How to Create a More Energy Efficient Kitchen

High utility bills can often be a pain in the neck. It feels like your money is going out the door. Although you use energy throughout your home, the kitchen is one of your home’s biggest consumers of energy both for electricity and natural gas. There are various changes that you make to cut back on your energy consumption in the kitchen. Not only will you be saving yourself money, you’ll be saving the environment as well.

Install New Appliances

With the recent emphasis on energy efficiency, kitchen appliances have made significant improvements in their energy consumption. If your fridge is twenty years old, it could be costing you more money to run your old fridge, than it would be to buy a new one. However, it’s not just energy efficiency that is important, size matters as well. If you have a very large fridge or oven, they are going to cost more to run. Unless you need them to be that size, you may be better off by getting something smaller.

Use Efficient Lighting

The lighting in your home consumes a large part of your total electricity usage. You can reduce this by switching your lights to LED bulbs. Using LED bulbs has several additional benefits for homeowners. LED bulbs require less energy to run which reduces your electricity bill. They also reject far less waste heat than other bulbs. This means that you won’t have to spend as much on AC costs.

In the kitchen there are other ways you can be efficient about your lighting. You need to have good lighting to prepare your food, but that doesn’t mean you need to have all the lights on. By having separate switches for the lights over the food prep area, you can reduce the number of lights you have on at the same time.

Cleaning

If you want your kitchen to be energy efficient, it needs to be clean. A dirty oven and stove are not as efficient at transmitting heat. If you don’t clean them regularly, you’ll end up paying for heat that goes to waste. This increased heat consumption will also increase the cost of AC in your home. Cleaning the seals of your refrigerator will also help keep the cool air trapped inside. This will greatly reduce the power that is required to keep your food cool.

Energy efficiency is more than just a fad. It’s a necessary change to the way that we live. By installing new appliances, using more efficient light bulbs, and cleaning your kitchen more, you’ll be able to protect your wallet as well as protect the world we live in.

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