Electricity Saving Tips For The Kitchen
When it comes to using electricity saving tips in the home, it helps to take things one step at a time. Even small measures all add up to reduce your bills, keep more money in your pocket and help save the environment. Your kitchen is one of the areas of the home where you use the most energy, so here are a few tips for cutting down on the electricity you use.
Your Refrigerator
Although it may seem obvious, be careful not to leave the doors of your refrigerator open for longer than you need. Of course, this is easier said than done when you have kids. The longer you keep the refrigerator doors open when you’re looking inside, the more it’s going to have to work to get back down to its original cold temperature.
Some other methods that will stop it working too hard include not overfilling your refrigerator (although your freezer won’t mind being packed to the gills), making sure that the door doesn’t leak any cold air and not placing it near any direct sources of heat or in a sunny area of the kitchen.
When You’re Cooking
There are so many electricity saving tips for cooking that won’t negatively impact the way you cook but can make a huge difference when it comes to saving energy. When you’re using pans to do your cooking, make sure you always cover them for the most efficient heating. Even if you’re just trying to get the water to boil, covering the pot will help it heat up faster. You should also match the size of the pan to the size of the coil heating it.
Cooking food in bulk is a fantastic way to save both time and energy. You can simply freeze the leftovers and save them for those evenings where you don’t have time to cook a whole meal from scratch.
Another way to save energy is to try cooking more one-pot dishes. This means that everything is cooked in the same container, making it easier to cook yet saving electricity at the same time. Or use a pressure cooker to speed up cooking times for certain meals.
Other great electricity saving tips include turning off the burners just before food is finished cooking. The residual heat of electric burners will keep on cooking it for you. This works especially well with pasta: simply get it to boiling point, place a lid on the pan, turn off the burner and leave it to cook for as long as the instructions state.
Using the Oven
If you’re using the oven, don’t keep opening the door to check it’s ready. This can reduce the temperature by 25 degrees each time, meaning your oven will need to use more energy to heat back up again. If your oven is electric, then you can use the same tip as above and turn it off when the food is nearly done. The oven will stay hot for 10 minutes and keep cooking the food.
As you can see, none of these electricity saving tips involve you sacrificing your favorite meals. They just mean thinking ahead a little and getting into new habits that will soon become second nature. When you see how much difference they can make to your energy bills, you’ll be wondering why you didn’t try them sooner!
Unused Appliances
If you aren’t actually using your appliances, unplug them! Pull the plug on the coffee maker or toaster. It’s been shown that many appliances suck small amounts of electricity even when not in use. So unplug those suckers and save a little money along the way.
These are all great tips, many of them new to me. Thank you!
These are excellent tips. Also don’t forget to unplug your unused appliances.
Absolutely! I forgot to include that one because I just do it without thinking!
These are some really amazing tips. I do a lot of things throughout the rest of my home but never truly focused on the kitchen. Thanks so much for sharing them with us at The Mommy Monday Blog Hop.
These are excellent tips! Thank you!
These are great tips–I’m going to have to unplug the toaster! Thanks for linking up with the Bloggers Brags Pinterest Party. I have pinned your post to the Bloggers Brags Pinterest Board!
Tammy — the toaster is an easy one to miss, right? Thanks for the pin!
Great tips. If our freezer is running a little low we add a few water bottles to fill the gaps and to help the freezer work more efficiently.
Using a full sized oven to cook with also eats electricity, so I invested in a halogen oven and now only use the large oven when I need. A three tiered steamer pan also helps to cut energy consumption. I can manage to cook a roast for four people using the halogen and the three tiered steamer pan and our electricity bill has noticeably reduced. I would recommend anyone looking to lower their electricity bills to give it a try, They won’t be disappointed.
Wow. Those are some great additional ideas! Thanks for sharing, Debbie.