[bennelson]

I had a similar experience.

When we first moved in to our house, it had a very old electric oven, which we immediately replaced with a gas oven and range.

I was also surprised that, yes, it uses something like 400 watts. I think that on my oven, that glow bar isn't on constantly, but it is on to start and then I think it may cycle on and off a bit while baking.

Overall, I really like the gas oven and range. It's just nicer to cook with real fire and have very fine control over the flame, and you can SEE what the heat is doing.

My range uses a piezo-spark start for the burners. I believe that in an electrical power outage, I could still use the range. The burner controls physically control the gas, and I could match light the burners.

It might be fun sometime to simply unplug the appliance and play around with testing how it would (or wouldn't) work in a power outage.