Appliances like your refrigerator, stove/oven, dishwasher, microwave, and clothes washer and dryer comprise about 15% of home energy use. Look for Energy Star-rated models to reduce your energy use on these appliances – but if your primary concern is cost savings, keep in mind that extra features can sometimes drive up the cost of efficient models.
To further reduce your carbon impact and air pollution inside your home, consider switching from gas appliances to efficient electric options for cooking and clothes drying.
Clothes Dryers
Replacing an existing gas or propane dryer with another of the same kind is usually the simplest and least expensive option. However, if you are interested in eliminating fossil fuel use in your home, you may want to consider an electric or electric heat pump model.
Electric clothes dryers use electric resistance technology to dry clothes. They generate heat through electric resistance and expel hot air through an exhaust vent.
Electric clothes dryers are less expensive to purchase than an air source heat pump dryer and dry clothes more quickly but are less energy efficient than heat pump alternatives.
Heat pump clothes dryers use electricity to remove moisture from your clothes. Instead of generating heat via a gas burner or with electric coils, the heat pump technology moves heat from one area to another. Like other heat pump technology, it moves heat from the surrounding area into the dryer.
Unlike gas and electric resistance clothes dryers, heat pump dryers do not need an exhaust vent. Instead, heat pump dryers circulate warm air within the dryer itself. Since a heat pump dryer does not need an exhaust vent nor a gas hookup, there is greater flexibility in its placement in your home. However, the water they extract from clothes must be drained, either via a hose connected to your home’s plumbing or by manually emptying a water tank every cycle or two.
Heat pump dryers tend to utilize longer drying cycles, though longer cycles will ultimately be gentler on your clothes.
Cooking
Many homes have natural gas or propane stoves. You can adjust the temperature more quickly on a gas then a conventional electric stove (though not more quickly than induction). The decision of what kind of stove to use in your kitchen will come down to your own priorities and how much weight you put on things like the ease of cooking and responsiveness of your cooktop, your cooking style, indoor air quality, and budget.
Conventional electric stoves use heat-producing elements to generate heat through coils and/or through a glass surface. Electric stoves do not cook as quickly as induction stoves, and the cooking surface gets very hot. However, they are compatible with all cookware materials and generally less expensive than induction options, so an electric range can be a great option.
Induction is an efficient way to cook food quickly without the indoor air pollution that comes with a gas appliance. Induction stovetops are electric options that use magnetism to send electric pulses into cookware, heating it directly without heating the surrounding surfaces. Induction stovetops heat up very quickly and allow rapid rises and drops in temperature. They put nearly all of their energy into heating the food (rather than the stovetop itself), so are considerably more efficient than traditional stoves. All of this makes induction stovetops an appealing alternative to the traditional gas stove.
Induction stoves are often confused with electric glass stovetops. One easy way to tell: if the glass surface of your cooktop gets hot or glows red, it’s not an induction stove.
Induction stoves only work with magnetic cookware. Pots and pans made of magnetic stainless steel, iron, or nickel will work. Glass, copper, aluminum, and ceramic pots and pans will not, and some steel pots and pans may have internal layers that prevent them from working on induction cooktops. Test if your cookware is compatible with an induction stove by placing a magnet on it – if the magnet sticks, the cookware will work.
If you’re a renter interested in using less fossil fuels in the home, consider a portable induction cooktop. They are relatively inexpensive to purchase, can be placed on a countertop, and can be taken with you when you move.
Individuals with pacemakers are advised to stay at least two feet away from inductions stoves while in use. The electromagnetic fields from the stove can interfere with the function of the pacemaker.
