September 14, 2021 – Appliances, Home Owners
So many people fancy themselves home chefs these days. With cooking competition shows on TV, convenient food and recipe subscription boxes, and #mealinspo on social media, more and more of us are heading into the kitchen to whip up something awesome. But of course, we want to do it as inexpensively as possible.
If you want to get even closer to that chef lifestyle without breaking the bank, you’re going to want to cook using a propane stove.
Propane stoves are significantly less expensive than electrical stoves, both upfront and over time. Since there’s a wide range of models for both, the cost upfront comes down to personal preference – but the cost over time is where propane can give you significant savings.
It’s possible that the least expensive stove you can find happens to be electric, and that’s understandably attractive, but when you think about long-term use, you won’t be saving money.
Propane stoves generate heat at a cost that’s 10 – 30% less than their electrical counterparts, which means your monthly energy costs will be significantly lower, depending on how much you cook. Propane stoves also don’t have to be serviced as often as electric, which means you’ll have fewer “Surprise!” fix expenses with a handyman.
Why is it so much less expensive?
Because propane heat is far more efficient than electric heat. Propane is energy-dense and has a significantly higher output than electricity, which means it takes less of it to do the same job. Propane also heats up much more quickly, which means it does its job more quickly and cuts down on the amount of time you’re using your stove at all.
In addition to its effect on cost efficiency, propane’s ability to quickly heat up a stove – and quickly cool it down – is one of the reasons it’s preferred by most professional chefs!
The way propane works to heat your stove is simple. Propane is moved from your main supply into your house, where it’s carried to the burner and then combines with warm air inside a tube. As that mixture of gas and heated air is released through the small holes in your stove’s burner, it combines with more air.
Then, at your control, the ignition system lights this mixture and creates the blue flame that you can control with your stove’s knobs. When the flame is higher, it creates a hotter cooking surface, and when it’s lower, the temperature drops.
The precise control of a propane appliance means that you can go from searing something in a pan with high heat to letting it cool down very quickly, more so than with electricity. This is because electricity is heating up a metal coil that needs the chance to cool down once you’ve turned it off, as opposed to heat just disappearing as the flame does when your stove is propane powered.
To get started on cooking with propane, you’ll need to make sure you have a propane-compatible stove, and then extend your propane supply to it. If you already rely on propane for your home heating system, then this is as simple as having a Paraco specialist run a new line to your stove.
Other propane home appliances share the same advantages as propane stoves. Aside from the lower cost, which factors in across the board, from clothing dryers to space heaters and generators, propane is a designated green fuel that reduces overall carbon emissions compared to electricity.
When factoring in extraction, production, processing, and transportation, propane is 87% efficient vs. electricity’s 32% efficiency, which is why more and more environmentally-conscious families are choosing propane whenever possible.
If you’re not using propane to heat your home yet, you still have options! Contact Paraco to find out about customized propane systems to make your kitchen setup perfect.
We can’t all be Gordon Ramsey (or even the poor people that he’s yelling at), but with propane heat, we can come a little closer to cooking like him – and save money while doing it.