If you’re like many Americans, you have a desire to “Go Green” in your home, but lack the knowledge of how to do it without spending thousands of dollars in the process. In this article, I will show you several energy efficiency strategies that cost little to no money to do and save you hundreds of dollars when you do them:
Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #1
Boil only the amount of water you are going to use – by only filling your kettle or pot with the amount of water you actually need every time you will reduce wasted energy in heating more water than you need or use. If your family did this for one week it would save enough energy to light up your house for a day, or run your TV set every evening for a week.
Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #2
Keep a lid on all the pans being used in cooking – that’s because water will boil around 6% faster in pans with a lid on, thereby saving time, electricity and your money, as well as giving the environment a break.
Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #3
When you cook in the oven, keep the door closed – nearly every modern oven has a see-through door to let you see what’s happening inside. Use it! Around 20% of oven heat is lost every time the door is opened. If you’re trying to bake a cake, for example, and you keep opening the door to see how it’s getting on, then you are cooking at 80% of the correct temperature, while wasting energy and money!
Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #4
Stop using commercial cleaning products in your kitchen – these cleaners are expensive to buy and expensive to produce. You can make your own cleaner from a mixture of vinegar, salt and baking soda. It will clean perfectly, and it will contain no toxic chemicals, thereby helping the environment. It will cost a great deal less too. Not convinced? Think about this… We dump some 32 million pounds of damaging toxins down our drains every year, just from household and kitchen cleaning products alone.
Here’s another simple recipe for an all-purpose cleaner, courtesy of Greenpeace:
½ cup pure liquid soap
1 gallon hot water
¼ cup lemon juice
Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #5
Switch from sponges to brushes – if you use one of those sponges with a plastic scrub pad on one side for a week or so you and throw it away and start using a new one – you’re just throwing money away each time you replace it. Consider using something more permanent that will last a very long time, and will get the dirt off too. A good old-fashioned scrubbing brush will do that. It will last for months, if not years, and it can be recycled over and over again.
Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #6
Stop preheating your oven – you’ve been taught by cookbooks and by following package directions to preheat. You don’t have to pre-heat an oven for every dish, unless for bread and pastries. Just shove the dish in the oven and switch on, setting it at the right temperature. Use that preheat time to cook your food and simply adjust the amount of time down from the package times. Your food will cook just as evenly and you’ll save money in the process.
Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #7
Eat at home more often – Americans eat out on average around five times a week! Meals that are prepared commercially are costly and many contain chemicals, ingredients, and preservatives that really aren’t good for you. You could find yourself saving around $100 a month from eating more meals at home. By eating more organic foods in the process you will not only save money but reduce the number of hormones and unwanted chemicals entering your family’s bodies.
Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #8
Eat more fruits and vegetables – you can save around $2,000 a year on health costs on average by simply eating enough fruit and vegetables. Here’s how – the average weighted price of fresh vegetables is around 64 cents per pound and the average weighted price of fresh fruit is around 71 cents per pound. The average price of a pound of beef is around $4.15.
Not only is this healthier for you, but is helps the environment too – A lot of the costs are in bringing the end product to the market. Vegetables and fruit are cheaper to produce. Their production is less harmful to the environment too. Consider also that vegetables are plants and most fruits grow on trees, which both absorb CO2 and give out oxygen. Cattle, pigs and sheep don’t do that. In fact, they do the opposite. Cattle especially produce a lot of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #9
Feed you family pot roast – consider that cooking a chicken in a slow cooker for seven or eight hours uses one third of the energy that cooking it in an oven does. The same applies to any meat you might want to cook, as well as vegetables and whatever else you can think of. If you have cheap electricity at night, which is common in some places, then make use of it to slowly cook something overnight to save even more money.
Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #10
Feed your family Organic foods – besides reducing the hormones, chemicals, and pesticides from your diet, the carbon dioxide (CO2) effects are dramatic as well. CO2 is captured and stored in organic soils much better and more effectively than in ordinary soils. This makes organic foods much more friendly to the planet. If we grew all our corn and all our soybeans in organic conditions, some 580 BILLION tons of CO2 would no longer be pumped out into the atmosphere.
Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #11
Stop throwing away food – Americans have a wasteful habit of serving up too much food. This leads to an amazing amount of waste. On average, 30% to 50% of the food we buy gets dumped! And that’s whether we eat at home or eat out. Americans throw away a mind-numbing 14 million tons of food a year! That works out at about 100 pounds a year for each of us just dumped in the garbage can.
Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #12
Drinking water doesn’t need to come from a bottle – if you buy drinking water in small plastic bottles, you could be throwing away a whopping $1,400 on average every year! Worse than that, only around 5% of the empty plastic bottles ever get recycled. That means 95% of them end up in landfills. Instead, uou could invest around $100 for a multi-stage water filter to fit to your existing water supply. It’s already safe to drink, but this will make it taste great – every bit as good as bottled water, and you’ll save around $1,300 a year on average. If you still need to carry water in bottles, consider using reusable bottles. You can get stainless steel water bottles, for example, that will last a lifetime. Consider this: Americans burn some 1.5 million barrels of oil every year just to produce all the plastic bottles of water we use. How many cars would that power for a year? Around 100,000! That’s the number of cars in a fair-sized city.
Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #13
Put a sink faucet aerator to the kitchen sink – this will reduce the amount of water you use. Some 15% of the average household’s water consumption goes on faucet use. A faucet aerator provides water under increased pressure, but less of it, so it does a similar job. It gives you a needle spray pattern that’s actually more efficient too. Cost to buy? Minimal. Benefit to your pocket and the environment? Immense!
Those are just a few of the many energy saving options you can easily incorporate into your daily lives. Just remember that it doesn’t have to cost you a lot to save you a lot when you make your kitchen more energy efficient. Obviously upgrading your kitchen appliances will help save you money as well, but that’s a whole different article.
Help Others Save Energy
One way you can help other is to become an Energy Auditor. If you’ve ever thought about having a “Green Career” now is a great time to get started. The Energy Audit Institute is now offering online training programs in Home Energy Auditing. You can get trained and certified in this “in-demand” career field in about about 2 weeks for less than $250. Learn more about getting started at the Energy Audit Institute.
Angie has over 5 years experience in Internet marketing and is currently the Affiliate Manger for the Energy Audit Institute. Her in depth knowledge of Energy Audit Training and Energy Audit Certification enables her to create dynamic marketing content and drive industry awareness to the fastest growing online energy audit training company.