I got up early and headed to the kitchen to make coffee. It was dark and on an impulse I turned on a burner on the new cook top. Then I turned them all on. It looked pretty cool so I took a photo. Then I got to thinking, which is a dangerous thing. I was wondering how much heat that new cook top puts out and how does it compare to an electric one. Because it a gas appliance, the heat output is specified in BTU, actually BTU per hour since BTU is a unit of energy. A simple conversion of factor of 0.293 converts BTU per hour to watts. As we all know the Watt is one joule per second. So the total power of the new gas cook top is 52,000 BTU/hr which is 15,239 watts. I looked up an equivalent electric cooktop and its total power output was 9300 Watts which is 31,700 BTU per hour. That means the gas cooktop has 64% higher total power output. I found that interesting.

Now the interesting comparison is the cost of natural gas versus electricity. After quite a bit of searching, I found that the residential price of natural gas in Texas is $9.21 per million BTU. Our local price of electricity (more or less) is $0.12 per kilowatt hour. To make it easy to understand, If I ran a gas stove of 52000 BTU per hour for one hour the cost would be $.48. If I got the same amount of energy from an electric stove, it would cost $1.82. The electric energy cost is 3.8 times higher than the natural gas cost. I could have screwed up somewhere in my calculations, but I doubt it. The factor I don't know is whether the gas burner or the electric burner is more efficient at transferring heat to the cooking pot. I will save that for another time. Easily amused, remember.