Frying would require some sort of oil or fat and it’s hard to tell but the pan looks clean. Anything with oil will dramatically bump up those numbers. It’s intuitive just cleaning your kitchen, grease being cooked travels.
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.
yoshuaw 1 hours ago [-]
Some anecdata from my kitchen, which has an air quality monitor positioned approx. 4 meters away from the stove:
- Most days when cooking PM2.5 doesn't exceed 5ppm.
- I accidentally burned some vegetable oil this week, and PM2.5 shot up to around 70ppm.
- I fried up pancetta a little too hot a few months ago, rendering the fat entirely, and both PM2.5 and PM10 went up to >999ppm.
59 minutes ago [-]
tomxor 58 minutes ago [-]
I wonder what the difference between PM2.5 from cooking oil or fat vs PM2.5 from combustion engines is on the lungs.
My instinct is that it should be less toxic from vegetable oil, if it's just vaporised... past the smoke point maybe the chemistry changes enough to make it more toxic. The body has mechanisms to remove foreign matter from the lungs, but how easily and how much it clogs up your lymph nodes seems to depend on what it's made of.
AlecSchueler 3 hours ago [-]
Because I want to feel connected with my family or my guests while I'm cooking. I spend a lot of the day in the kitchen preparing multiple meals for a family, I don't want to be closed off.
kccqzy 2 hours ago [-]
A concept of a door is such that if you want to be closed off you can be and if you don't want to be you also have that choice. Having a door to the kitchen is strictly better than having no door. Personally I'd pick a glass sliding door too.
The air quality depends on exactly what you are cooking. Close the door if your cooking involves high heat, open it otherwise. And incidentally I don't understand why the author would do testing while frying an egg. Frying an egg does not involve high heat. High heat means getting close to or past the smoke point of your oil. I would not close the door when frying an egg.
graeme 7 hours ago [-]
I've tested with oil. You don't see a large spike unless something is blackened or the oil
smokes
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.
infecto 4 hours ago [-]
You’re right but I also think as you hint, that it’s very hard to cook without causing this to happen. I would add that when frying, even if you are below smoke point, just the act of cooking food in that oil atomizes the oil enough that it lowers air quality.
asdff 3 hours ago [-]
Have you ever wiped the top of the cabinets in your kitchen? Mine always get coated in grease. It is almost like the oil is being atomized like perfume. Hood works great with smoke testing but this still happens. Inside of the hood is also extremely gross to the point where the oil condenses and drips if I forget to clean it for a while.
PeterStuer 1 hours ago [-]
How powerfull is your hood? In my experience, consumer hoods are extremely underpowered. You can make them work, but that involves taking several minutes, even up to 10, at max power to set up a draft that will exhaust fumes from your stove.
asdff 12 minutes ago [-]
It is powerful enough to smoke under it and have it draw out the smoke. It also ate its carbon filter at one point, just sucked it off the grease trap into the fan. I shut the door to the kitchen and open some windows and there is very appreciable draft coming out of those windows. I tend to only use the back two burners directly under the hood while cooking. Certainly no commercial unit, however.
graeme 1 hours ago [-]
Yes that's a big downside of oil. I'm not sure about atomization but oil spatters a lot even if it isn't smoking.
asdff 14 minutes ago [-]
Worth it over eating teflon I suppose.
mushroomba 2 hours ago [-]
I personally take special care to never vaporize fat. It can be done but you have to change your cooking style and only cook with certain styles outside.
asdff 15 minutes ago [-]
How do you prevent this? I keep temperature below smoke point already but also it has to be high enough so things actually cook upon the oil vs being saturated with oil.
moduspol 8 hours ago [-]
Even in nicer houses in the US, they’ll have a range hood but no intake air! And then I’ll hear neighbors complaining about it not working well because nobody tells you that if you don’t have make-up air, you also need to open a window for it to work well.
lotsofpulp 7 hours ago [-]
I have plenty of million dollar plus houses around me selling without any exhaust at all, just a cooktop on an island in the middle of the kitchen, and most of the times it is a gas cooktop! And in 80% of the houses, it's just a shitty microwave exhaust above the range.
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?
panzagl 2 hours ago [-]
Sometime in the last 30 years builders learned how to build something that looks like a house, but isn't- no vent to outside in kitchen, 'two-car' garage that cannot fit even the smallest cars, etc. You don't notice these things as a kid, so you don't look for them when you buy your first house, by which point it's too late.
gaoshan 2 hours ago [-]
This is exactly my situation (cooktop in an island with nothing above it). Our solution (because we cook a lot and often it's Chinese food with the attendant oil) was to just stick an existing rolling island in the garage with an induction hotplate on it and do our messiest cooking out there. Not ideal but it keeps the house cleaner and we didn't have to spend much.
Personally I would prefer a Chinese style kitchen with a fully enclosed cooking space (sliding glass doors to leave open if desired) and exterior ventilation. It keeps the worst of the aerosolized oil contained and away from the rest of the home.
infecto 6 hours ago [-]
I think it also depends how much people cook and what they cook. I suspect most here are thinking about that roast in a crockpot that has a pleasant aroma.
On the flip side I am thinking about anything with high heat, meats and oil. The food will be delicious and the smell of the food is great but the smell from the cooking process is miserable and will linger.
unbalancedevh 7 hours ago [-]
Good cooking smells delicious. Let it permeate!
com2kid 48 minutes ago [-]
Cooking really spicy food can cause everyone in the house to start coughing, even those who love eating spicy food, and even with a decent venting system. Then there is sea food, many preparations of which are going to smell like sea food no matter what you do. Or there are just recipes that involve lots of fish sauce (or any other heavily fermented sauces).
Baby octopus fried in fish sauce stink, even with a vent fan.
Plenty of dishes, and entire cuisines, need good ventilation.
lotsofpulp 7 hours ago [-]
I don’t want to be smelling food when I am not eating, or about to eat.
trallnag 7 hours ago [-]
Have you ever smelled a room permeated by Indian food?
bigstrat2003 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, it smells amazing. One of the best things about Indian food tbh.
mrguyorama 2 hours ago [-]
Yes it's the absolute best. Right up there with roasted pork or chicken thighs.
Cumin, Turmeric, hot onion and garlic just fragrant, butter, creams...
What do you think food should smell like? Boiled chicken? Do you have sensory issues?
piva00 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
lotsofpulp 6 hours ago [-]
The issue isn’t odors during the cooking process, the issue is odors pervading the walls, fabrics, and other fixtures all around the house such that it causes an odor at all times.
mushroomba 1 hours ago [-]
Odors are spread this way through oils. All lingering odors mean greases have permeated the tissues of the building. It's quite foul, but I have observed many people to live this way.
Avamander 1 hours ago [-]
Or if you by accident just burn something.
MostlyStable 3 hours ago [-]
My current kitchen has a quite good vent that exhausts outside. Several years ago when I was testing a weather station with a particulate sensor before deploying it, it would pick up large spikes when I cooked, even though it was across the house and behind several doors. For air quality specifically, I very much doubt that realistic levels of separation between the kitchen and the rest of the house make much difference.
dfxm12 8 hours ago [-]
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?
infecto 7 hours ago [-]
Have you been into a western home? The stove may not have a hood, if it does have one it’s usually inadequate. The kitchen will be in an open space so anything you cook travels everywhere. The number of homes without range hoods is wild to me. Hence cooking in your bedroom, you cook and the whole house smells.
dfxm12 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, I've been in many Western homes, but never one without a hood over the stove. Perhaps it is a hasty generalization to assume they don't have hoods. Adequacy of the hood seems like it's not going to be usefully quantifiable or provable. I hope your analogy doesn't rely on this measure...
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.
nucleardog 25 minutes ago [-]
> Adequacy of the hood seems like it's not going to be usefully quantifiable or provable
If we can't come up with something a little more scientific I'm happy to send my wife over to do some cooking!
The effectiveness of the range hood directly impacts how close you can be to the stove before your eyes start burning and watering and you start coughing a lung out because you've effectively been hit with pepper spray.
In the worst case scenario (no range hood or ventilation), you'll probably want to evacuate the house.
As the person you replied to says as well, the popularity of "open concept" spaces contributes too. Even with poor ventilation, a kitchen with a door you can close helps limit how far the cooking byproducts reach.
jerf 7 hours ago [-]
I have a hood over my stove.
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.)
infecto 6 hours ago [-]
Since you want to argue it, where is your data? I can share some of mine from a recent study. It’s non trivial numbers without hoods and even more using recirculation.
Weird hill to defend when you don’t even have data. Maybe you did not like my analogy but it also matters how much you cook and what you are cooking. Hence why it can be more important in a Chinese household, lots of high heat cooking of meats including fish. So I can see the analogy failing in a household that does not cook often or cooks more tame items. If you frequently cook fish, or do any type of high heat, heck if you have done any cooking in a commercial kitchen before you quickly realize how inadequate the venting is even if it does go outside. Hence it can feel like you are cooking in your bedroom in a lot of western houses since they use an open floor plan with the kitchen. But ignore the analogy if you don’t like it!
You made the analogy & the claim that cooking in the west feels like cooking in your bedroom. The onus is actually on you to explain it and prove it. I didn't make any claims. Oh, I guess I claimed that the bedroom is where people sleep and get dressed. No, I will not be providing data for this. :)
The link you've provided says nothing about hoods generally not being in western homes or make your analogy any more apt.
infecto 4 hours ago [-]
You’re missing the point. I already explained why Western kitchens often feel like “cooking in your bedroom”: open layouts, weak or recirculating hoods, and a lot of households with no real ventilation at all. The data backs this, about 10% with no hood, another 26–36% with recirculating, only, and plenty more with underpowered or poorly designed systems.
I never claimed hoods don’t exist, just that they’re often inadequate. And yes it’s wild to me that 10% of homes don’t have a hood and the other 30% or so are recirculating air which is close to the same. Whether the analogy clicks for you or not, it reflects the lived reality of anyone who cooks frequently (especially with high heat or strong flavors). That’s why Chinese-style kitchens, with closed layouts and strong direct venting, are so valued.
If your rebuttal boils down to “but bedrooms are for sleeping,” then maybe this discussion is not valuable.
Why do people insist on defending the oddest of hills over such a lived experience comment like the one I made. Now for sure if you rarely cook or if cooking is making Mac and cheese then sure this will be hard to understand.
dfxm12 4 hours ago [-]
Your job is not to prove why you prefer Chinese style kitchens. I merely asked you to explain your analogy.
I was trying to understand your analogy, because, having cooked in western kitchens and been in bedrooms (often in the same house!), it made no sense to me. It's not like people generally sleep in their kitchens. Your reasoning seems to be that cooking makes your house smell. Even if this is true, I still don't see how this makes your kitchen feel like your bedroom.
Then you talked about hoods, with an undefined "adequacy" measure. I correctly suspected here you were going to use this undefined adequacy measure to move away from the analogy about cooking in your bedroom (presumably because it is inexplainable) to start a separate argument and take it wherever you needed to. You found some study (about Canada, but there's a lot of "West") that talks about hoods (being found in 90% of homes). But you see, some of these hoods are not adequate enough... sigh
OK, all that is beside the point, because again, what does any of this business about hoods have to do with bedrooms?
infecto 3 hours ago [-]
You’re really overcomplicating this. The analogy isn’t about dragging a bed into the kitchen, it’s about the way smells and particulates permeate living spaces when ventilation is weak or nonexistent. In an open floor plan, cooking odors don’t stay “in the kitchen,” they drift into the same areas where you relax, sleep, or work. That’s the point: the boundaries between spaces collapse, so it feels like you’re cooking in your bedroom.
If you can’t grasp that distinction after multiple explanations, then maybe the analogy isn’t the problem. Happy to discuss if you actually have anything constructive to add but please your beating a dead horse for no reason.
dfxm12 3 hours ago [-]
I have nothing to discuss with you if you're the type to resort to personal insults when challenged.
infecto 2 hours ago [-]
What insults and what have I not explained to you? You are arguing with me over a lived experience. You can have a different lived experience than me but I find that open concept kitchens coupled with what is always poor ventilation leads to smelly situations for most types of cooking. I don’t even understand what you are arguing with me about. I gave you data and my own experience. You refute and ignore the data and waffle on the rest. Like I said, maybe the problem is not the analogy here. If that hurts, well then tell me why I am wrong. This is definitely tops as one of the more silly threads I have participated in.
buran77 7 hours ago [-]
Hoods are a great addition but a closed kitchen is the real deal if you want to keep smells out of the house. Even the best hoods can't keep up with cooking anything remotely smelly.
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. Don't get me wrong, the smell of good food is great, but not when it gets in your dresser full of clothes or when the house gets saturated with a cacophony of smells very difficult to remove.
lotsofpulp 6 hours ago [-]
> Adequacy of the hood seems like it's not going to be usefully quantifiable or provable
If the exhaust mechanism is attached to an above the range microwave, it’s not adequate. And that is the vast majority of kitchens I see on Zillow, and I have probably sifted through thousands and thousands of houses.
A dedicated exhaust hood is seen in very few home listings, mostly in new higher end homes, or older renovated homes.
mordechai9000 2 hours ago [-]
Why is combining it with a microwave inherently bad? As long as there is an air channel to the exterior, the critical thing should be air volume over time, no? (CFM or m^3/minute or whatever)
infecto 5 hours ago [-]
And most vented hoods are still inadequate either because there is no makeup air and the fan is restricted or more likely the fan is just junk.
amanaplanacanal 2 hours ago [-]
I suspect most homes are leaky enough that they don't need any kind of "makeup air."
wffurr 7 hours ago [-]
Externally vented hoods are now required in my town in Massachusetts. But I have lived in several places like you describe and it’s sub par.
nemetroid 3 hours ago [-]
By "western", do you mean American?
stronglikedan 7 hours ago [-]
Having grown up in western homes, and visited innumerable other western homes, I believe you may have not been in very many western homes.
infecto 6 hours ago [-]
Not trying to start a fight here but not sure what kind of hill yall are trying to die on here.
I am from the west, have lived all over the US and no there is not great data on the matter but I have historically had an interest on air quality and I cook a lot. There is some nuance to the data. 10% reported not having any hood. 26% of gas households were not vented. 36% of electric were not vented. You can start going down that path and also start seeing that most vented hoods are either inadequate or don’t properly cover the cooking area.
So I am not sure what you are trying to argue about? There is a non-trivial amount of homes in the US without proper ventilation. You can pull up Zillow almost anywhere in the country and easily find center island cooktops without hoods or down drafts. Or even more common a microwave recirculating that air.
I think most people don't know that the fan in their microwave is not vented to the outside and that that is important. Maybe its a height thing- are you tall? I don't think short people realize how gross the top 1-2 feet of a kitchen are.
anikom15 3 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure a hood is mandatory in the U.S.
panzagl 2 hours ago [-]
Not that vents to the outside.
namibj 8 hours ago [-]
My new kitchen will be separated from any other living spaces for exactly that reason; though the exhaust may need juicing.
infecto 6 hours ago [-]
After being in a number of Chinese condo apartments I realize how awesome it was. Most had sliding glass doors so you could open it up if you want but if you were cooking something heavy, you could close the doors or internal windows, open that window or balcony door outside and let the cooking commence.
anikom15 3 hours ago [-]
At least in America, most places will have big enough kitchens that can isolate grease to the area around the stove. Good design will put the stove far enough from living and dining areas.
mttch 8 hours ago [-]
Two things, no oil as others have suggested but also frying eggs does not require a very high temperature, around 150 Celsius and your eggs don’t look particularly browned (which is how I prefer them too) so you aren’t exercising the Maillard reaction, which generates the PM2.5. Try again with browning a fatty cut of beef or pork steak in oil which require higher temperatures where lots of browning is occurring and you are also closer to the smoke point of the oil.
Tade0 9 hours ago [-]
Those eggs appear to be on a non-stick pan, so without oil.
Try cooking with oil and you'll see PM levels go to enormous heights.
Aaargh20318 8 hours ago [-]
I have an air purifier in my bedroom. It measures PM1, PM2.5 and PM10 as well as TVOC (Total volatile organic components) and adjusts it's air intake according to the air quality. Usually it runs at very low speed and is inaudible, even at night.
When I start cooking downstairs, within a minute or so I hear the purifier upstairs ramp up to full speed.
andrewl 7 hours ago [-]
That sounds like the kind of air purifier I want. What brand/model is it?
Aaargh20318 6 hours ago [-]
It's an AEG AX91-604DG
chao- 8 hours ago [-]
Do people normally not use oil with nonstick pans? I always use some regardless of pan because it crisps better and adds flavor.
nkrisc 8 hours ago [-]
Same. The primary benefit of the oil, I’ve found even in a non-stick pan, is better and more even transfer of heat and more even browning.
lotsofpulp 7 hours ago [-]
I couldn't imagine cooking without oil. Pan frying spices in oil is pretty much the first step of cooking for me.
That's a good point I didn't think of as well. Oil (fats) are great for holding onto and distributing flavor throughout the dish as well.
progbits 9 hours ago [-]
Indeed, and I prefer short period of increased air pollution + ventilation and air filters, to nonstick pan and eating PFAS which is unavoidable (and unmeasurable at home).
onli 8 hours ago [-]
Afaik the nonstick pans are not emitting pollution in that sense, the food does not get contaminated, even if the surface peels off that is supposed to be benign. The problem is the production process, having already contaminated the drinking water of the whole world with PFAS - and that's the route where we get contaminated for real as well.
But who knows, maybe those pans are even more dangerous than currently known.
cassianoleal 8 hours ago [-]
If it's Teflon / PTFE, as long as you don't let it smoke you should be fine. The polymer chain is too large to enter your cells, so your body just expels them intact.
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.
jnordt 3 hours ago [-]
I have been tracking my airquality with a device called AirQ Pro / Science
What i like about this device that they give a very precisce and clear physical definition of each metric and explain by what quantitative factors the metric is influenced.
incl. potential measurement error sources and ability's to reset sensors.
Definitely recommend this over other air quality devices that try to simplify all the measurements into good/bad..
(Note: Just a happy user no affiliation whatsoever with the company)
amo1111 7 hours ago [-]
> Something weird though is that turning on my extractor fan didn’t really do much.
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.
43 minutes ago [-]
Mistletoe 7 hours ago [-]
>In my experience, people often overestimate how much protection ventilation provides.
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.
amo1111 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, ventilating out > recirculating no question! I just wanted to raise awareness that ventilation is not instantaneous. It takes time to bring things back to safe levels in case of spikes.
A quick search brings up the CDC guidance, where they discuss air changes per hour for a room. This will be for HVAC units, which operate on a completely different magnitude of airflow compared to a kitchen extractor fan.
This also matches my experience in industrial applications, you only need a single failure point such as a spill or a large enough leak and ventilation alone is no longer enough to keep people safe. This is why it's worth considering a glove box/isolator. You could make the argument that a glove box can also leak and I'm starting to sound like a safety engineer. Anyway at home either will be fine with outside ventilation being superior if done right.
pxeger1 9 hours ago [-]
> Someone once said to me that cooking can increase particle pollution in the air to dangerous levels. Is this true? I suspect not.
Were they talking about gas hobs? Surely that's much worse than the electric/induction one you appear to be using.
crazygringo 8 hours ago [-]
No, gas combustion doesn't generate any significant amount of particles.
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.
infecto 8 hours ago [-]
Gas combustion absolutely contributes to poorer air quality but I would argue that actually cooking (not what’s happening in this test) is much worse. Heating oil and cooking proteins will quickly fill a house. If you can smell it, the air quality has been reduced.
AdmiralAsshat 8 hours ago [-]
My favorite method of frying an egg is in a wok with oil. It gets amazingly crispy, rather than floppy, which is how it usually turns out in a conventional nonstick pan.
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.
namibj 8 hours ago [-]
>smoking
>bad air quality
.... That should be obvious though, right?
AdmiralAsshat 8 hours ago [-]
Sure, although it's interesting to see how long those pollutants linger, based on how long it takes my air purifier to return to "normal" quality. The egg fry will make it angry for about five minutes, maybe. By contrast, every time I fry up some bacon, the indicator will stay in the red zone for 15-20 minutes.
onli 8 hours ago [-]
To me measuring the air quality was interesting and surprising. Because like you said, how long the pollution lingers is surprising. And to me it wasn't obvious how bad the values get when cooking. I was aware of the kitchen smell traversing into the apartment, but hadn't realized how bad the air quality gets because of that.
cameldrv 2 hours ago [-]
One thing that frustrates me about air quality is that we have sensors for various types of gasses, but when it comes to particulates, the sensors are just telling you the size. The composition of the particle has to make a huge difference in terms of the effects. Metal dust from a brake pad or rubber from a tire must do very different things to your lungs than vegetable oil.
adolph 16 minutes ago [-]
If you look at how a CO2 sensor works [0], you see that it is tuned for a specific material. Characterizing any possible material would be the job of a gas chromatograph [1], which are typically an industrial/scientific instrument as opposed to a more limited mass produced device. Maybe one day the cost (both material and ongoing maintenance) will be low enough to have in one's home.
Low PM count in his bedroom? Good for him, but try right after making your bed. Nobody is so perfectly defoliated that they don't have dust in their bedroom.
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.
hombre_fatal 3 hours ago [-]
I have a Winix air purifier from Costco in my bedroom, and it has a small air quality indicator light (blue -> yellow -> red) though I'm too lazy to look up what it's measuring.
Surprisingly, making the bed, shaking out the sheets, or vacuuming doesn't make it change color.
But farting in the room makes it red for minutes.
An ever amusing phenomenon that makes my girlfriend and I chuckle on a weekly basis.
jerlam 3 hours ago [-]
Winix air quality sensors (at least the ones I have) measure volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which is a little ironic since HEPA purifiers do little to remove VOCs from the air.
Some other air purifiers like Coways measure particle pollution.
adolph 11 minutes ago [-]
Winix and many other brands can be equipped with activated charcoal filters which do absorb VOCs.
For consumers looking for a way to remove VOCs in their homes and offices,
Kroll adds, “air cleaning using activated carbon filters, a tried-and-true
technology that doesn't rely on chemical reactions, is still the way to go.”
I've taken to performing much of my higher temperature (and presumably higher aerosolization) cooking outdoors. Mostly to reduce the heat load to my home, but also so I can smoke and fry and sear with abandon.
As a side effect, I now have a collection of very well seasoned cast iron.
kccqzy 2 hours ago [-]
I have a much cheaper Temtop unit in my kitchen. Its maximum reading for PM2.5 is 500. Usually if I apply too much heat it will stay at 500. And it detects PM2.5 way faster than my nose can smell smoke or burning.
ksab 7 hours ago [-]
As someone who once did lab-based cooking studies (with a mass spectrometer), you would be surprised what is emitted from frying with oil.
I suggest frying some bacon and report back.
koolba 3 hours ago [-]
> Something weird though is that turning on my extractor fan didn’t really do much. I need to look into that!
Where the device is relative to the pan and fan would clearly matter. It should be across the room to get a better estimate of the net effect. Not right next to the pan.
ssimpson 8 hours ago [-]
Not sure about yours, but many extractor (vent) fans will just suck the air over a very loose filter and throw it back into the room. Many in the US are part of the over stove microwave and rarely vent at more than 250cfm (~7 m3/min) where specific vent fans that go outside can move upwards of 700-800cfm (20m3/min).
tensorlibb 7 hours ago [-]
I've found just opening a window does the most to make a difference - in most European / US homes (even with propane / gas service) the "exhaust" just blows into the same room or a cabinet!
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 only externally-extracting fans were a codified standard for stove hoods in the way that bathroom fans and dryer vents are.
tensorlibb 7 hours ago [-]
It's actually just wild - my last apt in Manhattan was built in 2018 and had a gas range. The "exhaust fan" just vented back into the kitchen and the only "exhaust" per se was a vent in the bathroom that "sucked" all the way to the roof with negative pressure.
If I ran my stove for more than 15 min my carbon monoxide / fire alarm would go off.
amanaplanacanal 2 hours ago [-]
Wow! Do building codes allow that? I thought natural gas stoves had to be vented to outside.
alberth 3 hours ago [-]
Just having a natural gas stovetop will significantly worsen your homes indoor air quality.
People forget your breathing in the exhaust of burning a fossil fuel.
adolph 1 minutes ago [-]
Iirc, the primary problem with gas stoves is nitrogen oxides which are created by just about any burning process that uses atmosphere as the oxygen source since air is about 78% nitrogen. In other words, the problem doesn't have to do with the methane being a fossil fuel.
If we had stoves with a source of gaseous or liquid oxygen, then the NOx emissions would be greatly reduced.
Terretta 1 days ago [-]
This result runs contrary to my observations with a $750 German device selected based on reviews of the sensor used (and a roundup writeup about these air quality sensors that had been here on HN years back).
jstanley 9 hours ago [-]
What are your observations?
jawilson2 7 hours ago [-]
Contrary.
jstanley 5 hours ago [-]
You mean contrary to:
> PM2.5 peaks at 11 ug / m^3 and then comes down once I stop frying.
? Just saying "Contrary" doesn't give away much information.
It doesn't come down when you stop frying? It peaks at a different number? It never goes up at all? It actually goes down when you start frying?
HackerNewt-doms 7 hours ago [-]
What device exactly?
shireboy 8 hours ago [-]
Stealing from the comments: “I bet the eggs taste better”
asdff 3 hours ago [-]
The biggest surprise for me in this thread is that people actually like crispy eggs.
virtualbluesky 58 minutes ago [-]
It is possible to have both a crispy base and liquid yolk.
asdff 16 minutes ago [-]
I just find nothing palatable about the crispy edge. If it happens when I cook an egg I cut it off. It has no flavor beyond the oil it was cooked in and all the mouthfeel of an orange peel left in the sun for three weeks.
esafak 8 hours ago [-]
> Something weird though is that turning on my extractor fan didn’t really do much.
Was it one of those useless microwave ones?
ur-whale 8 hours ago [-]
Was this on an electric or a gas stove?
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
justinrubek 54 minutes ago [-]
I like eggs fried crispy. I like eggs fried in butter. Eggs fried gently and soft are luxurious. Oil cooked eggs are lovely. You can do it in a wok and get them puffy with a crispy bottom and a soft top. Or you can make the top crispy. Sometimes butter brings extra flavor when I really want the egg flavor. There are many valid ways to make eggs.
mikeyouse 7 hours ago [-]
Gas typically doesn’t result in too much pm2.5 - but you do get a lot of combustion byproducts that are similarly unhealthy in the form of NOx, benzenes and other VOCs.
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.
- Most days when cooking PM2.5 doesn't exceed 5ppm.
- I accidentally burned some vegetable oil this week, and PM2.5 shot up to around 70ppm.
- I fried up pancetta a little too hot a few months ago, rendering the fat entirely, and both PM2.5 and PM10 went up to >999ppm.
My instinct is that it should be less toxic from vegetable oil, if it's just vaporised... past the smoke point maybe the chemistry changes enough to make it more toxic. The body has mechanisms to remove foreign matter from the lungs, but how easily and how much it clogs up your lymph nodes seems to depend on what it's made of.
The air quality depends on exactly what you are cooking. Close the door if your cooking involves high heat, open it otherwise. And incidentally I don't understand why the author would do testing while frying an egg. Frying an egg does not involve high heat. High heat means getting close to or past the smoke point of your oil. I would not close the door when frying an egg.
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.
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?
Personally I would prefer a Chinese style kitchen with a fully enclosed cooking space (sliding glass doors to leave open if desired) and exterior ventilation. It keeps the worst of the aerosolized oil contained and away from the rest of the home.
On the flip side I am thinking about anything with high heat, meats and oil. The food will be delicious and the smell of the food is great but the smell from the cooking process is miserable and will linger.
Baby octopus fried in fish sauce stink, even with a vent fan.
Plenty of dishes, and entire cuisines, need good ventilation.
Cumin, Turmeric, hot onion and garlic just fragrant, butter, creams...
What do you think food should smell like? Boiled chicken? Do you have sensory issues?
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.
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.
If we can't come up with something a little more scientific I'm happy to send my wife over to do some cooking!
The effectiveness of the range hood directly impacts how close you can be to the stove before your eyes start burning and watering and you start coughing a lung out because you've effectively been hit with pepper spray.
In the worst case scenario (no range hood or ventilation), you'll probably want to evacuate the house.
As the person you replied to says as well, the popularity of "open concept" spaces contributes too. Even with poor ventilation, a kitchen with a door you can close helps limit how far the cooking byproducts reach.
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.)
Weird hill to defend when you don’t even have data. Maybe you did not like my analogy but it also matters how much you cook and what you are cooking. Hence why it can be more important in a Chinese household, lots of high heat cooking of meats including fish. So I can see the analogy failing in a household that does not cook often or cooks more tame items. If you frequently cook fish, or do any type of high heat, heck if you have done any cooking in a commercial kitchen before you quickly realize how inadequate the venting is even if it does go outside. Hence it can feel like you are cooking in your bedroom in a lot of western houses since they use an open floor plan with the kitchen. But ignore the analogy if you don’t like it!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10234804/?utm_sourc...
The link you've provided says nothing about hoods generally not being in western homes or make your analogy any more apt.
I never claimed hoods don’t exist, just that they’re often inadequate. And yes it’s wild to me that 10% of homes don’t have a hood and the other 30% or so are recirculating air which is close to the same. Whether the analogy clicks for you or not, it reflects the lived reality of anyone who cooks frequently (especially with high heat or strong flavors). That’s why Chinese-style kitchens, with closed layouts and strong direct venting, are so valued.
If your rebuttal boils down to “but bedrooms are for sleeping,” then maybe this discussion is not valuable.
Why do people insist on defending the oddest of hills over such a lived experience comment like the one I made. Now for sure if you rarely cook or if cooking is making Mac and cheese then sure this will be hard to understand.
I was trying to understand your analogy, because, having cooked in western kitchens and been in bedrooms (often in the same house!), it made no sense to me. It's not like people generally sleep in their kitchens. Your reasoning seems to be that cooking makes your house smell. Even if this is true, I still don't see how this makes your kitchen feel like your bedroom.
Then you talked about hoods, with an undefined "adequacy" measure. I correctly suspected here you were going to use this undefined adequacy measure to move away from the analogy about cooking in your bedroom (presumably because it is inexplainable) to start a separate argument and take it wherever you needed to. You found some study (about Canada, but there's a lot of "West") that talks about hoods (being found in 90% of homes). But you see, some of these hoods are not adequate enough... sigh
OK, all that is beside the point, because again, what does any of this business about hoods have to do with bedrooms?
If you can’t grasp that distinction after multiple explanations, then maybe the analogy isn’t the problem. Happy to discuss if you actually have anything constructive to add but please your beating a dead horse for no reason.
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. Don't get me wrong, the smell of good food is great, but not when it gets in your dresser full of clothes or when the house gets saturated with a cacophony of smells very difficult to remove.
If the exhaust mechanism is attached to an above the range microwave, it’s not adequate. And that is the vast majority of kitchens I see on Zillow, and I have probably sifted through thousands and thousands of houses.
A dedicated exhaust hood is seen in very few home listings, mostly in new higher end homes, or older renovated homes.
I am from the west, have lived all over the US and no there is not great data on the matter but I have historically had an interest on air quality and I cook a lot. There is some nuance to the data. 10% reported not having any hood. 26% of gas households were not vented. 36% of electric were not vented. You can start going down that path and also start seeing that most vented hoods are either inadequate or don’t properly cover the cooking area.
So I am not sure what you are trying to argue about? There is a non-trivial amount of homes in the US without proper ventilation. You can pull up Zillow almost anywhere in the country and easily find center island cooktops without hoods or down drafts. Or even more common a microwave recirculating that air.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10234804/?utm_sourc...
Try cooking with oil and you'll see PM levels go to enormous heights.
When I start cooking downstairs, within a minute or so I hear the purifier upstairs ramp up to full speed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempering_(spices)
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.
What i like about this device that they give a very precisce and clear physical definition of each metric and explain by what quantitative factors the metric is influenced.
incl. potential measurement error sources and ability's to reset sensors.
Definitely recommend this over other air quality devices that try to simplify all the measurements into good/bad..
(Note: Just a happy user no affiliation whatsoever with the company)
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.
A quick search brings up the CDC guidance, where they discuss air changes per hour for a room. This will be for HVAC units, which operate on a completely different magnitude of airflow compared to a kitchen extractor fan.
https://www.cdc.gov/infection-control/hcp/environmental-cont...
This also matches my experience in industrial applications, you only need a single failure point such as a spill or a large enough leak and ventilation alone is no longer enough to keep people safe. This is why it's worth considering a glove box/isolator. You could make the argument that a glove box can also leak and I'm starting to sound like a safety engineer. Anyway at home either will be fine with outside ventilation being superior if done right.
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.
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?
0. https://www.co2meter.com/blogs/news/co2-carbon-dioxide-detec...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_chromatography%E2%80%93mas...
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.
Surprisingly, making the bed, shaking out the sheets, or vacuuming doesn't make it change color.
But farting in the room makes it red for minutes.
An ever amusing phenomenon that makes my girlfriend and I chuckle on a weekly basis.
Some other air purifiers like Coways measure particle pollution.
As a side effect, I now have a collection of very well seasoned cast iron.
I suggest frying some bacon and report back.
Where the device is relative to the pan and fan would clearly matter. It should be across the room to get a better estimate of the net effect. Not right next to the pan.
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.
0 - https://amzn.to/423AAaj
If I ran my stove for more than 15 min my carbon monoxide / fire alarm would go off.
People forget your breathing in the exhaust of burning a fossil fuel.
If we had stoves with a source of gaseous or liquid oxygen, then the NOx emissions would be greatly reduced.
> PM2.5 peaks at 11 ug / m^3 and then comes down once I stop frying.
? Just saying "Contrary" doesn't give away much information.
It doesn't come down when you stop frying? It peaks at a different number? It never goes up at all? It actually goes down when you start frying?
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