We thought the Vermicular would satisfy for some years our appetite for electrifying our cooking, but last November we decided to get an induction range after all. Partly this was because we read a bunch of newer articles about the indoor air quality hazards of gas ranges. Partly it was because our Viking’s igniters started going a bit wonky— nothing catastrophic, but annoyingly balky burner lighting and slow oven preheating. Totally fixable, but Viking parts and service are hideously expensive, and we didn’t want to put more money into a fossil-fuel-powered appliance.
Three months and many snafus later, we have a brand-new induction range and a bunch of hard-earned lessons. Let’s talk about some of those lessons.
Panel upgrades are too hard
Our electrical panel, with a pretty common 150 amp main breaker, already looked pretty full with high-current breakers for the hot tub, heat pump, EV charger, and Powerwall. So our first thought was to upgrade it to 200 amps, and we discussed this option with our go-to electrician1. I had occasion to talk to the electrician anyway in December because the lights in my office were flickering, and it turned out that a breaker had been damaged by badly-dissipated heat from existing high-current loads a different electrician had carelessly placed next to each other during one of the earlier upgrades. He confirmed that our panel was full, and told me about the difficulty and uncertainty of panel upgrades: a byzantine application form, 6+ month waits for PG&E to even respond, high upgrade fees, and then typically a two-day upgrade process during which the house has no power.
Ugh. That sounded like a ton of trouble just to change out a stove. It turned out we could avoid that trouble with a workaround, but we shouldn’t have had to. If the state of California wants to have any chance of hitting its 2050 decarbonization goals, it needs to force PG&E to provide better panel upgrade service to the large percentage of buildings that will still be around in 2050. When we bought the house in 2013, it had just one high-current load— the hot tub— so 150 amps was plenty. To completely and easily electrify, we ought to be able to support as many as seven: hot tub, heat pump, EV charger, backup battery, stove, water heater, dryer. That shouldn’t be unusual and it shouldn’t be a logistical nightmare to make it happen.
Load shedding FTW
The workaround we used is based on the very sensible principle of load shedding and prioritization. That is, if you have too high a total current draw, pick some things you don’t really need to have reliably powered on at that time, and shut off the power to those things for awhile. That way you can add new high current loads and still be assured that the total house load will never go over the panel limit.
In principle, you could imagine a smart panel prioritization system that knows exactly where all the power draws are coming from and does a complex dance to keep the load under the limit. In practice, the simple hack is to identify a non-essential high-current load and put it behind a clever device which shuts it off if the total house current draw gets too high, so that it no longer “counts” toward your panel limit. In our case, the EV charger was the perfect non-essential load, and removing it from the panel calculation freed up just the amount of current we needed for the stove.
I asked if we could do the same thing with the hot tub to free up even more space for the future, and the electrician said he didn’t know; the product was marketed as serving a single EV charger load and it wasn’t clear how it would handle multiple loads. Maybe you’d need multiple shedding devices, or maybe all the low-priority stuff would go in a subpanel that the one shedding device would cut off. It wasn’t necessary to push that frontier to get our induction stove in, so I opted not to.
Electrical work is super expensive
Even with that clever workaround, it still took a team of three electricians a day and a half of work to put the EV charger behind the load shedding device; put in the conduit to the new outlet for the stove; and rearrange the breakers in the panel to avoid future heat damage. They only had to turn off the power for about two hours during that time— much better than two days!— but between all the labor and the fancy newfangled load shedding device and the more ordinary materials, it ended up costing thousands of dollars more than expected, almost as much as the new range itself. The electrician assured us, and I trust him, that it was still much cheaper than a panel upgrade.
There really is an urgent need, and a business opportunity, for cost- and time-saving innovations here. Appliances that can plug into regular 120V 15A power (like battery-backed ranges) and easier, cheaper panel retrofitting technology both seem like promising areas for further development. If I’d known in advance what our total bill in time and trouble as well as dollars would have been, we might well still have the gas range. And we’re the ideal home improvement customers in terms of financial cushion and control over our time; most people are much more constrained on both axes and will have less tolerance for these kinds of difficulties.
The devil is in the connection details
Kitchen ranges, whether electric or gas, don’t get connected and disconnected often. The downside of this is that they tend to use finicky, difficult-to-change connection mechanisms. Being clear about exactly how these work can save you time and headache when changing ranges.
In our case, we had to disconnect the gas pipe from the old Viking range, cap it off, put in the new 50A 240V outlet for the induction range, then plug that in. The difficulties started when the appliance people came to inspect the existing setup and found that the gas was “hard piped” to the Viking range. It didn’t even appear to include a shutoff valve specific to the range, which is supposed to be required by current code. They advised us that we should shut off the gas to the whole house for the disconnection and haulaway, then have the plumber come in to cap off the pipe the same day so we could have hot water again. Fair enough.
The haulaway crew arrived on the appointed day, I turned the gas off at the meter, they pulled out the Viking range— and found they couldn’t even disconnect the piping from the range in the first place. There was a shutoff valve after all back there, but it was no help with the disconnection. And actually, they told me, I was supposed to have gotten the plumber to do the disconnect for them first. Which they had not made clear at the site visit. Argh.
I called the plumber and asked him to come out early while the haulaway people went off to their next scheduled job. He arrived around noon, shimmied acrobatically over the kitchen counter to wedge in behind the range, disconnected the gas pipe and capped off the pipe stub on the floor. Luckily the haulaway people were able to come back later in the afternoon and take the now-freed range, leaving a range-shaped hole in our cabinets with 22 years of crumbs on the floor.
The electrician came in to put the outlet in the next day. They asked whether I had a preferred orientation of the new outlet, i.e. which way the prongs should point. I looked in the specs the appliance people had given me and found a spec for what kind of plug it should have, but not which way it should face. At this point I should have called them for a clarification, but I didn’t realize it would be a big deal, power cords are reasonably bendy, right? So I shrugged, and they oriented the outlet with the ground on top and the three other prongs below.
The appliance delivery crew arrived the next morning with the new induction range— and found that they couldn’t install it because the power cord won’t fit properly with the outlet oriented that way. I didn’t realize what a huge, non-bendy cord you need for this 50A outlet, but in retrospect it makes sense: that’s about as much current as the EV charger, so the cable it flows through is about as big and heavily insulated. And the delivery folks couldn’t reorient the outlet themselves; they knew it’s a simple job but they weren’t allowed to touch it, probably for liability reasons.
I called the electrician to see if he could come fix it right away, but he had another job to finish beforehand. The delivery crew had to go to their next job, and initially thought they couldn’t get us rescheduled until Tuesday. Frustrated at yet another complication and unhappy at the prospect of five unexpected days with no stove, I called the appliance store logistics manager and pointed out that it was their fault for not putting the proper orientation of the outlet in the spec. He managed to get it rescheduled for the next day. The electrician came back in the afternoon and spent literally two minutes turning the plug 90 degrees counterclockwise, and we commiserated about how the world was overfull of bureaucrats and lawyers.
After that the installation went fine. But boy, would I have saved a lot of angst and time (mine and everyone else’s) if I’d known more about those connections.
Where do we go from here?
The new induction range is a lovely shiny toy that makes our kitchen look sleek and modern, and doesn’t buzz and whine like the cheap standalone induction burners. I love it. Our remaining gas appliances, the water heater and dryer, are out of sight, out of mind, and unlikely to break anytime soon given reasonable maintenance. But they use a lot more fossil gas than the stove ever did, especially the water heater.
There now exist 120V 15A water heaters that you can just plug into a normal outlet, notably the Rheem ProTerra. I worry that these won’t have enough heating power to consistently keep the water in the tank hot, and also just generally that they’re a first-generation product and first-generation products tend to be buggy. But as more of these come on the market and people get more real world experience with them, I’ll get more interested. I bet we’ll be looking at installing one in a few years.
There are 120V 15A heat pump dryers on the market too, but as far as I can tell they are the small European kind, not the big burly “dry all your towels in under an hour” American kind. We may keep the gas dryer till the bitter end, or we may use this as an excuse to try expanding the scope of the load shedder, or even bite the bullet on the panel upgrade.
Lights Out, who I recommend highly to San Francisco readers.