How a former Facebook engineer designed an induction stove that also stores energy for the grid
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How a former Facebook engineer designed an induction stove that also stores energy for the grid
By Adele Peters
Four years ago, engineer Sam D’Amico was working at Facebook on its mixed-reality headset. But D’Amico, who loves to cook, started thinking about how he could apply his skills to something very different: designing a better stove.
In 2021, he left his job to launch a startup called Impulse, and he began working with a team on a new induction stove that could help convince consumers to ditch their gas ranges—and as a bonus, help add energy storage to the grid.
The problems with gas stoves keep getting more obvious as new studies come out. Cooking with gas can emit more benzene, a carcinogen, than smoking cigarettes. Stoves also emit other pollutants, including nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and methane, a potent greenhouse gas. (Even when your stove is off, it still leaks pollution into your indoor air.)
Induction stoves, which run on electricity and use an electromagnetic field to heat pans, avoid those problems. But some cooks are hesitant to make the switch because they’re convinced that gas is better. That’s thanks in part to the gas industry, which has spent decades pushing the idea that gas stoves are superior. Still, Impulse realized that there were ways to change the experience of using an induction cooktop so that it could more clearly outperform gas.
First, thanks to a battery inside, the new cooktop is more powerful.
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Arun Malyala