stove – Things Are Good

Ditching Gas Stoves as Good as Using Drugs for Asthmatics

cooking prep

Having asthma is tough as you may too often feel short of breath, and the solution to many asthma symptoms are prescription drugs. The drugs generally help the body open airways and allow the asthmatic person to breathe normally agin.
It’s been proven that air pollutants increase the stress put on asthmatic individuals and lead to increase asthma rates in the population at large. It’s also known that gas stoves produce a ton of indoor pollution. Put those two things together and now you get a good question: if gas stoves are removed from homes with people with asthma then will their condition improve? The answer is yes!

Indeed, if you get rid of gas stoves then you could see improvements as good as, or exceeding, certain drugs used to treat asthma.

Sehgal said: “We were surprised when we analysed the results and found a very large effect size. The improvements in asthma symptoms following stove change were similar to – or even greater than – those reported in clinical trials of commonly used asthma medications.”

Each person was assessed for four weeks before the gas cooking replacement, and for four weeks afterwards, including scoring their asthma using an internationally recognised scale of zero to six.

The average asthma score improved from 2.6 to 1.5, on a scale where a change of 0.5 is considered to be clinically significant. This included fewer hospital visits and fewer days off school or work for asthma flare-ups. They also found less wheezing, less use of reliver inhalers and fewer people saying that their asthma had woken them during the night.

Air pollution was measured in 44 of the homes. On average, nitrogen dioxide dropped 70%.

Time to Break Up with Gas

One thing is certain: we need to get off of fossil fuels as fast as possible. The gas companies want to keep polluting and are paying people to promote the burning of carbon-intensive resources.Gas companies are using influencers to promote gas stoves, when everyone knows that induction stovetops are better in every way.

Because so many people are concerned about how much carbon we dump into the air, there is a burgeoning grassroots movement trying to disconnect everyone from gas consumption. The video above is one such example, and as more people understand the state of our planet more people are switching from gas to electric solutions.

Further complicating things, the gas industry has, for decades, framed itself as a “cleaner” alternative to fossil fuels like coal and oil. “We should probably discuss the name of it: ‘Natural gas.’” says Panama Bartholomy, executive director of the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition in California. “It has been perhaps one of the most successful marketing campaigns that we’ve seen from a large industry to call what is really a dangerous pollutant, something natural.”

Cooking With Electricity is Cleaner than Gas

Gas stoves have reputation for being good to cook with, but they are really quite bad for everything else that happens in the kitchen – like inhaling air. Indoor fas stoves can actually make your kitchen air quality worse than a highway’s. Thankfully, electric stove technology has improved to the point that the cooking benefits of gas are negligible compared to a quality stove.

So if you’re in need of a new stove, go electric.

On the air-quality front, at least, the evidence against gas stoves is damning. Although cooking food on any stove produces particulate pollutants, burning gas produces nitrogen dioxide, or NO2,, and sometimes also carbon monoxide, according to Brett Singer, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies indoor air quality. Brief exposures to air with high concentrations of NO2 can lead to coughing and wheezing for people with asthma or other respiratory issues, and prolonged exposure to the gas can contribute to the development of those conditions, according to the EPA. Homes with gas stoves can contain approximately 50 to 400 percent higher concentrations of NO2 than homes with electric stoves, often resulting in levels of indoor air pollution that would be illegal outdoors, according to a recent report by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a sustainability think tank. â€œNO2 is invisible and odorless, which is one of the reasons itâ€™s gone so unnoticed,â€ Brady Seals, a lead author on the report, says.

A New Stove Project Looks to Crowdsource Healthier Heating

Regular readers of this site may know that we are fans of efficient stoves. The Kenya Stove is a new project to get efficient stoves in the hands of Kenyans. Erin, from Kenya Stove writes:

First some bad news: More than 3 billion people rely on traditional cookstoves for cooking in the developing world. Exposure to smoke from inefficient cookstoves and open-fire cooking practices contributes to the burden of pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular disease, and other diseases and results in an estimated two million deaths worldwide per year.

Now the good news: We plan to pilot a novel gasifying wood stove and fuel project in Kenya in the coming months. The stove emits little smoke, is durable and can be made at low cost with materials locally available in Kenya by Kenyan artisans thus creating jobs. Additionally we have selected mesquite, an invasive species in Kenya, to be used as the fuel source and therefore not impact indigenous forests through deforestation for wood fuel or charcoal-making. We anticipate our project will improve the health of families by reducing exposure to smoke, provide a lower cost fuel for cooking, and reduce the environmental impact caused by charcoal-making and the emissions from inefficient stoves.

Help fund their initiative here.

A Stove That Uses Fire to Charge Electronics

BioLite is a company that focuses on creating clean-burning stoves. We’ve looked at stoves before and why it’s important to create efficient stoves for a better planet and healthier people.

Recently, an employee of BioLite gave a presentation at TEDx Montreal about the importance of clean stoves.

The company has tied their business model of selling camping stoves to improving home stoves in a smart way, here’s an advertisement about their camping stove:

BioLite CampStove Demo & Story from BioLite on Vimeo.