My wife and I decided to switch to induction after the NYT article on this topic a few months ago.
Not only did we have a gas stove that was probably spiking NO2 levels when we actually used it; we also seemed to have a gas leak. It was not a big one, just a faint smell, but it was hard to pin down. A plumber concluded the connection between the range and the pipe wasn't the problem. No specific part of the range smelled stronger than the rest of it. For all we knew, it might be a hole in a pipe. So we wanted to make gas stop flowing through our unit (a condo within a three-family home, very normal here in Cambridge, Massachusetts) altogether.
We contacted an appliance company about switching to induction. To prepare, they told us, we would first need to upgrade the range power outlet to 40 amps, and cap off the gas pipe behind the range.
The electrical work cost $1800. It could have been much more; we were lucky our circuit breaker was positioned such that they only needed to make two openings in our walls. (They suggested we put little hatch doors in those spots to make future work easier.)
We asked our plumber to not only cap off the gas pipe behind the range, but also put in a valve in the basement, such that gas flow could be shut off to our unit, but also easily turned back on if a future owner wants to reverse what we did. We did this rather than turn off our gas altogether, because we have a gas water heater and still needed gas available there. The plumbing work cost about $300 I think.
To make cooking stay as close as possible to being how great and fast it is with gas, we chose a range with an induction stove: The LG LSE4616ST, which cost $3000.
We were lucky to be able to afford this change for our health. Of course, it would have cost a lot less if we hadn't cared about induction, but still multiple thousands of dollars.
This is the epitome of the current green movement. Proponents want an unnecessary luxury green product subsidized for higher income households, even though there are perfectly fine substitutes that are just as good for the environment at 1/5 the cost you just described. I just can't get on board with a movement like this.
I mean, they could have just fixed their gas leak (lol what the fuck) and bought a nice hood. Even having to suggest people fix their gas leak is comedic and reminds me of how absurd many tech people are. Bragging about transitioning, recommending a subsidy, allowing a gas leak.
Oh sure, but it's very common to have a minor leak in your home and be relatively unaware.
Just by nature of natural gas service existing you're being exposed to leaks by your municipality. It's better to be rid of it entirely. Washington DC, for example, has over 5,000 leaks. Boston leaks ~50,000 tons a year.
I suspect 50 years from now natural gas will be remembered as fondly as leaded gasoline is today.
Here in New Orleans they take your meter if you report a leak and you can’t get it back for a couple weeks and thousands in reconnection fees because they don’t trust people’s plumbers apparently and have to reinspect everything themselves
The New Orleans City Council regulates them, not the state. Not sure if the city Building and Permits office (which has had its own travails) gets involved in this.
So choose the amount you subsidize so that the cheapest reasonable solution becomes affordable to most people. There are induction stoves costing just a few hundred dollars for example. There is no need to subsidize $3k, but subsidizing electrical or plumbing work to replace fossil fuels with electricity makes perfect sense.
We've wound up with subsidies because it is what is politically feasible.
The most efficient approach would be to correctly price the negative externalities of gas on health and environment, but pragmatically politicians understand that enormous carbon taxes are a very quick way to be voted out of office. Accordingly we arrive at the solutions available: subsidies for alternatives and/or a very slow phase in of carbon taxes.
Progressive jurisdictions are straight up banning gas hookups in new developments for environmental and health reasons.
Subsidy in the form of a tax credit (so you need to front the government the money until tax season), so that you can buy something that basically only works if you own a house, into which you've already installed some infrastructure, itself subsidized via tax credit.
I can't help but think it would have been better to subsidize the purchase of used hybrids (or, you know, transit)
I agree with you on hybrids, I think hybrids are a better fit for most people right now. Especially for renters and households with one car. I also think people need to come to terms with the reality of the world we live in right now and take responsibility for their own resiliency. We cannot externalize complete resiliency to government. We are in a bit of a chaotic transition right now. In the last two years we've seen electricity failures, public safety failures and basic government services failing. I think people need to make sure their lives are resilient through decisions like should I buy an EV or hybrid.
Overall I'm not against green subsidies. I'm against subsidies going to higher income households, it's government transfers to the rich! Especially in California, their green subsidies benefit the rich and hurt the poor.
I live in an apt and bought a ~$100 induction hot plate and now do about 90% of my cooking on that (formerly used semi-faulty burners on a cheap electric range). In the future when I own my home I plan on just a having a few cheap restaurant induction hot plates at ~$250 each I can replace/upgrade at will. It might not look as classy, but it will do everything I could ever ask it to do.
We should absolutely not be subsodisong someone who has the means to install a $3000 induction range and do $2k worth of additional work at the same time. A semi decent 4 ring induction cooktop can be had for less than £300, and it plugs straight into a wall socket with no electrical work needed. If you're removing a gas stove and making the point safe, I'd say $100 to cap the pipe at the point of the old range (based on me having that work done in my last apartment). Prices may vary with cost of living.
For people using small burners in apartments, single ring plug in induction cooktops are available for about $100 with no other work required.
Typical American wall sockets rarely deliver more than 120V * 15A. Plug in induction hobs targeting the American market clock in at 1800 W spread across all burners, at most. There are no four burner solutions for which this power is sufficient.
Right, but we are talking about an upgrade to a house that was wired for a gas range. The person I was responding to suggested using a countertop hob plugged into a standard wall socket. That's not going to work in the states.
At least, I assume that is what they were talking about because there are no full scale induction ranges available for 300 pounds = $400. They start around $900.
Yes, that's what we've been talking about. 120V 15A is not enough to run two burners at any kind of reasonable heat output, much less four. That's 900W->3000BTU/h per burner, assuming the electronics work optimally. Even accounting for the fact that induction is 100% more efficient than gas, you're talking about the equivalent of two 6000BTU/h gas burners, effectively. For reference, that's less power than the simmer burner on my gas range. The main burners of a cheap gas range are 15000BTU/h, and more expensive ranges go up to 25000BTU/h.
All this is of course fixed by installing a dedicated circuit for a real induction range. 220V * 40A increases the potential output six-fold, which is enough for any reasonable use case. But doing that is much more expensive, which is the whole of what I was trying to convey.
Gas stoves transfer very little of that heat to your food, most of it goes around your pans and into your kitchen. And the thing with high heat is that it gets drastically less efficient. Large flames push way more heat around the pot than they push into it.
We're not not talking about 100% differences, we're talking closer to 400%. At least that's what I've found when measuring boil times for a 1200w plug in unit compared to a 15000btu gas burner.
Of course 240v is an absolute must for a 4 burner range, but that's not uncommon nor hard to get. Almost every home in the US has at least one 240v connection in the house, and it's usually $200-300 to get one installed. That's not nothing, but it's way less than it costs to install a gas line.
> We're not not talking about 100% differences, we're talking closer to 400%.
The number I cited came from some random website that I Google searched. If you have a more authoritative number, I'm happy to see a citation, but I won't be convinced by you just saying so. FWIW, the low power claims I made r.e. 2 burner plug in induction cooktops match my personal experience using them.
> Almost every home in the US has at least one 240v connection in the house, and it's usually $200-300 to get one installed.
I would be impressed if you could get 240 run from your breaker to your kitchen for $200, unless the breaker box is right next to your kitchen. The cost of the job is mostly going to depend on how time consuming it is to run the wires, assuming the wires already present are not sufficient for carrying 240v 40A. A brief search on the internet indicates a very wide range of quotes, probably dependent on site conditions and the local electrician labor market.
This is true, but a lot of newer homes have a cooktop and separate oven, rather than a drop-in or slide-in range as used to be popular. This is nice because the oven is at a better height (and it's pretty convenient to have a double oven), but the consequence is that gas cooktops are almost never wired for 240V. If the cooktop is on it's own circuit then the upgrade can be done without rewiring, but I don't imagine that's a very common arrangement, it's probably shared with a few outlets, or microwave, etc.
The curse of 120v strikes again. I did a quick Google and it looks like it'll cost you about $500 to install a 240v circuit, which is still a far cry under the 5k+ the above poster paid. A 3600kW combined set of burners is likely more than enough for many households
But you also need a 220+V and 40A circuit installed. How expensive this will be is 100% dependent on where your breaker box is in relation to your kitchen. Moreover, this option only works if your kitchen is already configured for a cooktop, as opposed to a full range. Most American kitchens are still configured for ranges, so to install something like this you'd also need to retrofit your cabinets. Now prices are starting to add up.
The minimum induction range is about $1000, so I don't think you're going to get away with spending less than $1500 except in a very exceptional case.
All that being said, yes, it can be done for much less than what OP paid in most cases, but I wouldn't necessarily count on the quality of the barebones induction range (at least based on my experience with portable induction cooktops -- they are often shit with small heating coils that produce intense hotspotting).
> But you also need a 220+V and 40A circuit installed. How expensive this will be is 100% dependent on where your breaker box is in relation to your kitchen
From googling around it looks like $300 to $800 in the US; I can't use homedepot here in the UK but I found this [0] for $350. That's ~$800 for an upgrade to a hob , assuming you do the electrical work.
> Most American kitchens are still configured for ranges, so to install something like this you'd also need to retrofit your cabinets. Now prices are starting to add up.
Anyone who owns a house with a range doesn't need a subsidy, to be frank. _houses_ might be, but apartments are likely using shitty bottom of the range gas burners, or crappy electrical coils. In my experience a £99 ikea portable induction burner was _way_ better than my builtin gas stove in my last rental apartment.
We bought a single profesional induction stove, 4.5 kW for a single plate, on ebay, barely used, for 100$. The thing is a beast. You can heat a pot with 50L of water in ~10-15min with it to like 60 + degrees celsius.
Water really does make it obvious. I always used to use an electric kettle to heat water and then pour it into a pan to avoid waiting for it to heat on gas. With an induction hob it's super fast to heat.
It’s very bizarre to me how you can get very inexpensive single burner countertop induction plates ($50-100), but multi-burner built-in cooktops are dramatically more expensive ($1000-4000). Anybody know why this is?
Is the US most homes use combination stove/ovens called ranges. These are the cheap option because they are mass produced. Stovetops are more common in bigger, more expensive homes which is why the stovetops at Best Buy are the "premium" models.
Also, at least in the US people have been told over and over how a kitchen remodel actually adds value to your house. "Every dollar you spend you get a dollar twenty back!" Well maybe so or maybe not, but if you don't sell your house before you need to remodel again, you are never realizing that gain.
Interestingly, this is more or less the opposite to Europe these days. While integrated stove/ovens are somewhat rare now, they tend to exist almost exclusively on the high end; a bog-standard cheapest-possible installation will be a separate halogen or induction (or gas) stovetop and a single oven.
You never see the naked coils anymore; as far as I know they're not available anymore (though I'm not sure _why_; they were definitely a thing when I was a kid, but I haven't seen one in about 25 years). The very cheapest units are often those solid plate resistive heater things, but the price difference between those and halogen/ceramic units is very small (about 50 euro on the low end) and the running costs are higher; you don't see them much anymore.
Product segmentation I guess. One is competing with microwaves and other loose utilities, the other is installed as part of a kitchen outfitting which is expected to be expensive.
I'm sure it is at least partially just what you can get away with charging.
Single burners are common for students and people with little room for anything larger, often very budget constrained.
Cooktops are often being put in as a part of an already expensive kitchen refit/build.
With that said, I'm sure there are other factors. Built-in hobs tend to need to be a lot thinner to fit in the available space, at least from what I have seen.
The professional machines don’t look nice, don’t have fancy buttons or electronics. They are not fashion items for fancy looking kitchens.
Instead, They are practical. They have insane power (4.5kW is low range… and it goes directly into the pan…). They are easy to clean, and they have physical knobs: one for on/off, and a dial for power, which they display in a cheap display in kWs.
ebay (buy new directly from the brand). Restaurants open and close, and that stuff needs to often go somewhere else, up to the point that many of these brands sell their new equipment on ebay dirctly via their own shop.
In the US you can't order a Bosch induction top off Amazon. The cheapest 4 field Bosch induction cooktop at Home Depot, Lowe's and Best Buy (stores people frequently buy appliances at in the US) is $1700.
This is really interesting. I was reading the thread waiting to find a hard, technical reason for the cost difference. Instead, this really seems to be an opportunity for disrupting the US market. I wonder if someone could make some good money for a while importing Bosch stove tops. Your margin blah blah blah..
No we shouldn't. Whatever you care about, like maybe CO₂, at those prices you can get a better bang for your buck elsewhere. For new installations it might make sense.
It could be that your gas lines are old and porous, leading to slow release of gas. Usually not a problem, unless the space is enclosed or poorly ventilated, in which case it can cause pooling of the gas and possibly an explosion.
Gas is dangerous, lines should be checked every couple of years (pressurized or vacuum tested) and the rubber connection hose for the range should be replaced every five years or so.
Unless there were serious unmentioned complications, that is a ludicrous amount of money to pay for a new 40-amp circuit. Upgrading the entire panel costs less where I live.
I expect it will cost at least that much for me to do it, and I think my arrangement isn't that uncommon. My meter is on the exterior garage wall, and so the panel is on the interior in that same location. The only path for wiring to my kitchen is up and into the attic then down, or around the garage in conduit until it can enter the crawlspace. Either option is going to cost a day of electrician time, and he's going to charge at least a grand for that. Add in materials, covid pricing, and if I get out of it for less than $2K I'd be surprised.
Fortunately my brother in law is a licensed electrician and he'll do it for his normal rate, which won't include the 100+% markup from the business. I'll pay him generously and still end up paying less.
We would probably better off not relying on politicians to use what technology wins, but instead tax carbon emissions. And I mean tax it properly at real cost of the externality. Not some fig leaf $1/gallon.
Not only did we have a gas stove that was probably spiking NO2 levels when we actually used it; we also seemed to have a gas leak. It was not a big one, just a faint smell, but it was hard to pin down. A plumber concluded the connection between the range and the pipe wasn't the problem. No specific part of the range smelled stronger than the rest of it. For all we knew, it might be a hole in a pipe. So we wanted to make gas stop flowing through our unit (a condo within a three-family home, very normal here in Cambridge, Massachusetts) altogether.
We contacted an appliance company about switching to induction. To prepare, they told us, we would first need to upgrade the range power outlet to 40 amps, and cap off the gas pipe behind the range.
The electrical work cost $1800. It could have been much more; we were lucky our circuit breaker was positioned such that they only needed to make two openings in our walls. (They suggested we put little hatch doors in those spots to make future work easier.)
We asked our plumber to not only cap off the gas pipe behind the range, but also put in a valve in the basement, such that gas flow could be shut off to our unit, but also easily turned back on if a future owner wants to reverse what we did. We did this rather than turn off our gas altogether, because we have a gas water heater and still needed gas available there. The plumbing work cost about $300 I think.
To make cooking stay as close as possible to being how great and fast it is with gas, we chose a range with an induction stove: The LG LSE4616ST, which cost $3000.
We were lucky to be able to afford this change for our health. Of course, it would have cost a lot less if we hadn't cared about induction, but still multiple thousands of dollars.
We should be subsidizing conversions like this.