Same for me when I moved out of a stuffy old high-rise in Philadelphia. I had frequent coughs and wheezing, shortness of breath, and just lots of general discomfort with breathing. Every time I washed my car there was a thick black layer of soot covering it within a couple days, so I'm sure that was doing great things for my lungs. Also got a couple serious colds every year when I lived there. That was as a 20-something who never smoked, didn't have asthma and wasn't overweight.
Living in the suburbs now and haven't had an issue since moving.
Annoying as I certainly find gas more pleasant to cook with.
At a high enough income level you are right that kitchens separate the oven and stove. However you'd be surprised how many high end kitchens will use a gas stove because it's often a better and more versatile cooking tool, plus natural gas is something America has a lot of and is very cheap compared to the Russian gas that many Europeans have to deal with.
Also, the poorest of Americans will use electric ranges almost universally because we can make electric ranges for the same or less than a gas range and the poorest of people live in places that don't even get natural gas copper piped through their place. They would just live without it and have electricity only.
Since I switched to induction i think it's the best technology. Yes, you need specific pans, but all the good ones are induction ready anyway.
Besides that, it's safe like any electric, can be fast heating like gas, is more efficient than standard electric, and the oven plates don't burn you for more than a minute after taking off the hot pan or pot (since the vessel is heated, not the glass plate).
It's seriously the best way to cook now, and it has gotten quite affordable.
Was also surprised to find out that it is actually the more economical choice for us as well. We can only do propane, and not natural gas, and its a lot more expensive, so it works out nicely.
Don't want to go back to anything other than induction at this point.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342533629_The_impac...
Another is time: minimum wage for a 40 hour work week earns you less than $15,000 a year (in the US). So many working poor are working more than 40 hour weeks, and can't take the time to cook, even if they can afford and obtain ingredients. Fast food is cheap, available, and fast.
Bigger problem is that low-income folks don't have the time, the access, or the urge -- marketing aimed at low-income folks works as well as on any demographic -- so they miss out.
If you're working 49 hours a week in 2 jobs and taking the bus home, are you gonna have the time to make steel cut oats and organic quinoa with mushroom broth, or are you going to hit the easiest thing on the way home, aka a quick burger at McD's? Quinoa ain't bad, but it doesn't hit the spot a the way a burger does either.
If we're talking the cheapest and worst food habits of the poorest, we're talking lots of ramen and tons of frozen foods. You can get big bags of frozen french fries for way cheaper than fast food. $3 gets you a fry at McDonalds or a 2 pound bag of frozen generic.
Fast food would be the luxury version lol.
Any lower/middle class oriented apartments I've seen built in the past 30 years in my area at least have all been electric.
Also spent a lot of my 20's in cheap apartments, and never had anything more than an electric coil stove.
My first apartment out of college was an absolute trash heap. I lived in a studio, which had clearly at one point been a 1 br until someone put a wall in the middle of it to create 2 studios. Only two positive aspects about that place was the fact that it had a brand new gas stove, and that whoever had put up the wall failed to create a new electric circut for the studio, so my neighbor paid my electric bill for the year I was there :)
Ye olde grand cities new stock of apartments has gas, so Chicago, NYC, simply because it's already wired and can be cheaper than electricity in winter.
Induction gives you most of the benefits, without the hazards described in the article, or the same risks of fire and explosion.
Also, better induction cookers have useful enhancements such as "hold my pot at 85 degrees" or "hold my fry pan at 180 degrees".
A layer of soot in Philadelphia? I've spent plenty of time there, know plenty who live there, and never saw or heard of such a thing. Were you parking next to a chimney sweep?
All gas stoves should be below a hood with a ducted outside vent, the more powerful the better.
To my understanding, installing a very powerful stove hood in a tightly sealed house without proper consideration for a make-up air intake can cause problems (i.e. backdrafts in the exhausts for gas fired water heaters), especially in concert with other things venting outside like a clothes dryer. It's very possible to have it done right, but a pretty bad situation if done wrong.
They also seem to require a centralized air conditioning/heating system. That would give you a nice central place to put an air quality monitor. The big challenge though is that often these central systems don't process all air in the building evenly. Multi-zone systems help.
1000% agree on the venting. It occurs to me that I have some gas heaters that I should double-check the venting on... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_recovery_ventilation
You still want a quality filter and humidity is an issue in some areas, but overall they can make a huge difference.
At the end of the exchanger, the warmed incoming air is in contact with 70° outgoing air, so it will be at almost 70°. Similarly, the outgoing air will be at almost -10° as it exits.
It will probably make more sense if you look at the diagram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countercurrent_exchange
My house basically has a natural set point that the exchanger runs at per season. Much like my thermostat I can basically leave it at a setting for a season and it works well.
There are a few days I may have to slightly adjust things, usually when there's a big temp swing, so if it were more automated that'd be better but in general I have to maintain conditioned air in both the winter and summer to keep the house stable... and the house seems happier for it.
What country are you in? I'm in the US and my nice home, built in 2015, doesn't have either one.
I'm in Kansas City, and even into the $650k range, houses only VERY rarely are built with them.
Like around here, the building code in one city requires a certain blower door score to pass. But doesn't require blower door testing if you say you followed certain "sufficient" practices. There's no way most of these houses would achieve a sufficient blower door test score, but they all "comply with code".
I don't have counter evidence on hand but assuming the oven is vented outdoors, my understanding is that a hood should be relatively low-powered, not high, in order to then capture emissions from the stove top. It should be a function of size, height from the stove top, noise constraints, etc.
https://www.prolinerangehoods.com/blog/cfm-need-range-hood/
You can vent both the gas oven and the stove separately. You have to buy high end appliances for that. I've seen them but can't remember.. maybe a Viking stove or something prosumer-commercial. Make up air can be a cracked window or a separate intake duct that opens up when the vent is turned on. Your local building code will have specific requirements.
You can duct a hood out of an external wall or even better out of the roof. If you go with a roof vent you can install the extractor fans in the duct in the attic which helps reduce noise if that's a concern. What you can do will depend on your specific kitchen.
I have found that the stove top is worse than the oven for emissions. The reason is that my exhaust hood is under-powered and it's a microwave/exhaust combination that doesn't extend over the entire cooking surface. So I would advise a hood larger than the stove top itself, install a larger duct and I would overestimate the CFMs required. If you get a multi-speed range hood then you can adjust it as necessary.
I actually think electric ovens are better combined with a gas stove top. Electric ovens though do have a tendency to fail at inopportune times (e.g. the holidays!)
The best part is how many "down draft" vents are put into place, even new luxury construction.
They look nice, but don't do much...
It came miscalibrated from the factory.
OR
After a short period it would no longer be calibrated.
Turns out keeping an air quality testing device calibrated properly is really really hard, and definitely not cheap. So maybe the computing side of this is not really all the difficult, but the physical measurement side of this is absolutely not easy.
Eventually I gave up trying to find a device for my home because I realized I would have to really dig into the science hard, and I would have to spend more money than I was willing. And I was unwilling to do either.
Using a sensor like this to measure percent of oxygen in a gas requires you to eliminate a lot of confounding effects like pressure waves, flow changes, etc.. Basically you can cause the sensor to absorb more oxygen than is present in the gas by temporarily increasing flow.
So if you're building an air quality sensor you have to pay very close attention to how the air moves through the sensor. That requires not just a calibration but also characterization of the flow through the system under environmental conditions.
One other effect I could see is a contaminant sensor becoming fouled. Oxygen sensors can become fouled and report inaccurate values, which is why it's very important to control the inputs.
This is one of the reasons an antifreeze leak in an engine block can cause your engine performance to go to crap. The oxygen sensor is part of how a stoichiometric ratio of fuel and air is maintained, by monitoring the combustion products for excess oxygen. So when it gets fouled either the ceramic element is damaged or the sensor stops receiving consistent flow and the resistance relationship ceases to be valid.
In short I don't see how you could build a useful long-lasting sensor by just buying parts off Amazon or Digikey and throwing them together. You would have to treat it like a scientific instrument, meaning that you have to validate your assumptions about how the sensor performs and I doubt that most of the products on Amazon do that.
I think you're going the wrong way. These problems were caused by trying to artificially exert control over a complex environment. Similar to trying to "manage" a natural environment, each effort results in 2 more side-effects which each then need their own "management". On the other hand, some modern "management" techniques are to simply re-introduce nature to an environment and letting it self-manage. This ends up with better ecological health as well as less cost and complexity. But we have to let go of whatever weird human-specific desire caused us to mismanage it the first time.
Why do we need carbon monoxide monitors? Because carbon monoxide builds up, because gas-powered devices and heat exchangers live inside the sealed home. Put them outside the home and the problem is solved, no technological solutions necessary.
A properly designed home can also avoid things like vapor barriers, reduce dependence on air conditioning and heating, avoid mold and mildew, and require less maintenance. But if we insist on working within existing home designs, there's a constant requirement for new fixes for the new problems we introduce.
My own "redesign" is just to look at how homes used to work. Wattle and daub, hogan, pueblo, timber frame, log cabin, long house, clochán, crannog, igloo, walpini, adobe, brick. They each have pros and cons, but they work best for where they were built and the needs of the people that lived there. They adapted solutions for heating/cooling, pest control, weather resistance, cooking, storage, etc that fit their purpose. As far as I know, none of these homes ever had to deal with annoyances like mold or carbon monoxide. But then again the downsides could be severe in densely-populated urban areas; entire cities could be razed overnight by fire and strong winds!
Before modern homes were redesigned to take advantage of supply chain efficiencies, timber frame and stone foundation were common in the US. Before air conditioning, homes were designed for where they sat to take the seasons into account. A central corridor of air could be funneled by opening doors or windows on either side of the house, rapidly cooling or heating it, and windows and shutters could lock in whatever the temperature was - but this would be a bad idea on a humid day! A stone foundation acted as a mini thermal battery, and some building materials were incredibly good insulators. Also common were fireplaces and living quarters in the center of the home; shut all the doors to keep your room toasty warm, or open them up to warm the house for company. There was no vapor barrier, no sheeting; just nail some shingles to the frame and stuff whatever you can into the walls for insulation, or build walls out of a composite like mud and stick. In wet, hot areas, you had lots of porches and big awnings so you could stay outside with a fan in the shade.
There's many other old-school techniques we could be using, but then homes become more expensive as no contractor knows how to build them, or we've literally done away with all the natural resources and now they have to be acquired at great expense. Not to mention of course, zoning might have made it all illegal anyway. In many ways we've engineered ourselves into a corner.
>should be able to cheaply add networked sensors, fans, filters, and vents
Sensors can be ok... But your homes's AC design, even if based on simple building code lookups, is based on some fairy complex engineering which rely on certain assumptions.
If those assumptions aren't met, the design usually must be approved by a licensed engineer. This is why you don't see more independently controlled vents on the market. No professional is going to install products that don't meet code, unless an engineer has stamped the plans. (Which includes operational logic.)
Ignoring regulations, you shouldn't just add controlled vents to a system (or manually close existing vents) without compensating for that elsewhere. You likely need a variable speed blower, controlled/compensated return air flow, and system logic to control it all.
Will the house blow up if you install them yourself? Probably not. But it could result in a system operating much less efficiently, increase the number of system cycles (reducing system lifetime), cause duct ruptures/leaks due to increased back pressure, and most likely, cause condensation in places other than the condenser, possibly causing mold to grow and/or rot.
Which leaves 2 options: installing a commercial system with the integrated vent control you're looking for, or adding sensors for input for when the system should run, without modification. Biggest simple change you can make for immediate impact? Change your filters every month, even if it means using 12 $3 fiberglass filters instead of 1 $36 hepa filter.
For instance, I run a list of room temps through a simple max function to ensure my AC and/or blower runs until the hottest room falls below the set temperature.
If this results in wildly unbalanced temps throughout the house, you have a bigger issue, and likely need your system resized/adjusted by a professional.
Related, and because most people don't realize it, your AC is an engine. You want it properly sized and to run constant, when needed. Think of your car: is it more efficient to make a trip by many intermittent 100mph sprints, or driving 55mph without stopping.
Multi stage compressors now act like car transmissions to dynamically "size" the system as needed, but run constantly with minimal stopping.
Most techs I get from companies have been very poorly informed and almost hopeless at "debugging" any performance or functional problem. The operating model seems to simply be to replace parts in a pre-determined "likelihood of failure" model.
I don't blame the techs - I liked most of them but after casual conversation it seems clear that most of them don't get much training.
I guess my main complaint is that while I definitely want to "call a pro" my experience finding a good professional in HVAC (and plumbing for that matter) has not been particularly successful.
And don't get me started on part pricing - I am very happy to pay for knowledge (with high hourly technician costs) but more than once I have had easily purchasable OEM parts massively marked up by HVAC companies in what seems just like price gouging.
Case in point, a few years ago when I was a new homeowner I converted to natural gas from oil and got three quotes from three highly rated companies. All three companies recommended the exact same boiler. A few months ago I started to research the outdoor reset functionality that allows it to change the water temperature based on the outdoor temp. Well, I discovered that the feature is basically useless for me because both of my zones are too small to generate the minimum number of BTUs at lower temperatures. So I have a (up to) 96% efficient boiler that will never be able to reach that efficiency. I either would have needed a smaller boiler and or a buffer tank to be able to work correctly.
In trying to fix it, I had multiple techs come out and none really fixed the issue. These are basically some notes on the experience: - First tech stayed for 6 hours. Cleaned the system, replaced a high pressure switched, and readjusted the PVC in and out takes. The pressure switch alone costed over $500 dollars. He did the PVC for free. The problem persisted after he left. - First tech sent a second guy out the next day. This guy comes in and within 10 minutes recommended replacing my Nest with their "preferred" smart thermostat for a cost of $500. He also wanted to redo my humidifiers water setup ($200), and redo the elbow joint in the condensation output of the furnace ($200). After he quoted me all of that I asked him to leave. I redid the condensation output myself ($15 in parts), and humidifier ($15 in parts). I looked up the high pressure switched they replaced, and was shocked to learn it only costs $150. - I wrote my first Yelp review ever because of this company. They contacted me a day after I posted my review asking me to take it down in exchange for a partial ($300) refund. I agreed. - I had two family friends who do HVAC come out afterwards to look at it. After seeing that it was a high efficiency unit they basically wouldn't touch it. They are older and basically said they never retrained for high-efficiency units. It was never needed because they have more work then they can handle with older units. All they were able to offer was to give me a good deal on replacing it with a less efficient unit if I wanted.
At the end of the day my issue was never fixed. Luckily we haven't had as cold of weather as that week, so the issue hasn't manifested again. If it happens again I honestly will cross my fingers and hope the next company that I use is more helpful then the previous.
If you Google your furnace model you may find you tube videos with similar issues or things to check.
+1 on the rapid change of filters, much better to change a filter frequently even if it is a bit lower performance than to let one sit for too long, but keep an eye on your electricity cost, that is the factor that should decide the quality filter that you purchase and frequently you replace it.
Ground rule: the better the filter, the more it will absorb, the better the chances that something you really don't want lodges there and starts spreading if the filter gets overloaded. Fiberglass filters are a good compromise between energy efficiency and cost, they have excellent working surface compared to their physical size and tend to have a relatively long working life before they 'join the other side' and become a source of contaminants rather than a filter of contaminants.
I live in a highrise in SF and this bit me during the wildfires this year. The air conditioning would pull in smoke from outside. I ended up turning it off altogether on the worst AQI days, and buying lots of replacement filters for both the furnace and some off-the-shelf air purifiers.
That's it.
Somewhere there is a reservoir and something to heat the water. It can be anything, and indeed most older homes have been converted a few times already but nothing changed in the water system itsef. (For a house to have started with a wood furnace, then oil, then electric, then municipial heating or solar or whatever, is completely normal.)
The water either circulates by convection (very old systems), or with a pump. If the pump fails, convection typically still works, just less flow.
But even chilled water systems start to get complicated because of humidity and condensation.
And if you're already installing a forced air HVAC system for the 'AC' part, then installing radiators for heat is usually superfluous.
> I started putting HEPA air filters all over my house
Can you very briefly say how you accomplished this? Was it with modified box fans? Thank you!
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-air-purifier...
One of the main problems is that homes are not built for indoor air quality. Furnaces in crawl spaces or garages, lack of air sealing. You can't just add sensors and fans to fix the problem.
Plus, adding a fan/vent to a home isn't ever going to be cheap. You're talking about cutting the interior and exterior of your house, running ducting and wiring up electrical.
I have an anecdote about the Awair. The air at one of my previous workplace was making me sick, so I asked the management to look at the air quality. They hired a professional who saw nothing - because they asked for the AC to be turned off during the monitoring.
I got an Awair and managed to track when the air quality dropped. It was whenever the AC came on. They then called another professional who finally caught it -- turns out the building's ventilation ducts had not been cleaned in 5 years AND there was water damage.
Without a customer grade air quality tracker, I would have simply believed the first professional. I would have had to either suffer being sick daily at work or having to quit for air quality reason.
Now I carry mine around to my friends and family's house and let them borrow it for a while. It always come up with explanations about issues people had been quietly enduring forever.
If you want to use one suche device on the go, at friends places, etc., I'd recommend the Atmotube Plus or Atmotube Pro by Atmotube (depending on your needs).
My purchase was a few years ago now. I've heard that the market is bigger now, so you may want to shop around. I also have the big Dyson purifier at home which comes with built-in sensors.
A combination of sensors and actuators to fix the air problem, yes. But where does the internet come into play here? Seems like something 100% local to me.
Except if you want to view the data remotely, but that's a side feature, not a main requirement for this to work.
My preference would be to self-host that model and the associated controls. I suspect this would require some meaningful compute capability in-house.
However, I suspect that the problem would benefit from cloud-scale compute. It's a fluid dynamics problem, which is just a lot of numbers to crunch. This might require more horsepower than a little ARM device can reasonably push out.
IOT is a signal for "large disposable income", so HEPA/health anything associated with IoT will bump up the price tag considerably.
Why would anyone deliver anything good when people already willingly paying for crap?
LOTS AND LOTS OF PLANTS
One of the best filters out there is a spikey plant that you wouldnt think of as "pretty" but it is super helpful
https://leafyplace.com/air-filtering-house-plants/
While is #10 on this list, its still SUPER good at filtering... I Personally like LOTS of Pothos and Spider plants....
> To reduce VOCs enough to impact air quality would require around 10 plants per square foot. In a small 500-square foot apartment, that’s 5,000 plants.[0]
Potted plants do not improve indoor air quality: a review and analysis of reported VOC removal efficiencies[1]
[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/11/houseplan...
I just like plants in general... vertical walls in specific though I have yet to build my own (built the ones with architects in Salesforce office around the country)
but now I am craving more plants!! (and moss) ((and fungi)) (((planning on composting all these leaves with seeded fungi spores, just need to find the spores)))
They are pretty though and if you have the time and the room for them they definitely are worth having but $ for $ if your goal is clean air technology is far more efficient.
Second, I wasn't giving "advice" per se
I just think that the world is a better place with more plants ( I was just commenting about Singapore's setbacks with respect to how green a super dense city can be )
but What I am stating is that no house is complete without a healthy level of plants... (its the same as that adage; don't ever listen to a person who doesnt have any books in their home)
So dont like a home where there are no plants!
EDIT: Oh I forgot to mention, the ancient Mayan Saying "Humanity will die once the last tree is cut down"
It seems like this is an area where IoT should really deliver the goods. I should be able to cheaply add networked sensors, fans, filters, and vents to my home to automatically monitor air quality and temperature, then take appropriate action. Sadly, we're basically stuck with smart thermostats that spy on you and deliver little benefit over a local solution.
I had a lot of hope for IoT air conditioning vents, but those products never seemed to materialize. Indoor air quality monitors are expensive and inaccurate. Nobody is offering me a real-time fluid dynamics model of the heat and pollutant situation in my home, let alone responding to it appropriately.
Amazing how hard it is to create reliable, computable models of the world...