Submitted 6 months ago by ramble81@lemmy.zip to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Toasters, kettles, stoves, ovens…
It’s too bad that there’s no way to recapture the waste heat from an oven/range in the summertime. Like to heat our water when the bread has finished cooking. Maybe future homes could run a recirculating water pipe behind the oven you could switch on and off?
You’re reusing the heat to warm the house normally. Obv, you don’t always want that, so you may opt to limit using the oven in summer for example, as it is the one which runs the longest.
what you’re describing is an oven with a heat pump. industrial-grade ovens like this exist, but they don’t really exist in the home appliance market as the amount of energy recaptured at that scale would be negligable. it’s easiere (and cheaper) to make ovens more energy efficient in other ways.
there are a number of other home appliances (washers, dryers, and dishwashers), however, which use inverter heat pumps to recapture/recycle heat, thus increasing energy efficiency by quite a lot.
Not as fancy as heat pumps but our kettle boils one cup at a time and the boiling chamber is under the water tank. Some of the wasted energy goes to warm up the water in the tank meaning less energy is needed for the next cup. It’s probably not that efficient but it’s better than nothing.
I like your idea, but I think a tankless water heater would save more energy, and in that case you don’t need hot water just sitting around.
I don’t want to have to possibly call a plumber and electrician to fix my oven though.
Refrigerators use electricity to move heat from inside the box to outside the box.
Electric to heat has really good energy conversion efficiency.
Just heard the quote, ‘Toasters weren’t invented to make toast, they were invented to sell electricity.’
That’s silly, they really don’t use much power in the grand scheme of things. It uses a lot of power for a very short period, a small blip. Big power consumption comes from things that run often or all the time. It compounds.
Where I live everything is electric for the vast majority of people. The norm here is to have electric stoves and electric water heaters. Even heating houses is mainly done through electricity.
I was so surprised to learn as a teen that this is not the norm everywhere, and that some people are actually still lighting fires in their houses to cook food.
A gas hob is so much better than an electric hob.
You should try induction cooking.
Sure. It’s always “better” to burn stuff to generate more pollution in the air that you breathe, and also continue to depend on fossil fuel.
www.cbc.ca/…/gas-stoves-air-pollution-1.6394514
And “better” depends on your sources of energy and what your goals are. Like most people here, I grew up with an electric stove and we are just used to cook this way. It’s just an adaptation. I use gas stoves in camping and in my cabin, and I’m so used to an electric one, that I hate using gas.
Electricity here is cheap and clean so if you want to eat hot and warm food and minimize the impact on the environment, and your bank account, you should probably get used to cooking with electricity. There’s also different technologies. My mother prefers a glass-ceramic stove but induction stoves are also getting pretty popular. Or you can pay more, pollute more, continue to breathe the results of combustion and keep buying fossil fuel to cook “better”. I consider less pollution for millions of people, and less reliance on the oil & gas industry to be “better”.
I concluded a while back that if you make some sort of miracle that handles both heating stuff and water stuff you can replace a ridiculous amount of appliances. Everything from a stove to a car wash.
“Heating and water stuff” — that’s basically every form of power in the world safe solar and hydro. they all generally rely on creating steam to move a turbine, even nuclear.
Like an automotive carpet shampooer?
That too
And that most of these appliances are pretty much irrelevant in the modern world, just staying around because people think they need them. A convection oven with an induction stove on top replaces microwave, kettle, toaster etc.
Wait till OP finds out that most of cooking is putting heat into food.
If you really think about it. All any appliance does is turn energy into heat.
Why stop at appliances? By that logic, humans are nothing more than self-propelled heaters.
I read somewhere that when engineers are designing home heating/ cooling systems, they factor in the number of humans in a home as 100 watts each. I think dogs are 50 watts.
There was a paper floating around about a decade ago. Basically it was asserting that biological life is the natural outcome of entropy itself. Bc living beings are especially good at increasing entropy over time. Not sure if it was credible but a fun idea nontheless
False. My water filter pitcher does not turn energy into heat.
(Ok, fine, it uses gravity to move the water through a filter, which technically converts some of the potential energy of the water into heat through friction, but that’s not something the pitcher does, that’s something the earth does that the pitcher uses to its advantage.)
Saying that all appliances turn energy to heat is true, but saying that all appliances do is turn energy in to heat is not. While heat is still a byproduct, lots of appliances make things move as well.
And what is that movent? Eventually decays into heat.
For heat pumps, the thing they’re moving is heat.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 6 months ago
And in the summer, we look at all that and say “no thanks, I’m going to go outside and use good old fashioned fire.”