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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

The thing I find shocking is how many US homes I've been in that have a gas stove AND "fake" oven hood (essentially it filters and recirculate, instead of venting outside, which does little to nothing for gas fumes).

If they decide against outright banning them, there must be a push during inspection to associate a gas stove with a real oven hood, and ideally some consumer education that: "Gas on, vent fan running" or similar.

If a gas stove was invented today, if you compare it to regulation for other gas appliances (specifically how the fumes are vented), it would almost certainly have an interlock wherein a hood turns itself on to auto-vent outside.

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The purpose of the "fake" kind is to filter basic stuff like grease out so that it doesn't coat your walls. The filter in it is very basic, but if you look at one that has been used for a while, it is usually covered in a thick coat of grease. That's grease that didn't go somewhere else.

It's definitely not as good as one that vents outdoors, but it's not worthless either.

But that’s secondary when it comes to gas stoves. The primary purpose of a proper venting hood is to vent carbon monoxide so that it doesn’t build up to dangerous levels in the home. Carbon dioxide, particulate matter, and other combustion byproducts are also very important to vent to maintain indoor air quality and promote good health, but CO can outright kill everyone in the house with acute exposure.

The risk of CO from a gas hob should be trifling - at least, by comparison to a boiler.

gas boilers usually vent to the outside.

I always just assumed that the “vent fan” over my gas stove actually, you know, vented. After reading your comment I became suspicious of my fairly typical setup and, sure enough, when I turn on the “vent fan”, it’s being blown out of the top of the unit. Wtf.

I never made the connection that the thing is so loud not because of the fan but because the exhaust air is being forced through a relatively narrow area between the front of the unit and the front of the cabinets above it.

I learnt that when I bought an air monitor (airthings) and see VOC+CO2 spike after cooking. It's way worse when using the oven.

I find it fascinating how different the cooking is in Europe vs. US. at least in my limited experience. I've seen multiple apartments across Italy where the kitchen is a small, separate chamber with a door where the resident will get a skillet red hot, drop a piece of meat on it, and open the window. This would be unthinkable in the US - it would set off every single smoke detector in the house. Maybe it's not cause and effect, but just an emergent state - it's difficult to do this here so on average it doesn't happen? Or people tend to have grills outside for this sort of thing? I don't know.

In our house the stove is located centrally and I dread to think how we could retrofit an exhaust for a true venting hood. All we have is a fake hood with a grease filter above the stove.

This is common in Asia also. My wife was shocked that open kitchens were the norm in the USA since most homes in China have a small door-separated kitchen next to a window for venting. The fact that we don't have a real outdoor vented hood is not ideal for cooking Chinese food, but the cost is a lot (not to mention the limit on CFM for vented if you don't want to also invest in makeup air).

This whole thing set me into planning a kitchen reno that would switch from gas to induction, but that would require a panel upgrade, and the cabinets would need to be redone to add outdoor venting....and even then we'd only get 400 CFM without a costly makeup air system...and then we need to have a new place for our microwave...dominos to a $150K kitchen reno...things I wish I knew better when buying a house.

> ...the kitchen is a small, separate chamber with a door where the resident...[can]...open the window.

I don't know why this arrangement is so rare in the USA. It should be standard.

Ooh boy, I bet you could do an entire sociology PhD on this topic if you wanted.

We just built a house with the very opposite. Kitchen is the center of the home. I want to be able to cook and converse with people in the dining room or the living room. I want to be able to clean and watch the kids do homework.

Anyway, part of the sociology aspect of this is that cooking has moved from something your servants did, to something that your wife did, to something that is acceptable for high status people to do.

This was called 'Wohnküche'(Kitchen to live in), and enabled by things like 'Kachelofen'(Masonry stove) in Germany, but died out about 100 years ago. Or at least anything built after WW2. The Russians with their colder climate pushed this to the extreme with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_stove where the thermal mass and ducts also heated the room instead of only being used for cooking.

This is interesting. If I understand correctly, European housing evolved from open to closed kitchens during the same period that American housing went in the other direction.

A friend of mine in Korea has an apartment with both solutions. There is a large kitchen area open to the dining/living area, and also a sliding glass door separating a second complete (but small) kitchen with a large window to the outside.

It used to be very common - lots of Victorians in SF were originally laid out like this for example. Most remodels will covert to an open floor plan though because it’s less isolating and claustrophobic for the cook.

Personally I just avoid cooking smoky foods because setting off the smoke detector calls the fire department after a few minutes which costs $1000.

Cook the stuff that’s easy at home. And go out for the rest.

Where do you live? I’ve never heard of either of those things happening!

Highrise apartment. The alarm starts beeping and you get something like 5 minutes to turn it off before it evacuates the level and calls the fire department.

In the few years I have lived here, no one has ever got that far but I have set it off and had to wave the smoke away before.

It's probably some sort of apartment that has a centralized smoke alarm. Your average battery powered smoke alarm you buy yourself.

Building code nowadays only allow building A+ energy efficiency homes here (Lithuania) which forbids using vented extractors - only filtered ones.

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