A Polish firm is marketing an innovative kitchen appliance - a gas stove that has no open flame and looks almost exactly like its electrical cousin.

The "gas-under-glass" stove is made in a plant in Swidnica, south-west Poland, and has already found customers at home and abroad thanks to its efficiency, which inventors say is 50 per cent higher than traditional gas stoves.

The president of Solgaz, the firm behind the invention, explained that this is achieved thanks to very effective burning of the gas inside the stove.

"Inside there are highly effective, catalytic gas burners which burn the gas superbly. Their unique feature is that the combustion of gas occurs at a very high temperature, about 800 degrees (Celsius). Therefore the gas burns completely, it burns very accurately, and harmful gases such as carbon monoxide or nitrogen oxides are not produced," Mieczyslaw Kaczmarczyk said.

Emission levels for harmful substances from the combustion of gas can be 10 times lower than norms for open-flame gas stoves and gas consumption is reduced by up to 50 per cent, the company's engineers say.

Initially, the stove was designed by a former engineer of the company for his wife, but the solution proved so effective that after several years of tests and research it was adopted for production.

"An important aspect here is safety because inside we have applied two kinds of security measures. The first is as in any ordinary gas stove and the second is an electronic protection against gas leaks which constantly checks if the gas is being extracted and whether it is burning at that moment. If these two things do not work the whole stove shuts down and starts beeping," Solgaz marketing manager Jakub Biel said, adding that the stove also shuts off automatically if a pot boils over.

The stove can be used anywhere where supplying the current needed for an electrical stove might be difficult - such as older buildings where the infrastructure doesn't allow it, or in places that use gas as the main heating source.

"The ordinary user is our greatest market, a person who has a kitchen and just wants to cook something at home," Kaczmarczyk said. "But they are also suitable for yachts, suitable for caravans, so here we also have customers from this segment."

Original Article from: Reuters