Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: We are soon making the decision to bring or not bring gas to the community

[Jenny Guy (jenstermeister]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2020 at 10:24 AM Muriel Kranowski <murielk [at] vt.edu> wrote:

> Is there such a thing as an electric commercial stove? Our CH has a gas
> stove that runs on propane, as it was prohibitively expensive to have a gas
> line brought to our site 20 years ago, and it still works, but it must have
> a life span like all appliances...
>

I think the life span of a gas range is 100 years :-). I'm using a
Wedgewood from the 1950's and it cooked a perfect turkey on Thanksgiving.
Maybe they don't make them like they used to, tho.

Regarding switching away from gas, I think heating uses a lot more gas than
cooking. Any thoughts on the sustainability of pellet stoves, like are the
pellets just a waste product? I have a gas insert in my fireplace that is a
very good heater and allows me to just heat the space I'm in. It could
easily be replaced with a pellet insert. We rarely have power outages here,
so that's not an issue.

Our buildings were built in 1940. One apartment has had its gas wall heater
replaced with a mini-split heat pump, but we don't have room for those
little outdoor units for most of the apartments. I'm hoping they'll come
out with a ductless model that can go in the crawl space and vent to the
outside. If anyone knows of this, let me know!

Here's something else I wonder about: our buildings have been here for 80
years without air conditioning. The apartment with the heat pump now has
A/C, because heat pumps both heat and cool. So it's using cleaner fuel in
the winter, but it's running A/C in the summer when the other apartments
are using nothing. It seems like all the energy saving plans assume that
everyone will have A/C. When I was a kid, it was unthinkable that anyone
would have air conditioning in San Francisco, but now it's full of modern,
'energy efficient' sealed buildings that need A/C because the sun beats on
the non-operable windows, and they have brown-outs in the summer. I don't
get it, it seems like a blind spot in energy planning.

Jenny
Kingfisher Cohousing Oakland Calif.