Time to get rid of a gas hob?

wittynamegoeshere

I put myself to the test last night, by glancing at my smart meter display before and after cooking.

It rose by pretty much exactly 1kWh over the half hour I was stir-frying raw meat and a massive amount of veg, all cooked from scratch/raw and boiling a panful of pasta.  So, on the face of it, it cost me 28p to cook probably £4-worth of food.

But this reading was for the entire house, including a fair bit of background use, so 20p would be my guesstimate for the cooking alone.

I was using a ceramic electric hob, probably the most expensive option, so the cost would be less for other types of hob.

This is probably the most energy intensive type of meal from my repertoire.  Rice uses less energy, lots of other meals have much less cooking time.

My guess is that cooking costs me £1 a week, call it £50 a year, using our rubbish hob.  So any upgrade to a more efficient hob is going to have a long payback period.  As with many energy efficiency measures, it probably makes sense to look at efficiency if you're buying for other reasons, but it's unlikely to make sense if replacing one that you're otherwise happy with.

I suspect, based on my survey of looking round Tesco, that the typical household's food is as likely to come from a packet and just needs heating rather than cooking, so typical consumption may be less than ours.  Also calling out Just Eat or Deliveroo definitely isn't impacted by hob efficiency.

FreeBear

wittynamegoeshere said: I was using a ceramic electric hob, probably the most expensive option, so the cost would be less for other types of hob.

One these types of hob (horrible, nasty things) would have cost you quite a bit more to cook a meal on. You have to wait half an hour for the darned thing to heat up, and the only way to save a pan boiling over is to take it off the ring. A ceramic hob is a reasonable compromise..

wittynamegoeshere

That's a solid hotplate.  I remember using one of those in the olden days in a rented house where it was kitted out with the cheapest of everything.  You're right, they're terrible - there's so much inertia that they take ages to get hot then stay hot for far longer than you want them to.

Further back in the really olden days (1980s) at my mum's we had one with these radiant rings...

That radiant ring one had a lift-up top, like a car bonnet, with a tray under.  You had to clear out the burnt spilt bits and liquids now and then, we used to keep a layer of foil in, to make cleaning easier but it probably also bounced back some of the wasted heat that was being projected downwards.

They're probably not very different in terms of efficiency though, they all produce heat, from electricity that gets lobbed at the base of the pan, probably most of it gets the pan hotter but a proportion flies off in some other direction.

But you're talking percentages of what I'm guessing is a quid a week.  So any losses or savings aren't going to change your life very much.

It's mostly a convenience thing.  We don't have gas anyway, but if we did then my personal choice would be an induction hob with a separate single massive wok burner next to it.  Although there are bowl-shaped induction wok heaters that I will look at when considering our kitchen refit in a number of years.

Cardew

My main point was that induction hobs are almost 'instantly' controllable.

They are also so much easier to clean; in 12 years I have never had splashed fat burnt on to the hob surface.

I cannot think of many examples where a potential saving in running costs would justify buying a new appliance. 

wittynamegoeshere

I agree there will be some additional wasted heat with the solid hotplate, mainly as it will remain hot for longer after use.  But I doubt that this is going to amount to much, as it would be a small percentage of £1 per week for me at least.

I don't think many people disagree that induction hobs are the best option these days, for both efficiency and convenience.  Perhaps there are a few who have unsuitable pans, or are just generally scared of anything too techy.

We have oldie relatives who've just bought a hob.  I told them all about induction hobs, they said they're too fiddly with those silly touch sensitive things, they just want one with knobs that gets hot.  Perhaps there are induction hobs with knobs, but it would have been a waste of time looking as they're stubburnly against anything new.  I've given up bothering to argue with them, their world stopped about 30 years ago.  I'd suggest that stubbornness and ignorance are probably the main reasons why people buy anything but induction.

But... I'm sticking with my cheapo halogen hob, simply because it's a freestanding cooker that's in an old kitchen so will be replaced with a fitted induction hob in a new kitchen some years in the future.  But I'm not going to waste money on a better freestanding cooker in the meantime, as I'd definitely not recover its cost in energy savings.  Sometimes there are good reasons for not progressing.