Well, how much emissions does a 60" range cause when it's never used? Most people don't cook, but they still want giant kitchens with giant refrigerators and giant stoves.

As a foodie and a treehugger, I'm torn. I know about climate change, but I hate my crappy electric stove and want a gas stove, even though it causes more emissions. Of course, I don't have room for a 60" range. So at least I've got that going for me.

Best way to deal with this is to do so passive-aggressively. Many people I associate with are of the socio-economic levels which gravitate to this kind of thing. When visiting their houses, I'll fake being impressed by the Viking or the walk-in. Then I'll ask what kind of electricity or gas it uses. Then I'll ask if is Energystar rated. Then I'll ask if they really use it to the extent that it is made fore. Then I'll ask if they came across any smaller yet similar models in their search that were Energystar, since I would be interested in maybe getting one. You get the idea... make them feel superior, yet oddly inferior at the same time. I sometimes take it to the house level too...asking about insulation, passive solar design, sustainable construction materials. Yea, I get some visceral pleasure from this.
People in these circles live/die on how others perceive them. Work that to your advantage and watch them do exactly what you want them to.

Do they need a map to find the foie gras and Perrier in those fridges??

Seriously, though, I'd like to see a comparison of various stove tops and ovens in terms of energy use, efficiency and emissions. I agree with Icelander - as a foodie, I loathe cooking on an electric burner.

I think they might need a map, KPod. Some of these places are so preposterously large that normal-sized appliances just wouldn't fit. On my site I recently wrote about the "idea house" promoted by Cottage Living magazine, which you'd think given the name would be about homey little dwellings. Nope- that idea house is 5337 square feet and has a "great room" that could contain my entire house.

Whether gas or electric is better in terms of CO2 probably depends on where your electricity is coming from. Remember that there are large losses of energy in generation and transmission, so if your electricity comes from natural-gas-fired generators, you would probably produce less CO2 by having a gas stove at home. But here in my area I can buy sustainably produced electricity. So in an apartment I'm building we're just using that.

The only large appliance I want is a jumbo-sized freezer. Then I can freeze my homegrown fruits and veggies for winter. No way can eat everything in the form of jelly or canned stuff.

I'd love 30,000 BTU burners. Trying to stirfry on a normal gas burner leaves much to be desired, and don't even attempt it on an electric. Although I do find the 60-inch size excessive and wasteful.

But boiling a single pot of noodles on a reasonable burner setting would still only take a similar amount of energy as a regular sized stove; versus an SUV using more than 4 times as much gas to move one person an equal distance as a sensible vehicle.

Still, why own it if you don't use it. I could easily make use of one larger burner, but certainly not that much.

i agree with martin about the emissions - i tend to think a gas burner, if used correctly, would be more efficient than an electric burner for boiling water, cooking, etc. because of the inefficiency back at the power plant, where heat (what you need to cook) is converted to electricity, which is then converted back to heat at your stove. of course once our electricity sources are emissions-free...

what i really wonder about is boiling water for tea: gas burner or plug-in electric kettle? i'm pretty sure an electric kettle would be more efficient than my metal one on my electric coil burners.

when i'm no longer a poor college kid and can afford a giant 6-burner stove and two ovens, heck yes i'll be getting them. but since cooking and treehugging are two of my great loves, i'm very conscious about how i use my burners, preheating my oven just when i need to (not an hour before i'll be baking anything in it), using my oven light instead of opening the door (but only when i need to see what's going on in there), etc. i do worry about those who aren't conscious of these things and are now wasteful at 4x the rate they were with their old stoves.

LA: I do not think there is any question, the electric kettle designed for tea heats the water in half the time of our old stove-top kettle on a 10,000 BTU burner. The kettle also turns off when it is done.

Maybe someone can explain to me why a strong burner is worse. If I need to sear food, wouldn't it make sense to do it quickly? More gas would be used, but it would be used for a shorter time. I agree that big fridges make little sense if you don't use them (why pay to cool that empty space). But if you do store lots of food it would make sense to buy a new large efficient fridge rather than run two older less efficient ones.

Although I can understand that the environmental cost of producing that oven is significantly more than the cost of producing a smaller oven, I'm also not sure that having higher BTU burners is of environmental concern. My hottest burner is 18,000 BTUs and I use it at full strength for stir frying or to bring water to a boil for making stock. The rest of the time, I keep it at a level where the flame doesn't extend past the bottom of whatever pot I'm using, which uses less than its maximum output.

I think I was wrong to focus on the btu of the burner, good chefs with commercial ranges do amazing things with such power, and one only uses as much power as they need. it takes the same number of btu's to boil a pot of water whether it does it quickly or slowly. However it is still too big.

I'm with Max and KS_ in my opinion that bigger is not worse. Just because you have the potential to use 6 or 8 burners doesn't mean that will happen on a regular basis; but, when it is needed as in a large gathering hosted in say--a large house, then having that extra cook space is invaluable. Being a mechanical engineer, I can say with some certainty that the thermal efficiency of the two ovens will be on par with an oven of a more conventional size, provided materials of similar thermal properties are used in construction, and there’s no reason to assume they wouldn’t be. Nor would a 30K BTU burner necessarily always run at it's maximum ability, and when it did the energy balance would inherently mean that food would cook faster (though with admittedly more wasted heat) thus requiring less cooking time. Of all the evils in the world, this is a minor offender.

Lloyd, thanks for the response above; though I'm still not sure it answers the question for me. If the electricity I'm using for my plug-in kettle comes from a gas-fired power plant (which in PG&E territory is a good bet) with, let's say 40% efficiency, but my kettle on a gas burner has any higher efficiency than that (and this is the root of my question...does it?) then the gas burner seems to be the better choice. I don't think it has much at all to do with the time it takes to boil the water, since different "fuels" are being used.

Plus, I can't stand the whistle on my teakettle, so I usually hover and turn down the flame before it goes off, or immediately thereafter :)

6-10 pilot lights waste a lot of gas and cause lots of heat in the summer time. when i lived in a fraternity house, we had an industrial stove/oven that kept our kitchen warm in the middle of the winter.

"6-10 pilot lights waste a lot of gas and cause lots of heat in the summer time."

The commercials stoves we used in school had no pilot lights. We lit them by hand.

Do they even use pilot lights on modern stoves? The ones I encounter in people's homes always seem to have electric spark systems.

I just looked up some stats at the US Energy Information Administration (link: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/reps/enduse/er01_us_tab1.html ) to try to get an idea of how much stoves contribute to energy use. If you stick within the field of electricity, refrigerators are the biggest culprit -- using 14% of all electricity consumed in residences. The combo of rangetop & oven is down around 4-5%. So that 72" refrigerator might be the Chevy Suburban of the kitchen, and the stove just the Nissan Armada.

High output burners are important where customer service speed is essential. High speed cooking may be a rewarding pastime at home, but it's clearly not a necessity for culinary excellence in general. The downsides of very high capacity burners include: warping of ordinary pans, requiring you to buy more massive expensive ones that take more energy and materials to create; thermal output on even a low setting greatly exceeds the ability of average pans to conduct the heat to the food, thereby "wasting" much of the energy; higher emissions of aldehydes, CO, particulates and, believe it or not gang, mercury, into the home air/flue. Yes, natural gas contains some mercury; distributors generally scrub much of it out for delivery to domestic customers but may not for commercial ones. Then too, as pointed out previously, you are adding to the air conditioning load of the home, either by makeup air for the high speed externally vented flue hood or by radiative and conductive transfer to the inside. Considering that the average size of an American family is hovering around 2 and that holiday cooking for a big gathering is a relative rarity: most of us do it because we want to. Just like driving an SUV.