It’s been a few years since I built my last house and having to now navigate the new California Energy Codes is causing some anxiety. Any new construction in California since 2020 is being required to install a certain amount of solar on their house. It seems like a good first step to eventually making all new houses energy neutral. California’s next step is to ban natural gas in new homes so that houses can rely completely on their own green generation. Many Bay Area cities have already implemented the elimination of all gas appliances (furnaces and water heaters) on new construction with the exception of cooktops and gas fireplaces. I also recently found out that gas cooking is actually quite harmful to indoor air quality so that seems to be swaying me towards electric cooking.
In order to heat a house without a gas furnace, the current energy-efficient electric method is a heat pump. A heat pump is like a A/C condensing unit in that it separates the heat and the cool from the air and puts the appropriate air in your house to heat it or cool it. For heating, it’s great because it isn’t combusting natural gas and is putting cool air (instead of warm air and carbon dioxide) back into the planet as long as it’s coupled with solar. It’s a drop in the bucket for sure, but it doesn’t hurt.
In order to heat water without gas, you can get an electric tankless water heater which uses a heating element and a very large and potentially costly electrical hookup. This requires a large electrical panel and large wires going to the heater. One alternative I’m considering is installing multiple point-of-use tankless water heaters in each general room that requires hot water. This should decrease your plumbing installation costs but increase your electrical installation costs. The other alternative is a good old tank water heater that uses a heat pump to heat the water. I’m leaning towards the electric tank water heater.
As we are all busy and don’t like to wait for our stoves to heat up, induction heating will probably be the way to go. You are limited on the types of pots and pans you can use, but who uses glass, copper, and aluminum pots and pans anyway?
The final gas-consuming appliance is the fireplace. If that is the only gas requirement, I’m seriously considering whether it makes sense to have a gas line installed to the house. When you demolish your house, PG&E requires that you request a gas cutoff and they permanently cap off your gas line near the gas main in order to make the demolition safe. When you have a gas line put back to the new house, they require a very specially certified and trained contractor dig a big hole near the gas main and trench from the gas main to the house. Then you are at the mercy of PG&E when and for how much they can install the line to your house and then eventually the meter. Typically, PG&E gas is the worst part of any new build in my opinion. The overall cost to get a gas line from the gas main to the house and then to the fireplace and then install a gas fireplace is likely to be $30K to $35K. It hardly seems worth it for a house feature I rarely use. I do worry that the house will look odd without a fireplace so I’m inclined to use a modern electrical fireplace which seems to have a more realistic appearance these days and they are a lot less than a gas fireplace.
Not having gas also eliminates the ability to have a natural gas grill outside for BBQing and a fire pit. You could use 5 gallon tanks for that, but it’s a bit of a hassle. Overall, I’m still on the fence but leaning towards going with no gas, which I guess is the intended purpose of the new laws.