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Would you ditch your gas hob over health, fire and emission worries?
The writer had simmering gas-pollution concerns, but what made her get rid of the gas cylinder was another sort of threat.
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Scientists warned that gas can produce pollutants like nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide and more.
PHOTO: UNSPLASH
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I was just a bit taller than a gas stove when I first learnt how to light one. It smelled like rotting vegetables, sulphur and fear as I nervously struck a match after turning the knob to let the hob exhale from its gas-cylinder lung.
That’s the way it was manually lit back then, not with the safer electric igniter, but with a naked flame on a matchstick held by a child to combustible gas. To avoid wasting a single matchstick, I was also taught to light it with a flame borrowed from a lit burner with a twist of old newspaper.

