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When it comes to designing a green kitchen, evaluating stove cooktops for their energy efficiency can cause you to make a decision between convenience or your preferred method of cooking and being eco-friendly. But, if you really want to conserve energy and help to reduce your carbon footprint, your stove cooktop is something you need to consider in your kitchen design.

Unless you are going to cook in your fireplace over an open flame, you’ve got to consider the energy usage of the model of stove or cooktop that you buy. Most cooks prefer a gas cook top. With gas, the heat is easier to control and this can make cooking a lot easier.

However, gas stoves are powered by natural gas which is a fossil fuel and, as we know, fossil fuels are not that environmentally friendly. On the other hand, the electricity that powers electric cook tops comes mainly from coal burning power plants which, once again, are not that environmentally friendly. So, what’s an environmentally sympathetic cook to do?

When it comes right down to it, choosing stoves and cooktops that are practical and good for the environment boils down to one thing – the efficiency of energy usage.

Which Stove Cooktops Are Most Energy Efficient?

When looking for energy efficiency, the electric cooktops are going to beat the gas ones hands-down. They are simply more efficient, so if the environment is tops on your list, go with electric.

But, there are many different types of electric cooktops that you’ll need to evaluate for your green kitchen. In today’s electric cooktops, there are many choices between the surface elements. These include induction elements, halogen elements and the traditional electric coil that seemed to be almost old-fashioned today. Each of these has it’s advantages and disadvantages and they are not all equal when it comes to energy efficiency.

Needless to say, the newer technology cooktops are going to be more costly but they will also be more energy-efficient. The induction stove is the most energy-efficient because it transfers energy electromagnetically right to your pan. Of course, these are the highest priced.

The ceramic glass cooktops that use halogen elements are the next best when it comes to using energy, however if you don’t have very flat pans, you will be wasting energy because they do not work efficiently if there isn’t good pan to cooktop contact.

The least expensive – the electric coils are also the least energy-efficient not to mention the least attractive so please cross these right off your list when shopping for new cooktops for your kitchen!

When considering stove cooktops for your kitchen, you’re going to have to weigh your budget with your desire to lower your carbon footprint. Just like most things in life, you have to compromise to achieve your goals. Going with a higher-priced and more efficient model might cost you more upfront but can save on your energy expense as well as your impact to the environment over time.

Technorati Tags: Cooktops, efficient, energy, green, guide, Kitchen, Stove

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.

Technorati Tags: efficient, energy, Kitchen, Simple, Steps

Using environmentally friendly cleaning products, recycling and using biodegradable bin liners are just a few ways families are going green in the kitchen. However one of the most important, and significant changes many households are making is buying and using energy efficient kitchen appliances.

For many families, the kitchen is the room in the house where the most energy is consumed. Refrigerators, cookers, ovens, dishwashers and other kitchen appliances can account for nearly 40% of the total energy consumed in some homes. Buying energy efficient appliances, and changing the way kitchen appliances are used on a daily basis can easily make the kitchen a greener place.

Once you make the decision to buy kitchen appliances, for your new eco-friendly kitchen, it’s important that you consider the size of the kitchen appliances. Many families buy oversized kitchen appliances that they don’t need and end up wasting energy in the process. Larger kitchen appliances with lots of features can be very tempting. However if you have a small family, it’s best to buy energy efficient kitchen appliances that will fit your family’s needs, rather than opting for larger models. You’ll save space, money and you’ll be helping to save the environment too.

Dishwashers are great for convenience, but it’s important that you use them wisely. Did you know that many of the newer, more energy efficient dishwashers use less water than old models? Additionally, many of them are engineered so that you don’t have to waste additional water rinsing your dishes before you place them into the dishwasher. When buying an energy efficient dishwasher, choose a compact model, and remember to run it only when it’s full to help save both energy and water.

It’s imperative for families that cook often to use energy efficient appliances. Using kitchen appliances such as cookers and ovens can require a great deal of energy. When possible, use microwaves or other smaller kitchen appliances to prepare or heat food. And if you need to boil water, try using more practical smaller kitchen appliances such as a cordless kettle, rather than utilizing the cooker.

Do you still use an oven that requires preheating? Most newer models have made preheating a thing of the past, thus just one of the ways energy efficient ovens can help you reduce energy consumption. And remember, when it’s time to use the oven, always try to cook more than one dish.

Another great kitchen appliance to consider when going green is a range hood. A range hood can help with the ventilation in your home, and keep the air in your kitchen cleaner. Clean air is essential in any eco-friendly environment.

When considering buying new kitchen appliances, the first thing that probably comes to mind is the price tag. While purchasing energy efficient appliances can be a significant investment initially, you’ll see the savings instantly on your energy bill and save even more in the long run. Energy efficient appliances can save you between 10 – 50% in monthly energy costs. So in reality, by purchasing energy efficient appliances you’re not only doing your part to help protect the environment, you’re also saving a substantial sum on energy costs too.

Technorati Tags: Appliances, efficient, energy, green, Kitchen

Start making your effort to reduce your carbon footprint and save money at the same time. If you’re shopping for a new dishwasher, cooker, fridge freezer or oven, always look for the Energy Saving Recommended logo. They will cost less to run and help reduce carbon emissions.

Refrigeration – Side by side fridge freezers use more energy than similarly sized models with the freezer on top, even if they both carry the ENERGY STAR on board. The government holds the two categories to different standards, allowing side-by-sides to use 10-30% more energy. Icemakers and through-the-door ice also add to energy consumption.

In cooking, when it comes to choosing the fuel type, gas is usually preferable to electricity as a heating fuel. But because cooking doesn’t make a huge overall impact on your energy bill, this choice has more to do with your own preference. Many people find that gas offers better cooking control; however, it also introduces combustion products into the house that must be vented to the outside. Be sure to purchase an energy-efficient range hood that vents cooking products up from the cooktop and directly outside (avoid down-draft vents).

The EU Energy Rating measures energy efficiency on a seven point scale from A (most efficient) to G (least efficient). The rating covers a variety of household appliances including fridges, freezers and fridge-freezers, washing machines, electric tumble driers, combined washer-driers, lamps, electric ovens and air conditioners. By law, all retailers in the EU must display an energy efficiency rating on these products. A product with an A rating will have passed a rigorous, impartial testing procedure, so you can be sure of its high energy efficiency.

If everyone in the UK upgraded their old refrigeration appliance to an A-rated, energy efficient product, energy wastage would be cut by over two-thirds. Buying an energy efficient fridge freezer to replace your inefficient model could cut carbon dioxide emissions by up to 296 kilos a year.

Also, why not consider applying for a grant, availble to many people throughout the UK. The UK Government funds schemes providing up to £2,700 to households on certain benefits (see below for examples of eligibility criteria) to improve their heating and energy efficiency. In England the scheme is known as Warm Front, in Northern Ireland it is Warm Homes, in Scotland it is Warm Deal and the Central Heating Programme and in Wales it is the Home Energy Efficiency Scheme. The eligibility criteria for the schemes differ between countries – with some schemes you need to be in receipt of certain benefits, whilst others are available to anyone over a certain age.

Technorati Tags: Appliances, efficiency, energy, Kitchen