Home appliance upgrade help - gas range

I've a gas range that I want to replace and found great deals on electric models when I browsed Craigslist. Do I 'have' to use gas?

I much prefer gas over the old style coil electric. Gets heat faster to the pan. If you ever use a wok, you'll know what I mean. If you're serious about cooking, go for a gas range.

Not sure about the relative economies of gas v electric, but I'll second the preference for a gas range. Everything cooks better over a gas flame. Of course just as with flashaholism, once you install a great gas range, you'll want a few quality pots and pans to take full advantage of your new toy. Maybe Allclad and Le Creuset.

I'd like to start my journey into the cooking world so gas seems like the best choice. Escrow is closing this friday for my first house and need to make some appliance decisions. Thanks for the advice!

If you are in SDGE territory (which I assume you are), a natural gas range will be many times less expensive to fuel then an electric one. However, that may not be the case if you have a properly sized solar electric system. A gas range has superior heating abilities at the expense of relatively high pollutant emissions. CO2 is a typical byproduct.

the Amanas are the best for the money at around $900 for their best convection oven / range with 'pro' type high output burners, with simmer settings too (this setting keeps a tea kettle about two seconds from whistling when you turn up the flame.) -- after Amana you go into the multi-thou range of Vikings, Five Stars, and like that..

My $0.02:
If you go with gas, see if you can get one that doesn't just shoot the flames out sideways when you turn it up. Maybe you're frustrated by this already because you've been using gas. That's my biggest beef with most of the designs. You'll be happier if you can get one that's at least doing something with the flame design like a daisy-looking burner or a cross or a circle within a larger circle. Unfortunately, even through most of the "pro" level consumer ranges you get the single plain circle that just shoots the flames out more sideways the more you turn it up.

I recently bought a bunch of appliances including a wide Wolf range with gas top & electric ovens. It has the frustrating burner design but lots of other great features that I do love like a thick steel griddle so I can feed my troops & their sleepover friends with 9 pancakes or french toast per batch while the bacon & eggs are cooking too, and great electric ovens with no exposed lower heating element so they're fairly easy to clean. For some reason the gas top & gas oven version of the range has different & better burners but a frustrating griddle design with a small grease drain hole to keep clean. I didn't opt for that version because of the griddle and the gas ovens that would dry out bread more than electric.

I also looked at induction. I opted out because the prices are astronomical and also because for most of my cooking I like to lift my pans and move the food around. Gas is best for that. Plus, the consumer inductions are relatively wimpy. Induction is a great engineering design, but it seemed like the marketers were just starting to climb the wattage game and they weren't up to the wattage yet while the prices were crazy. I figured I could always cut a hole in my counter later for a single-unit induction box that I'd probably only use for boiling stuff, and do it with a real pro unit after the prices came down a lot.

As one more note, my mother-in-law bought one of those fancy glass-top electric ranges about two years ago. She loved it for about 3 months, after which she hated it. I think the review was that she loved how easy it is to wipe up, but only as long as the food isn't baked on, and she mostly hated how delicate the top was. I think there are now some chips in the top.

You don't "have" to as far as I know unless building codes etc mandate gas use. Going electric will cost you extra for wiring and breakers, outlets etc. Then you have to cap the old gas line too, not a huge deal but has to be done. I'd just stay with the gas myself, better performance and less cost.

I have ceramic top electrical and used coiled electrical in the past and I much prefer gas. Less expensive to run, quicker heat up, instant off, and cooking/heat back up when powerline is down.

If it hasn't already been done 220 volt wiring for the electric will be expensive. Based on some recent research natural gas prices should not go too high like oil has but I'm no prophet so you never know. I think electric has the best chance of staying reasonable in price. Gourmet cooks seem to prefer gas. If you have to means I'd wire/plumb for both so you can change later if you don't like one.

Good ideas in the prior posts.

My philosophical position is -- stretch and get what you want. Whenever I've compromised, I've always wondered. And generally wind up getting what I wanted in the first place after the hassle and expense of dealing with the compromise item.

That being said, I much prefer gas myself.

matrixshaman said:

I think electric has the best chance of staying reasonable in price.

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No way. It is the other way around. From PG&E, to SCE to SDG&E, CA has an amazingly complex rate tier structure. CA already has the lowest per capita consumption of electricity in the nation (thanks to 20 odd years of movement in that very direction), yet the minimum kWh rate in Los Angeles alone is already over twice that of the highest rate in Nevada. Tack on time of use, peak demand rates and you can multiply that two times over again. Natural gas reserves are more abundant than you have been led to believe.

+1 for gas, but that's just my personal preference for cooking. It's also much easier to install as you already have everything there.

When I bought this house everything was electric except for the central forced air heat, which was oil. I switched everything to propane. I live in the boonies(hence propane instead of NG) and my area is prone to power outages. Propane lets my wife and I continue living like normal on a much smaller generator.

:buddies:

shakeylegs said:

Not sure about the relative economies of gas v electric, but I'll second the preference for a gas range. Everything cooks better over a gas flame. Of course just as with flashaholism, once you install a great gas range, you'll want a few quality pots and pans to take full advantage of your new toy. Maybe Allclad and Le Creuset.

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If you're cooking in more than an inch or so of fluid, the thickness of the pot doesn't really matter. The water or oil will heat evenly regardless of the pattern of the flame. For lower liquid levels than that, a thick bottom is nice. Always use a thick-bottomed pan when heating something with milk in it.

All I'm trying to say is that a $300 soup pot is a waste of money. The water in the soup/sauce will heat it evenly even in a thin container. The smaller All-Clads are usually nice though.

I agree about the PG&E tariffs--Here is E6 Time Of Use plan for Northern California (required if you want to do Grid Tied solar power--mine is an older E7 rate plan which is easier to explain and better for Solar PV systems):

(note: I have highlighted the max/min pricing for power depending on time of day and your tier/usage level for summer/winter. Note that if you use 300 kWhrs per month as baseline--that using over 1,000 kWhrs per month in the summer can hit you with $0.53 per kWhr!)

But, what is Baseline you say???

Want to know if you are P-Z Territory--won't find out in your Rate Plan. Guess you have to call, or if you are already here--look at your current bill.

But--I still don't know what time is Peak/Partial Peak/Off Peak?

Wait--I am going on a very expensive Rate Plan because, most likely, I am going to Solar PV Grid Tied (solar cells)... But, my system generates most of its power between 9am and 3pm--and nothing after 6pm--but paying peak/partial peak out to 7pm/ppm during the summer?

And, there are a few weeks of the year where "Billing Time" is not the same and normal/sane PST/PDT (This one is the fault of our current President and Congress that wanted to extend a useless shift in DST for a few weeks--and all of the utility meters had been hard coded to, what had been a stable definition of DST, for the last 20+ years):

DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME ADJUSTMENT: The time periods shown above will begin and end one hour later for the period between the second Sunday in March and the first Sunday in April, and for the period between the last Sunday in October and the first Sunday in November.

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Want to tell your spouse and kids when they are wasting money and when the best times are to use electricity??? Want to figure out if the new bill will be better or worst for you... --Good Luck

-Bill

I have to disagree about gas being faster than electric. In my experience it is the other way around. I suppose it depends on what kind of pan you use. A round bottom pan won't work with electric. But a flat bottom pan on a flat electric heating element is considerably faster than with gas.

Boiling water is my specialty. Well you know, macaroni and such. Getting the water to boil is no contest. The electric puts the heat right into the bottom of the pan. When I am in a hurry with gas, I crank up the flame. This causes a lot of hot gases to go around the side of the pan which heats the handle and the lid so I can't grab hold of either. So yeah, gas heats the handle and lid in a hurry, but it takes considerably longer to boil the water.

Another problem I have with the no doubt cheap gas ranges I have had in apartments is simmering. I don't dare turn the flame down very low. If I do and someone slams a door, the flame is extinguished and the place fills with gas. My mother used to have a gas range with a "simmer save" setting that worked well. When turned to this position, it used a different set of gas jets. They were on the inside of the ring and there were just a few of them. Unfortunately I never came across one of those in my various apartments.

eluminator said:

The electric puts the heat right into the bottom of the pan. When I am in a hurry with gas, I crank up the flame. This causes a lot of hot gases to go around the side of the pan which heats the handle and the lid so I can't grab hold of either.

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With the better burner designs it's much different. If it looks like a circle and is called "sealed" then I haven't seen one that does anything other than what you're describing because it just shoots the flames sideways as you turn it up. Very annoying, I agree.

Do you have to go for a range? My parents recently redid their kitchen and one of the items that we replaced was the natural gas range. For the new kitchen they went with an Induction Cooktop. The cooktop is amazing - it heats pans up much faster than Gas. I know Induction has been around in the US for a while, but last year was the first time Induction was allowed in Canada (finally passed Canadian Safety Standards).

more info on induction here: www.theinductionsite.com

My dad's a chef, so he always stuck with NG - but after using the induction after a while, he had to admit that the pans got much more hotter than with Gas. Plus its safer for my mom, she has burned herself in the past, when she turned on the wrong burner by mistake - no more open flames now.

eluminator said:

I have to disagree about gas being faster than electric. In my experience it is the other way around.

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That's because Natural gas only uses ~40% of the energy burned on heating the food. The rest is wasted on the heat that is released into the air. The benefits of NG is that it offers faster control of temperature and the visual feedback with the flame.

Gas is better for a cooktop. However, electric is better for an oven (or a clothes dryer). I believe it's for the superior temperature control. Some high end oven/range units are "dual fuel." They have an electric oven and a gas cooktop.