The Issue:

Ovens and stoves can be dangerous home appliances. They can get extremely hot and they typically operate completely silently. This makes it easy for people to forget that they left the stove on!

Interestingly, a similar issue exists for electric cars: they’re SO quiet at low speeds (as compared to a gas engine) that people typically can’t hear them moving around a parking lot or backing out of a driveway.

Proposal:

For cars, the solution turned out to be simple: just have the car emit a distinctive “pedestrian notification” noise when the car is traveling at low speeds (usually this is a “hum” that sounds like a science fiction spaceship sound).

For the oven / stove, we can do the same thing! Just have a speaker on the stove that makes a “crackling fire” sound (Fig. 1) to indicate that the oven / stove is on.

Conclusion:

Is this another rare “actually-plausible” idea without any dangerous downsides? You be the judge!

PROS: Provides an immediately intuitive notification that the stove is on. Might prevent people from accidentally burning their houses down.

CONS: Without the natural turnover of housing stock caused by burned-down homes due to inattentive stove usage, maybe cities would find themselves stuck with a lot of ancient, drafty, earthquake-unsafe, falling-apart houses. This could be like the equivalent of entirely removing predators from an ecosystem.

Originally published 2026-01-19.