We’re all looking for ways to save money and consume fewer resources for a greener planet. Some of the ways to save energy, like turning the thermostat up or down, seem fairly obvious and don’t feel as if we’re doing enough. One great way to amplify your efforts is to look room by room at how you can save energy. This article tackles perhaps the most energy-hungry room in your home – the kitchen. Here are five cooking tips to save energy in the kitchen:
#1 Use the right size pan for the cooking job and make sure to match it to the right sized burner. It may sound silly but you can waste a lot of time and energy trying to boil a giant-size pot of potatoes on an itty bitty burner. And you can waste a tremendous amount of energy warming up a small pan of sauce on a giant burner. If you can see more than a half inch of overlap, either the pan overlapping the burner or the burner overlapping the pan, see if there’s a better fit.
Additionally, if you only have to boil three potatoes you don’t need to get out the giant 5-quart pot. And if you have to boil twenty potatoes, you absolutely do need a large pot with an appropriate amount of water – just enough to cover the tops so you don’t have to spend too much time and energy warming all that water.
#2 Don’t preheat your oven. Have you ever been pressed for time and just shoved that tray of chocolate chip cookies in an oven that hasn’t been preheated? What happened? Presumably you may have had to add one or two minutes to the cook time but it certainly didn’t add ten minutes or more to the cook time. With many ovens it takes 10-15 minutes to warm up to 350 degrees, and that’s wasted energy. Don’t waste your time and energy preheating, get those cookies in the oven and enjoy!
#3 Use smaller appliances for smaller jobs. If you’re making an open-faced sandwich, warming up leftovers or eating those frozen and ready-to-cook cookies, then skip the oven and use your toaster oven instead. It uses less energy to heat up. Additionally, your microwave can be used to steam, reheat and even to make eggs, melt chocolate and warm up canned foods in much less time and with much less energy.
#4 When you are making soups, stews and even some barbecue recipes or roasts, consider using a slow cooker instead of cooking them for hours on top of the stove. Slow cookers use less energy and you can cook your meals during low energy times in your home. For example, if you’re using the air conditioner during the day and also cooking, you’re going to make your a/c work harder because your cooking will add heat to the home. However, if you can cook your roast overnight when you’re a/c isn’t running as hard then you’re saving energy.
#5 Grab your mother’s pressure cooker and embrace it for its amazing power to cook foods in a tenth of the time. However, if your mother’s old pressure cooker scares the heck out of you, the newer models are significantly safer.
You can save a tremendous amount of energy focusing your attentions and habits on one room at a time. And what better place to start than in the kitchen, the core of your home and probably your biggest user of energy.
Programmable thermostats are quite possibly your single biggest tool to conserve energy and to reduce your utility expense each month. In addition to those marvelous benefits of saving energy and money, programmable thermostats offer a number of additional perks.
Benefits of Programmable Thermostats
* Typically, you will save about $150 each year on your heating and cooling bill, and you can save more depending on how you program your thermostat.
* Programmable thermostats are more earth friendly because they don’t contain any mercury.
* When you use a programmable thermostat, you will use less energy to heat or cool your home and therefore you’ll reduce your carbon footprint – fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
* For homeowners who work outside the home during the day and have a different schedule on the weekend, a programmable thermostat can offer many benefits. On the other hand, if you are home throughout the day, seven days a week, then a programmable thermostat will offer more limited benefits.
* Programmable thermostats remove the work from heating and cooling your home. Once you’ve programmed your thermostat, you can adopt a hands-off approach and know you’re going to be comfortable while saving money and energy – it’s extremely convenient and efficient.
* Programmable thermostats can be programmed differently for each day of the week. This is wonderfully convenient if you work from home two days a week and would like it to be warmer or cooler at that time. On the days when you’re out of the home during the day you can set your thermostat lower during the winter and higher during the summer to save more money.
You don’t need the temperature to be 70 during the winter if you’re not home; you can let it drop to 65 or even cooler and then set your thermostat to warm up your home when you’re scheduled to arrive.
* Programmable thermostats have override features, which allow you to modify your program temporarily. This is convenient if for example, you don’t go into work as you would normally and you wish to warm or cool the house to a more temperate level than if you weren’t at home. You simply set the temperature you want it to be and it will stay there until your next scheduled temperature change.
If, for example, you have your thermostat scheduled to warm the house from 63 degrees at 9am to 68 at 5pm then your override will hold until 5pm at which point it will switch to the new program.
Many programmable thermostats also offer a hold feature that allows you to simply set the temperature and keep it there until you change it. This might be used if you’re going on vacation and don’t need your home’s temperature to fluctuate. If you’re taking a vacation during the winter, for example, you can simply hold your home’s temperature at 55 degrees Fahrenheit and know that your pipes won’t freeze and you won’t be wasting energy and money while you’re gone.
Programmable thermostats are great for saving money on your heating and cooling bills and they’re extremely earth friendly. In addition to those two primary benefits, programmable thermostats provide a convenience unrivaled by standard thermostats which require you to adjust them each time you wish to change the temperature in your home.
