What is an all-electric home?

Most homes in America use a variety of energy sources to power all the things that a modern home has.

Of course, we use electricity to power our lights, flat screen TVs, washing machines, and treat tossing, full-HD Wifi pet cameras. However, most homes also have appliances that are powered by combustion: natural gas, heating oil, and wood are the most common fuels. And believe it or not, but a few homes are still heated with coal.

There are a lot of advantages to fossil fuel-powered furnaces, stoves, and hot water heaters. For example, gas stoves provide instant heat, and if you live in a remote area, delivered propane can be less expensive than upgrading your electrical service to heat your home.

However, there are disadvantages too: they can pollute your indoor air, often have higher maintenance needs than electric alternatives, and are usually less efficient. Electric alternatives also continue to improve and often offer features that are superior to gas-based appliances.

Another consideration is that many states and cities, out of concern for public health and climate change, have taken measures to reduce or eliminate gas appliances. For example, California will ban the sale of natural gas space heaters and water heaters by 2030, while New York state will ban natural gas for heating and cooking in newly-built homes starting in 2025.

While legislation will reduce the use of gas appliances in some places, some homeowners are taking steps to do this on their own. In fact, one increasingly popular trend is to have an all-electric home. This means using electricity for everything: heating, cooking, hot water, and even clothes drying.

If you’re intrigued by the advantages of electric homes, you don’t need to go all the way and make your home completely electric. Surprisingly small measures can give you big benefits in indoor air quality. For example, you can spend less than $100 and get a pretty good countertop induction burner for cooking. Replacing some use of a gas stovetop with an induction burner will reduce a source of carcinogenic chemicals in your home.

This website is a consumer guide to helping you decide if it makes sense to switch some or even all of your fossil fuel-powered appliances to electric.

Reasons to switch to electric

There are a number of reasons why local and state governments are passing legislation to gradually phase out gas appliances, while some homeowners are making the switch on their own. This is a summary, so be sure to check out my in-depth articles for more info on these topics.

Electric appliances are better for health and safety

You probably have a carbon monoxide detector in your home. That’s because carbon monoxide is a colorless, odorless gas than can be produced by gas appliances that aren’t functioning properly. According to CDC data, about 1,000 people die from carbon monoxide poisoning in the United States every year, and more than half of those occur in homes.j

Natural gas appliances, like furnaces and hot water tanks, can produce carbon monoxide (CO) when they are out of adjustment and don’t have enough oxygen during combustion. In a well-maintained system all combustion products, including CO, should be vented outside. However, leaks do occur and can be difficult to spot, causing pollution to build up inside the home.

Another source of pollution are gas stoves and ovens, which always release their combustion byproducts directly into a home. Natural gas is mostly methane, which when burned perfectly will produce non-toxic carbon dioxide and water. However, natural gas isn’t pure methane, and your stove will never burn gas perfectly cleanly.

As a result, operating a gas stove will release harmful byproducts into the air you breathe, including benzene, hexane, nitrogen dioxides, and PM2.5 particulates. A growing body of scientific research is linking the use of gas stoves to health risks, including a significant proportion of childhood asthma cases.

Finally, it’s been shown that all gas stoves leak to some degree. It can also be too easy to leave a burner on without igniting it. Gas distribution pipes routinely leak too. While minor leaks are normally not a safety issue, in extreme cases leaks can cause significant damage or even total destruction of a home.

Cooking with electric induction is pretty great

Electric induction stoves are a newer product that use a magnetic field to heat up cooking vessels directly. This results in instant response just like a gas stove, but without the negative health effects that come with burning natural gas in your kitchen.

Older technology electric stoves have been around a long time. They use coils, flat discs or radiant ceramic elements underneath a smooth glass surface and generate heat using the same principle: they pass electric current through a wire with high resistance, causing the wire to heat up. This is the same technology used in a toaster or hair dryer.

While cheap, electric resistance stoves have a significant disadvantage in that they take a long time to heat up and cool down.

Induction stoves work differently. There’s no heating element involved. Instead, the stove generates a magnetic field that causes pots and pans that contain iron to heat up directly. While the surface of an induction cooktop can get very warm from being in contact with hot cookware, they don’t produce any heat directly.

This makes them safer to work with. Because they respond to power output changes instantly, they give you similar cooking performance to gas. Finally, electric induction cooking is more efficient and powerful than natural gas. With natural gas, only about 40% of the heat generated heats up the pan. The rest escapes to the air. Electric induction, in contrast, is about 80% efficient. As a result, even a cheap 120 volt induction burner can boil water faster than an expensive gas range.

You can save money with electric

Fuel and electricity prices are always fluctuating and vary by region, so it’s hard to say definitively whether, say, a natural gas furnace or a heat pump will be less expensive to operate in the long run. That’s a calculation that you’ll have to make. However, there are a few considerations that weigh in favor of electric appliances.

Heat pumps can be much more efficient than other alternatives. The highest efficiency gas furnaces are 95% efficient. This means that 95% or more of the heat energy generated from burning gas is captured and distributed into your home. That’s good, but a heat pump can be more than 300% efficient. How is that possible? A heat pump doesn’t generate heat directly, but moves it from outside your home to the inside. Read my primer on heat pumps to learn how this works.

Off-peak electricity rates can help you save. A lot of homeowners have time-of-use pricing with their utility. This means that electricity is cheaper during certain hours - often a lot cheaper. For example, one utility company in California currently charges $0.27/kWh during off-peak hours and $0.65/kWh during on-peak - a 240% difference. If you can shift your electricity usage to off-peak hours, you can save money compared to using gas.

Many rebates are available. While the upfront cost of electric appliances is sometimes higher, currently available rebates can take a big chunk out of it. For example, the federal High-Efficiency Electric Home Rebate Act (HEEHRA) can take $8,000 off the price of a heat pump and $1,750 off the price of a heat pump hot water heater. You can find other rebates or tax incentives too.

Switching to electricity can reduce your climate impact. Even if a significant portion of your electricity supply is generated with fossil fuels, the climate change impact of using electric appliances can be lower than using gas. This is because heat pumps can be 300-500% efficient in generating heat energy. Another factor to consider is the electricity supply is getting cleaner, with many states having net-zero emission targets for their electrical grids.

A list of electric alternatives to fossil fuel appliances

Exactly which fossil fuel-powered appliances can you switch to electric? Basically all of them. Here’s a list of gas or oil-powered appliances and their electric alternatives:

If you’re a homeowner with an existing collection of gas appliances, it might not make sense for you to replace every gas appliance with an electric alternative. For example, while ventless condensing clothes dryers are common in Europe, they’re relatively rare and expensive in North America. On the other hand, if you’re planning a newly built home, the advantages of not having any gas connection can outweigh the higher upfront cost of electric appliances.

This website is intended to help homeowners make an objective and informed decision about whether going electric makes sense for you, so be sure to explore all the resources here.