While every area of your home consumes some level of energy, one of the largest areas of energy consumption is in your kitchen. Typically, your kitchen houses the vast majority of your home’s appliances, usually only omitting your clothes washer and dryer, which alone makes your kitchen consume a very large amount of energy compared to the other rooms in your home. Additionally, your kitchen is used for 2 purposes: to cook and entertain. Cooking means using a lot of energy to keep necessary food refrigerated and then more energy to heat them up for a meal. Because your kitchen uses so much energy, we’ve decided to provide a list of kitchen energy saving tips for you to use to make sure that your next utility bill is smaller than your most current one.
Cooking Energy Saving Tip #1- Match Pan Size to Burner- This applies mostly to electric stove tops. Let us put this into perspective for you. If you have a 6 inch pan and you place it on an 8 inch burner, then you will actually be wasting about 40% of the energy that that burner is using to heat up your pan. The closer your pan is to the size of the burner, the less energy you waste!
Cooking Energy Saving Tip #2- Keep Appliance Doors Shut for as Long as Possible- We’re talking about both your refrigerator and oven in this instance. For a refrigerator, you are paying for the energy to keep the inside of that refrigerator cool. For an oven, you are paying to keep the inside of the oven warm. Keeping the doors to your refrigerator and oven open for extended periods, as you will loose the energy used to get your appliance to that temperature. Additionally, you will then pay even more money for the energy to get your refrigerator or oven back to the desired temperature.
Cooking Energy Saving Tip #3- Clean Oven After Cooking- When using the “Clean Oven” feature, your oven goes up to an extremely high temperature. If you use this feature directly after cooking, your oven is already at a high temperature so you don’t have to pay for the energy to reheat your oven.
Cooking Energy Saving Tip #4- Use Glass and Ceramic Pans in the Oven- Whenever you are using your oven, try your best to use glass and ceramic pans to cook your food in. When using a ceramic or glass pan to cook your food, you can actually lower the temperature of your oven about 25 degrees and your food will cook just as quickly.
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