Removing Natural Gas From My Home: a Zero Emission Home Electrification Case Study

San Francisco Bay Area resident Wei-Tai Kwok challenged himself in 2019 to see how hard it would really be to replace all his natural gas appliances with high-efficiency electric versions powered by 100% renewable energy. It turns out that it only took him 45 days to replace his gas cooktop with induction electric, gas furnace with heat-pump mini-splits, gas water heater with heat pump technology and gas fireplace with an electric log insert before disconnecting permanently from the gas grid. "It was much easier than I ever imagined, and the home is more comfortable, more energy efficient and better performing now." For more info, see his detailed blog, including pricing information and rebates. https://www.sustainablelafayette.org/... *** Transcript: My name is Wei-Tai Kwok. I'm the co-chair of the Climate Reality Bay Area Chapter. I personally think the challenge for society and the reasons why we're having wildfires and outages is because we're burning too many fossil fuels and causing climate change. We must absolutely within the next decade, by 2030 move completely off burning fossil fuels in our cars and in our homes, and in our work buildings. How are we going to do that if we don't start now in 2019, 2020. I sort of thought with going solar and electric car I had pretty much done my share, but a year ago I started to hear this word called building de-carbonization start to pop up. When I travel over in Asia, they have, you know, every room I go to has a mini split, all electric heating and cooling. And when I realized that, “Oh my goodness, they've actually been doing this in Asia for a decade.” They're doing it obviously because it's cost effective and easy. They're not doing it because it's hard. I thought, wow, we just have to bring that technology over here and do it in our own homes here in the United States. So we decided, my wife and I, we said, let's go get some bids and try to figure out how we're actually going to proceed with this project.We talked to a number of vendors, looked out on the web for various blogs and websites. And I ended up finding a contractor who focused on zero net energy homes and energy retrofits.Not even 20 minutes from where I live here in Lafayette. And they came over and did an energy audit of our home and energy assessment. And they were looking very holistically at our home to see how we could improve the performance of our home and what it was going to take, what would be the steps to get us to go all electric in our home. We had a gas furnace, a hot water heater, a gas fireplace and our gas cooktop. So this is [an induction cooktop] product here. We used to have an all gas cooktop here and we took it out and I actually bought this online, this Frigidaire model for about $1,600. It runs on 240 volts and it's sorta like my electric oven, it needs a dedicated line. So I actually had to pay the electrician to install a 240v and a dedicated circuit. And that was, you know, maybe $600-$700 more. So all-in this whole project probably cost me about $2,500 to retrofit, but I want to show you how this works and I'm going to turn on, you know, they sell mostly digital and touch adjustment, but we liked this one because it had knobs. And I'm going to turn this thing on high. And if you look closely, you can see, you heard it beep a little, it says PB means power boost. And it's this part of the range that's actually going to be heating up now.Interestingly, if I put my hand on it, I can leave it there and there's actually no heat coming out of it because an induction, electric cooktop uses magnet technology to cook. And since my hand is not responding to the magnet, it's not going to do anything, but I'm going to take this pan, which needs to be… The pans that work are pans with magnets. This is a magnet and [click] you can see there. Now the magnet just literally sticks onto my pan. So that means that when I put this on here, I don't want to put my hand on that because that's about to get hot. And I'm going to show you over here, I've prepared some cold water and we're going to just pour some water in here and see how it's going to get boiled. Right? And so what's happening here is that the magnets are creating, are reacting with the iron in this pan and making it, those ferrous things rub against each other and start to [get hot]. Actually the pan itself is what's being heated now. It's not the surface that's being heated. And what we're going to see here is - Kevin (OS): We see the steam rising already. Yeah. They say that the induction electric cooktops heat about 30 to 50% faster than a gas cooktop. Full transcript here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J...