What's the big deal about an induction stove with a battery built in? That's a new product that's set to hit the market next year. I talk about it with one of the entrepreneurs behind it and a scientist at the Department of Energy who helped secur it funding.
Excellent use case, most importantly the ability to plug into std., existing 120V. Adds a YUGE market segment, and this seems like something that could see price decreases with scaling. I was lucky to find a 240V outlet alongside the gas behind my stove so we were able to switch easily to a domestic brand low end induction. Yep it buzzes, but the internal fan noise is often worse than the 60Hz hum. Life in America. In any case, the fam thinks those noises are offset by all the other advantages.
BUT, I've worried about electric stoves and evening peak demand, since that's when you cook, and you can't put it off like BEV charging. This solves that too! The other utility in town offers a simple residential TOU rate that would penalize normal dinner cooking:
4-9 PM $0.24/kWh all days. With the 4 kWh battery, 99% of the time, you'll be able to cook dinner and never draw during that period.
All other hours: $0.06/kWh
I'd definitely plug the 'fridge in to it also.
Nice work folks!!!! Good interview. Good having the two of them. Renewed my faith in California innovation and DOE management.
A single-burner item with battery augmentation would be pretty cool. 0.5-1kWh on top of the existing 1500W burner would make them a much more compelling portable cooking device.
(And somewhere this is going to have to address the separate cooktop/oven issue, for houses where that's the design or what needs to be replaced. Separate batteries for each?)
..and purchased the "system" you see there, which totalled less than $1000 US. It's modular: we can lose at most $600 from the most-expensive bit, the little oven, dying.
It's the whole idea of a single device, particularly controlled by one circuit board that is now the most-likely point of failure, for all cooking, that needs to die. Oven and stove in one box is an artifact of woodstoves leveraging one fire!
I can purchase one more module, for about another $1000 US, that is a "battery generator" - and have a couple or three kWh of power that I can plug that (or anything else) into. By that point, I've duplicated everything except this device putting out more than 6kW of power, for which the need escapes me.
Can't wait, but I guess have to. I am in NYC and on the wait list. Here in NYC, Local Law 152 requires inspection of common area gas lines. Buildings in NYC that fail the gas inspection will have gas shut down and have to pay for re-plumbing of gas lines, which may be more of than the cost of these induction/electric/battery stoves. We need them in quantity. Soon. Someone sent me an email ink and I've been following Channing Street Copper. Thanks for this podcast David.
Love this and looking forward to the stove becoming available in Los Angeles area. Very excited about distributed battery appliances and they can't get here fast enough.
our 1980s era breaker box got maxed out by an EV breaker and a breaker for the solar tie in. We could probably fit one or maybe two more 30amp breakers on our current electrical service if we just put in a newer larger breaker box (that also had capacity for future 200 amp electrical service) but the prospect of getting the utility out to drop us new upgraded service is frankly more than a little galling. and now that CA has declared war on home solar, I'm scared if I even contacted the utility to upgrade my electric service some evil NEM 3.0 loophole those assholes wrote will remove the grandfathering we currently have on our solar and instantly wipe out all of our solar's financial benefits.
So with upgraded electric service unlikely, and an upgraded panel of our current electric service unlikely to yield much capacity for more circuits and a home battery limited to supporting a handful of circuits rather than the whole electric service, we were kind of completely at a dead end with electrifying even one more thing in our house. We could MAYBE do one appliance, but our initial plans of electrifying everything had died.
Appliances with batteries built in means we can electrify our stove, it means we can electrify our water heater, it means we can electrify our dryer. All those electrification steps are out of reach to us currently but now they seem like achievable goals again.
We Can't wait for these to become a reality, just a shame there's not a battery water heater already available, our house's gas water heater is 19 years old and seemingly going strong but like any old appliance, its a ticking time bomb and we will probably be forced to replace it with gas, just like we were forced to replace our clothes dryer with another gas one.
Ok, I'm almost terrified to ask what may be seen as absurdly dumb, but would it be a super-efficient and high-temp home oven if we made it an induction oven to go with the induction rangetop?
That is, could someone making an induction range top make the oven box so that it has fixed rectangular conductive panels (top, sides, bottom, and back) with a door in the front so that you dial in the desired temp and the volts heat the conductive panels which heat the interior space . . .
And ideally, you can use the bottom panel like a pizza steel -- since it's more efficient than resistance heating, we could get higher home oven temps for the same power draw (or save power whenever cooking at more normal temperatures).
Could this be a thing that the people creating oven/battery combinations could offer?
Interesting parallel case in power tools. I was listening to a Finehomebuilding podcast and a battery engineer had written in. According to him you can now put together a battery configuration for a portable saw that will get you more power than a standard 120v 15amp plug. Which means from the contractors perspective it’s better. Being able to plug it in helps recharge between cuts, but you don’t blow out your customers breaker every 20
Also, with a big battery able to drive the oven in parallel with house current, you should be able to get to at least 600F if not 700F so we can make good Neapolitan pizza without a separate device!
So this is great stuff, but you left me unclear — are you saying that Channing St. is NOT going to offer an “ESE” (phon: “easy”) stove that takes advantage of the huge installed base of 240v electric ovens out there? I totally get why 110v use is awesome for those without 240 v to an older oven, but it would be absurd not to offer this to those folks who want to get rid of their old electric range and replace it with an ESE option that uses the existing 240v circuit
So many benefits of these stoves, but I'm a little hung-up on whether many small batteries around the house is less carbon intensive than a couple of large batteries in the garage. Just like a large gas-turbine power plant can use gas more efficiently than I can in my house, aren't large batteries more efficient than many small ones?
Anything that can help renters put a good 120v 15amp induction cooktop, that's beyond a single small burner, on their gas stove would be a game changer
On the idea of what else to add to the induction+battery cooktop, could have a built-in Instapot type pressure cooker and a built in air fryer/convection oven. Both things I'm currently using to avoid using the gas range in my rented apt and that take up a lot of counter space, and have big short term electricity draws...
Loved this episode (and just replaced my gas with an induction- also fortunate to have a 220 from previous electrical stove)-
While you spoke about other appliances- I don't think you
brought up air-source heat pumps--
Are the demands so large that this doesn't make sense for heat/ac through the heat pump?
I get the peak shaving- and also the demand shifting- but the biggest thing that had me sold on using this for something like a heat pump was the minimization of electrical and panel infrastructure. Is it that a 110 or a single 220 couldn't "keep up" filling the battery with the large potential draw-downs for winter mornings and summer afternoons ?
I am somewhat skeptical of the idea of putting a giant battery in close proximity to hot cooking grease. My family had a pretty significant house fire at one point, when a pan of oil got jostled -- we were attempting to fry mozzarella sticks. The burner lit the spilled oil, which then managed to spatter to the wall and ignite that. The firefighters said if they had been maybe 60 seconds later than they were, the fire would've gotten _inside_ the walls, and the whole house would've gone up. If there had been a substantial battery inside the stove, it very likely would've gone into thermal runaway and taken the whole house with it. (Sure, LiFeP is harder to kick into runaway than other chemistries, but dumping a quart of flaming oil on it seems like a pretty good way to get there.)
I own a PowerWall system (two pods, considering adding a third because we're electrifying more stuff in the house and building an ADU), and I was actually involved in rolling out that product... I definitely am more comfortable having a battery that size in my garage or on an exterior wall, than having it in my kitchen.
(And yes, I do understand the benefits of being able to run it off a 120V circuit rather than 240V.)
Induction stoves with batteries built in, and why they matter
Excellent use case, most importantly the ability to plug into std., existing 120V. Adds a YUGE market segment, and this seems like something that could see price decreases with scaling. I was lucky to find a 240V outlet alongside the gas behind my stove so we were able to switch easily to a domestic brand low end induction. Yep it buzzes, but the internal fan noise is often worse than the 60Hz hum. Life in America. In any case, the fam thinks those noises are offset by all the other advantages.
BUT, I've worried about electric stoves and evening peak demand, since that's when you cook, and you can't put it off like BEV charging. This solves that too! The other utility in town offers a simple residential TOU rate that would penalize normal dinner cooking:
4-9 PM $0.24/kWh all days. With the 4 kWh battery, 99% of the time, you'll be able to cook dinner and never draw during that period.
All other hours: $0.06/kWh
I'd definitely plug the 'fridge in to it also.
Nice work folks!!!! Good interview. Good having the two of them. Renewed my faith in California innovation and DOE management.
A single-burner item with battery augmentation would be pretty cool. 0.5-1kWh on top of the existing 1500W burner would make them a much more compelling portable cooking device.
(And somewhere this is going to have to address the separate cooktop/oven issue, for houses where that's the design or what needs to be replaced. Separate batteries for each?)
Sorry, but the $6000 US price makes it a hipster-kitchen conspicuous consumption joke.
I was infuriated that a $2000 (Cdn) range lasted only a few years, because a chip blew.
http://brander.ca/dora/20201027.html
..and purchased the "system" you see there, which totalled less than $1000 US. It's modular: we can lose at most $600 from the most-expensive bit, the little oven, dying.
It's the whole idea of a single device, particularly controlled by one circuit board that is now the most-likely point of failure, for all cooking, that needs to die. Oven and stove in one box is an artifact of woodstoves leveraging one fire!
I can purchase one more module, for about another $1000 US, that is a "battery generator" - and have a couple or three kWh of power that I can plug that (or anything else) into. By that point, I've duplicated everything except this device putting out more than 6kW of power, for which the need escapes me.
Can't wait, but I guess have to. I am in NYC and on the wait list. Here in NYC, Local Law 152 requires inspection of common area gas lines. Buildings in NYC that fail the gas inspection will have gas shut down and have to pay for re-plumbing of gas lines, which may be more of than the cost of these induction/electric/battery stoves. We need them in quantity. Soon. Someone sent me an email ink and I've been following Channing Street Copper. Thanks for this podcast David.
Love this and looking forward to the stove becoming available in Los Angeles area. Very excited about distributed battery appliances and they can't get here fast enough.
our 1980s era breaker box got maxed out by an EV breaker and a breaker for the solar tie in. We could probably fit one or maybe two more 30amp breakers on our current electrical service if we just put in a newer larger breaker box (that also had capacity for future 200 amp electrical service) but the prospect of getting the utility out to drop us new upgraded service is frankly more than a little galling. and now that CA has declared war on home solar, I'm scared if I even contacted the utility to upgrade my electric service some evil NEM 3.0 loophole those assholes wrote will remove the grandfathering we currently have on our solar and instantly wipe out all of our solar's financial benefits.
So with upgraded electric service unlikely, and an upgraded panel of our current electric service unlikely to yield much capacity for more circuits and a home battery limited to supporting a handful of circuits rather than the whole electric service, we were kind of completely at a dead end with electrifying even one more thing in our house. We could MAYBE do one appliance, but our initial plans of electrifying everything had died.
Appliances with batteries built in means we can electrify our stove, it means we can electrify our water heater, it means we can electrify our dryer. All those electrification steps are out of reach to us currently but now they seem like achievable goals again.
We Can't wait for these to become a reality, just a shame there's not a battery water heater already available, our house's gas water heater is 19 years old and seemingly going strong but like any old appliance, its a ticking time bomb and we will probably be forced to replace it with gas, just like we were forced to replace our clothes dryer with another gas one.
Ok, I'm almost terrified to ask what may be seen as absurdly dumb, but would it be a super-efficient and high-temp home oven if we made it an induction oven to go with the induction rangetop?
That is, could someone making an induction range top make the oven box so that it has fixed rectangular conductive panels (top, sides, bottom, and back) with a door in the front so that you dial in the desired temp and the volts heat the conductive panels which heat the interior space . . .
And ideally, you can use the bottom panel like a pizza steel -- since it's more efficient than resistance heating, we could get higher home oven temps for the same power draw (or save power whenever cooking at more normal temperatures).
Could this be a thing that the people creating oven/battery combinations could offer?
Interesting parallel case in power tools. I was listening to a Finehomebuilding podcast and a battery engineer had written in. According to him you can now put together a battery configuration for a portable saw that will get you more power than a standard 120v 15amp plug. Which means from the contractors perspective it’s better. Being able to plug it in helps recharge between cuts, but you don’t blow out your customers breaker every 20
minutes.
Thank you again, David, for another fascinating and hopeful interview!!
Also, with a big battery able to drive the oven in parallel with house current, you should be able to get to at least 600F if not 700F so we can make good Neapolitan pizza without a separate device!
So this is great stuff, but you left me unclear — are you saying that Channing St. is NOT going to offer an “ESE” (phon: “easy”) stove that takes advantage of the huge installed base of 240v electric ovens out there? I totally get why 110v use is awesome for those without 240 v to an older oven, but it would be absurd not to offer this to those folks who want to get rid of their old electric range and replace it with an ESE option that uses the existing 240v circuit
Hey David, Random question from the episode, I believe you mentioned that “where I live, the grid source is a coal mix”.
Did I mishear or do I misunderstand that Seattle uses primarily hydro power, or did you just move elsewhere?
Thanks for the great episode!
Loved this episode — great job, David!
So many benefits of these stoves, but I'm a little hung-up on whether many small batteries around the house is less carbon intensive than a couple of large batteries in the garage. Just like a large gas-turbine power plant can use gas more efficiently than I can in my house, aren't large batteries more efficient than many small ones?
Anything that can help renters put a good 120v 15amp induction cooktop, that's beyond a single small burner, on their gas stove would be a game changer
On the idea of what else to add to the induction+battery cooktop, could have a built-in Instapot type pressure cooker and a built in air fryer/convection oven. Both things I'm currently using to avoid using the gas range in my rented apt and that take up a lot of counter space, and have big short term electricity draws...
Loved this episode (and just replaced my gas with an induction- also fortunate to have a 220 from previous electrical stove)-
While you spoke about other appliances- I don't think you
brought up air-source heat pumps--
Are the demands so large that this doesn't make sense for heat/ac through the heat pump?
I get the peak shaving- and also the demand shifting- but the biggest thing that had me sold on using this for something like a heat pump was the minimization of electrical and panel infrastructure. Is it that a 110 or a single 220 couldn't "keep up" filling the battery with the large potential draw-downs for winter mornings and summer afternoons ?
I am somewhat skeptical of the idea of putting a giant battery in close proximity to hot cooking grease. My family had a pretty significant house fire at one point, when a pan of oil got jostled -- we were attempting to fry mozzarella sticks. The burner lit the spilled oil, which then managed to spatter to the wall and ignite that. The firefighters said if they had been maybe 60 seconds later than they were, the fire would've gotten _inside_ the walls, and the whole house would've gone up. If there had been a substantial battery inside the stove, it very likely would've gone into thermal runaway and taken the whole house with it. (Sure, LiFeP is harder to kick into runaway than other chemistries, but dumping a quart of flaming oil on it seems like a pretty good way to get there.)
I own a PowerWall system (two pods, considering adding a third because we're electrifying more stuff in the house and building an ADU), and I was actually involved in rolling out that product... I definitely am more comfortable having a battery that size in my garage or on an exterior wall, than having it in my kitchen.
(And yes, I do understand the benefits of being able to run it off a 120V circuit rather than 240V.)