuel.

But recently we had to do some changes and I opted for a glass top electric one. I am of the camp that the emissions from my gas stove was not something that I was really concerned about at my age, and I would have contineud on using gas if I didnt have to make some changes.

However, however.......I am completely taken aback at how much cleaner it seems to be. I say that it seems to be but have no actual proof of it. I was not looking for this and didnt expect to find this to be true. Yet, I do find it to be cleaner in the most unexpected manner!

Despite the fact that it is a learning curve to use an electric stove and I really prefer a real flame, above all, I do find it to be quite nice and clean. Circumstances forced the change.

My gas furnace is staying, though. Heat pump? Think not. We have expereiced the supreme discomfort of one of those and I wont budge on that.

We also replaced the gas water heater with electric and I am happy with that, too . Our old gas water heater needed an assist fan to blow out the fumes from the gas flame becasue it was retro installed into a house that wasnt built with the vent tube that is required. It was noisy and old. So it never made sense to me that I could bake and cook all day with a gas flame going in the kitchen, but when the water heater ran for 20 minutes the fumes needed to be vented. The gas furnace has the same kind of exhaust fan for the same reason.

So, if we are not running the furnace we are, essentially, all electric now. One thing that I have found about having all of the energy from one source is that it is easier to see where the energy goes and easier to see our usage.

I think that if my water heater were one that didnt need the fan exhaust I would have probalby opted to replace it with the gas one. But, my gas water heater was stil dependent on electricity because it would not run without the fan being on and the fan would not come on if the electricty was out anyway. So I didnt lose any advantage there.

I think that the idea is that by concentrating energy efforts into better ways to produce and transmit electricity we can all benefit by drawing from a common source and applying our collective efforts and infrastructure towards a common goal.

One other factor is that there are more and more multi family houses, apartments and the like and running gas lines all through those can be highly problematic. In a single family house the situation is a bit different. If .your system leaks and your oven blows up, that is usually just you that is affected.

One other difference with gas is that our furnace gets a once over every year and has several fail safe options for automatically shutting down if there is a problem, and, my gas oven had none of that. When I kept hearing what sounded like little explosions in my gas oven when using it, is the time that I turned it off and bought a new electric stove. Gas ovens also fail and, to the best of my understanding, do not have any fail safe controls on them and there is no inspection of them done. My gas stove was, by that time, way past its prime.

A future owner will have both options available, gas or electric. Both outlets are still there. The gas is just capped and I had new wiring done for the electric.

We switched out our gas cooktop to induction a few months back. We installed the gas cooktop over an electric wall oven in a kitchen remodel we did in 2005. Our area experiences frequent electric outages and we wanted to be able to cook during one. That, plus we enjoyed cooking over a gas flame more than our previous glass top electric. Flash forward 19 years and we now have a whole house generator and some concerns about indoor air quality using gas. So, the switch. FWIW - we enjoy the induction and don't regret the change.

I am NOT taking any chances of a gas leak inside. It does not even have to be your inside lines. It is the lines coming to your house.

I use propane outside on the patio.

Induction since 2011. i trust the science. no need to see fire. westsider40 westy

We still use gas. Electricity rates here are the highest in the nation except for HI. We have rooftop solar and it covers between 2/3 to 3/4 of our monthly bill. No battery storage and we don't generate enough to fill it up as it stands now.

Also, we live in a high wind/hills area. It isn't uncommon to lose electrical power, altho since we're in a protected district (e.g., schools, fire/police stations) our area is high-priority when restoring power.

I don't have a problem with going to induction, but it's not worth it for us. It would require a major upgrade to our electrical panel, plus permits and labor costs. Since we don't intend to stay in our home past another 5 yrs - heck, I'd move now if I could get my spouse to go - it's not enough of a plus to resale, to be worth it.

Just another fyi re induction. the response is instantaneous. when you turn the knob or tap the gizmo, the hobs respond instantly.. no waiting. been using nduction since 2011. grew up with gas and had electric too, but induction wins hands down . and heres how you clean an induction top. spray and wipe. i use glass cleaner and a paper towel.done.

i have no need to see the fire.