Try cooking with oil and you'll see PM levels go to enormous heights.
But who knows, maybe those pans are even more dangerous than currently known.
That's not to say you should go out and buy everything coated in PTFE. It generates tons of pollution when it's synthesized. I'm just saying there's no need to rush to throw away the ones you may already have at home - that might be counter-productive as you're now generating waste unnecessarily.
When I start cooking downstairs, within a minute or so I hear the purifier upstairs ramp up to full speed.
Were they talking about gas hobs? Surely that's much worse than the electric/induction one you appear to be using.
It produces CO2, NO2 and some CO. But it's not going to show anything on a PM2.5 meter.
The particles when frying come from the oil turning into smoke, as well as just aerosolization even well below the smoke point. These are what send PM2.5 levels skyrocketing.
When I sear a steak in cast iron, my PM2.5 levels go from their baseline of ~2 ug/m^3 to ~200–400. And course you can smell it in the air.
Also, cooking of all kinds spikes PM levels in my experience. Maybe eggs in a 100% clean non-stick pan are an exception, but I doubt it if you can smell it.
But it pretty consistently sets off the Coway air purifier in my kitchen when I do it...so I would assume frying with oil to the point of smoking does adversely affect air quality.
.... That should be obvious though, right?
My one wish is the west adopted Chinese style kitchens. Even in new condo builds the kitchen will be isolated in a room you can close off, with an exterior wall and powerful exhaust vents. I always found it perplexing how ok folks are with what feels like cooking food in their bedroom.
Aside from studio apartments, where space is at a huge premium, I'm having a hard time understanding what you mean by this. Can you elaborate?
I also don't think "you cook and the whole house smells" fits the analogy of "cooking in your bedroom". The key feature of the bedroom is that it's where you sleep, get dressed, etc., not the smell.
It has a fan to pull smoke and steam up out of the cooking space.
It blows the fan output right in my face, rather than outdoors.
This does not contribute anything useful to the cooking process.
It's fairly common in America. It's so common it appears it doesn't even cross your mind to consider it as something that might be desirable or useful.
(For those who say "well fix it then", I've looked, but unfortunately if you just put a hole in the wall behind the fan you end up in another exterior wall that meets up with the house there. It's not an easy cheap fix.)
And in many places the hood doesn't extract outside but just filters and blows back in the kitchen. Even less efficient.
In modern buildings you get these together: an open kitchen meant to make the living room look more spacious and a hood that and just spins the air around a bit because it can't blow it outside (it's nowhere near an outside wall, or you can't just drill a big vent, or mess with the air circulation). The smell will go to every place that didn't have the door closed.
So right off the bat, you're down $20k at least to remodel the kitchen so it has proper ventilation, assuming you cook.
Forget the health effects and whatnot, but are people not bothered by cooking smells pervading the house?
Being very honest, no, not really. From all the issues I can encounter in a house the smell of a meal cooking is not one of them.
Biggest generator of pwm during cooking is when things actually burn. Which can be just a very tiny portion of the food, like one black speck that came off and heated extra. This produces more pwm than the mass of oil and food.
Was it one of those useless microwave ones?
Now if we're cooking with gas (as the east Germans use to say in the 80's), that generates quite some PM2.5 in an of itself.
Also, anyone cooking eggs without getting to the Maillard reaction (or for that matter, with oil instead of butter) should never again legally allowed to approach a frying pan :D
That said, I personally use the Breathe Airmonitor Plus [1] - I kept having issues with calibration with the temtop unit. Mostly decided on this one since it uses an NDIR sensor similar to my Aranet which I carry with me all the time.
If I ran my stove for more than 15 min my carbon monoxide / fire alarm would go off.
I suggest frying some bacon and report back.
Does your extractor fan vent to the outside, or just recirculate through a filter? In my experience, people often overestimate how much protection ventilation provides. It mostly dilutes contaminants rather than removing or isolating them. For example, with moderately hazardous compounds, a fume hood works fine under normal use, but in the event of a spill it can’t bring levels back down quickly enough to protect the operator. In that kind of situation, an isolator makes far more sense or adding PPE, though that can be burdensome.
What really surprised me is how high the values get from just a single pan. It makes me wonder what it’s like in a commercial kitchen with multiple pans at higher temperatures, especially if the extractor fan fails and there’s no time to shut down operations to fix it.
Do you have references to back this up that I could read? Assuming the same fan size, ventilation would act like a perfect filter and remove everything out of the room that the fan pushes, whereas a filter will allow some particles to pass and recirculate. Especially useless if it is those metal fiber filters that are in a range hood that just remove some grease.
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