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Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. For all common tasks (and most uncommon tasks) that Americans do with a stove, non-induction electric stoves are as good or better than gas.

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I’ve cooked on both and prefer gas. For pots with curvature (woks), induction doesn’t work well. Induction is nice for boiling water/soups, but frying is better with gas. Gas is also more user friendly as a broiler in the oven for toasting than a slow to heat electric element.

gas is also incredibly wasteful. the efficiency of a resistive element stove is in the 80-90% range while for gas, it is in the 20s if you are lucky. most of the heat in a gas stove is lost to the environment.

The “better” you report is just perception. there is zero evidence or measurements to back that up.

Errr, assuming that your electricity comes from a combustion source and a simple cycle power plant, at _best_ the work derived from the heat is about 35%. You need to account for that in your 80-90% calculation. (That is, .9 * .35 = .315 using the upper range of your guesstimate.)

In other words, the waste heat has already been lost to the environment at the power generation source in that case.

As always "it depends"... (In this case on the power generation mix in your local grid)

The specific mix depends on the local grid, but nobody in the US gets electricity entirely from combustion, unless you're in like an Alaskan village that only has a generator.

I agree there are a couple niche cases like woks, but very few Americans ever use them, and if you do there are easy workarounds like electric woks. Electric ovens are typically better for broiling (https://www.consumerreports.org/appliances/ranges/gas-or-ele..., https://www.consumerreports.org/ranges/how-to-get-the-most-f...). Why do you think frying is better with gas?

Obviously some good gas stoves will still be better than bad electric ones, so I'm not discounting your individual experience, but I don't think your experience generalizes well.

The only thing gas has any claim of being better at is woks. Or anything else that really must have all that extra heat blasting up the sides of the pan. In every other way induction just kicks the crap out of gas. Far more powerful, faster to change heat settings, more precise. I grew up using OG electric coil stoves, had gas for the next 20 years, and induction for the last year. I could never go back to gas. Electric coil at least has the upside of being stupidly hot when you want. The high end temperature for gas isn't great.

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