gas range hack for greater power output: does it work?

This seems nonsensical to try with your home stove. You are correct, the rate of gas output is directly controlled by the knobs. In a typical home stove, drilling holes will not increase the gas output. It would affect the gas to air ratio, but I doubt it would result in an increase of temperature, and more likely a decrease.

Shopsin talks about this in his book, Eat Me, The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin. You can see it in this excerpt on Amazon. On his custom stove, described in that excerpt, it is certainly possible that when the knob is turned on all the way, the volume of gas coming out was still limited by the size of the flame holes, so that drilling it out allowed more gas to flow and thus a higher flame. And this is probably an extremely dangerous thing to do on your home stove.

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, unless you are prepared to put out a big fire. I have tried this at home and it does work. I love to cook in a wok, but traditional stoves don't make this easy. Traditional western stoves are made to cook with traditional flat bottomed pans, not round bottomed woks. So to make wok cooking more enjoyable I have modified my outdoor, dirty kitchen stove.

The stove I have outside is hooked up to the same gas source as the one inside my indoor kitchen. What makes this stove a bit different from the one inside, is one can take off the cast iron covers to the burners. Thus allowing the gas to come out as one big flame instead of being spread out for a flat bottomed pan. The problem is that the fire is not really controllable and is very easily blown out if too high, too low or just a sudden gust of wind blows the flame out.

The pro is that one can cook in a round bottomed wok, on a western gas stove with just a modified wok ring and a ton of fire coming out. It really puts out a lot of heat, but since it is outside, I don't worry about too much smoke or being too enclosed that makes the oil vapours dangerous. I also have my trusty fire extinguisher, wok cover and water at the ready to put out any unwanted fire. I'm not encouraging this particular modification on your stove at home.

It would most likely be unsafe, but, most stoves do have a small brass nozzle which limits the flow of gas at the point before it mixes with air, under the the aluminum disk which has the multiple holes where the gas/air mixture comes out.

If you are not adverse to the risk, and you are careful enough to make a very slight change when you increase the hole size (presumably by drilling it out with a drill bit very slightly larger than the hole) - well then the answer is that you could probably increase the flame size/BTU output on a home gas range.

This is the sort of thing that I would try myself, but not recommend to others.

Before I do try it, I think I want to order a "replacement" of the little brass nozzle so that I know I have a spare before I potentially ruin a burner on my nice new stove.

I've read about people doing this and succeeding, but, one guy said "if I try to run the stove with the burner turned up all the way now the flames are about two feet high". Most people's range hoods are not going to be safe with 2 foot high flames shooting out of their stove!

I really hope nobody burns their house down trying something like this. There are laws limiting the output of the burners on "home" stoves and there are safety codes regulating the installation of higher capacity "professional" stoves that home buyers do sometimes purchase for home use. For one thing, the higher output commercial stoves are supposed to be installed further away from the back wall, require certain types of ventilation hoods, etc. The law may even require some type of automatic/emergency fire extinguisher equipment also be installed wherever such stoves are installed.

Tried it, it works. You need to disassemble the burner. In my case, there are porcelain-coated metal disks which sit on an aluminum piece (which contains the sparking ignitor and has slots to distribute the gas). The metal disk lifts off, and two screw can be removed, freeing the aluminum piece. This reveals a small nozzle recessed in the stove top. In the center, you can see a brass nut with a small hole in the center. Using a drill bit that is almost the same size as the hole (it's really quite small, so small changes are significant), bore the hole. Reassemble the burner, and ignite. Carefully.

There are probably some limitations on how much gas you can efficiently mix with air, and the way my burners are designed, at high flow, flames shoot out horizontally. This causes the flame to spread too much to use on anything but really big pans.

I think the next step is to fabricate a better metal plate to better direct the flames, especially around the center of larger pots/pans. On the plus side, using a wok works fairly well, although I think the flames spread more than is ideal. I can brown steaks pretty well though.

There is a mathematical formula called "The Hanson Theorum" basically it's the calculating the area of a circle, very accurate without the use of Pi.

Imagine a pipe with a 10cm in diameter bore, well the calculation is 10 x 10 (to get the square of the bore) and multiply it by "The Hanson Theorum" which is 0.78.

The calculation is 10 squared x 0.78 to get 78 square centimeters of bore area.

If your gas jet is say 0.3mm we can create a higher gas flow, by boring that jet out to a slightly larger size with either a specialist drill size or some fine guitar wire... This will increase the gas flow, but at the same pressure. The regulator, should be able to cope with a 20 - 30% greater flow....

So lets assume the jet is 0.3mm - so .3×.3×.78 = 0.07mm square of jet bore area

Now if we want to increase the flow rate, by 20% - that means we need to figure out what a jet bore 20% larger is IN AREA, not diameter, the simple maths.

(10 + 2) x 7 = 0.084 of area, and converting that back to diameter, it's 0.084 =

0.327×0.327×.78 =

My brain is tired.... So you have to increase the jet size from 0.3mm to 0.327 mm in diameter.

OK you can drill them out - with a special drill or you can scrap them out with a piece of 0.009" or 0.23mm steel guitar wire... with a diagonally cut end, and a small drilling machine etc.. and just scrape away - you will get the technique... or you can hammed the wire into a square or rectangular shape....

Since you really are ONLY reboring it by a hair or two's increase in diameter.... it's not much and then you can see if your stove works well. Try to make the issue of small shavings in terms of rejetting the stove, rather than way too big.

If you go too big first go, your regulator may not flow that amount of gas AND OR your you may need to enlargen the air mixing stage, to get a hot clean flame, instead of a sooty yellow flame...

Yellow flames also produce Carbon Monoxide which is lethal in significant amounts in confined spaces.... and people under some conditions - like it's freezing cold, they are in a snow storm and the only place to cook is inside the little tent...

My little butane can single burner portable camping stove - on cold days like 10C, the burning rate which is based upon the boiling rate of the gas, which slows down as the evaporating gas, chills the liquid gas, so it cools and boils off at an incrediby slow rate, which means cooking a big meal in a pot takes 10 x as long as cooking on a 35C day.... So I need to fiddle with the jet a little to increase the rate of gas flow and not fiddle around much to make the stove improvements into a major engineering project, rather than a simple improvement.

Stoves are different, our frigidaire has removable jets below the burner plates((propane or natural)). You could increase them slightly however you may lose the ability to simmer if drilled out to large.