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Yo @vbaker , if you really wrecked a couple Tesla's per your signature, should you really be behind the wheel of a Case 580B?
RT
Yo @vbaker , if you really wrecked a couple Tesla's per your signature, should you really be behind the wheel of a Case 580B?
RT
California's war on gas appliances worries me. Not because I have a religious preference for cooking and heating with gas but because my home isn't wired for electric appliances and it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to retrofit it. I have no 240V hookups for my clothes dryer or my stove/oven. Gas only. Also, it's a townhome/condo, so any retrofit project would require HOA board approval and special assessments for a ~250 unit complex. It ain't gonna happen. Hopefully I won't need to start importing appliances from Nevada.
There are 120v options for ovens, stoves and dryers. With all the rebates and incentives out now plus the insane price of gas in CA you could probably SAVE money monthly with an equity loan.
It would be interesting to get a quote from an electrician. If they can isolate a single 120v outlet I think there are code compliant ways to upgrade a NEMA 5-15 to a NEMA 6-20 which is 240v. That would broaden you appliance options.
Just from a seismic safety perspective I think it makes A LOT of sense to not have a flammable gas piped into buildings. Especially in a region as temperate as southern CA.
Show me an electric stove/range which operates off a standard 120V/15A or 120V/20A circuit. That's my only option. Any other choice would involve HOA approval since this is a condo.
I don't think you're following what I'm saying. A standalone induction cooktop is not an option. It would need to be a replacement for a typical 30" range. Otherwise you'd have to explain to 250 homeowners why they need to completely remodel their kitchen with only a small cooktop and no oven. Maybe a small toaster oven but without enough power to run it at the same time as the cooktop without tripping the breaker.Lots of options on Amazon. Just search '120v induction cooktop'
Costco has had kits on the past too.
need to completely remodel their kitchen
If they want to have a 30" range with an oven that's probably what's going to be required. Lots of tax credits and such to help. I switched from a gas range/oven to induction ~6 years ago. It's been fine.
The price of gas has increased ~300% in the past ~12 months. Peak electric rates have not increased anywhere near that much.
IMHO, this is stupid government bureaucracy run amok. CARB achieved their Final Solution with respect to passenger cars (complete ban on new ICE vehicles sold by 2035). They need to justify their continued existence so now they're looking elsewhere.
Besides, gas prices may have risen faster than electricity but it won't take long for electricity to catch up. Have you seen SDGE's new rates? Peak 4p-9p electricity price this upcoming summer will be over $0.80/kWh for some plans!
it's not like gas service will be cutoff tomorrow but it does need to happen at some point. Hopefully in the next ~10 years. Do you really deny the insanity of methane being piped into a residence in a place as warm and earthquake prone as CA? The pro/con doesn't come close to playing out. There are lot of clever solutions being introduced to address this issue. Rheem even has a water heater that plugs into a normal 120v outlet now.
The first step is to amend the building code to stop digging the hole deeper and ban new gas service. That's easy and probably even saves money. A small ~5kWh battery would offset most of those higher peak rates.
This is where you are wrong. Cutting off gas NEVER needs to happen. Not unless you and everyone else who deem it insane to pipe gas into a residence want to completely subsidize the cost to retrofit my community's electric infrastructure.
Most months out of the year I never run the heat. Our gas water heater is efficient. We cook like normal people do. And until the geopolitical situation of this year presented itself, a typical monthly gas bill for us was under $15.
That's the plan already. To subsidize the cost to retrofit with electric infrastructure. So piping an explosive gas into a residence isn't insane? .... really?
Burning 1kWh of methane to add 0.9kWh of heat to water is not efficient. Not compared to a heat pump that can use 1kWh of electricity to add 4 kWh of heat. Add to that the fact that the 1kWh used can be solar energy that would have been wasted meaning the ultimate energy cost can be 0.
It's not just the gas burned but the fugitive emissions. Even when they're off gas ranges leak methane. WHEN. WHEN there's a 7.0 earthquake and the gas infrastructure requires 100s of millions or billions of dollars to rebuild. Will that really be worth it? Might as well start chipping away at the problem now.
Mankind has been piping gas into homes for almost a century. If it was as dangerous as you suggest, we would have figured out decades ago it was a bad idea and stopped doing so forever. In fact, I think we've given it a go already: The house my parents live in was built in 1968. It still has the "Medallion Home" doorbell on the front, proudly proclaiming it was an all electric home (although the furnace and water heater use gas; not sure how that happened). Yet somehow when my home was built twenty years later in 1988, it was judged wiser to avoid electric appliances and use natural gas for everything. Something must have happened between the late '60s and mid '80s to change society's opinion on the benefits of electricity. Or are you suggesting we were all completely insane during this time period and it was a vast conspiracy between the gas utilities and home builders?
Also, you're moving the goalposts. You cannot use a heat pump to boil a pot of water in the kithen. You cannot use a heat pump to roast a turkey or bake a cake. And solar energy cannot be used at all during peak demand periods after the sun sets without also using expensive batteries, and the manufacturing of batteries carries an environmental cost which you cannot deny.