Nathan Scandella (personal)

Energy Saving Tips

In the last few years, I've seen a lot of articles that mention some common-sense steps you can take to conserve energy at home, the office, or on the road. Most of the articles regurgitate the same tips. Most of you also aren't doing them, hence our problem. However, for a few out there, like me, these common tips elicit a "duh ... I already know that" response. So, I'm going to try to periodically add a few tips of my own, that I don't see written up elsewhere. Here are the first:

I try to cook in an energy efficient manner. For one, when I'm heating up food, or cooking, I try to prefer using the microwave. Microwaves are amazing inventions. They excite (heat up) the water molecules in your food or beverage, without wasting a bunch of energy heating up the air, your pot, your bulky oven, and the rest of the kitchen. All that extra heat is unnecessary. In the summer, conventional cooking is doubly wasteful, because you add extra heat to your house, which you then have to run the air-conditioner to remove! In the winter, it may not be as bad, because some of the waste heat from cooking can reduce the amount of heating your furnace has to do.

However, even that's still problematic. For one, stoves and ranges aren't very efficient at heating your house. If they were, we wouldn't have furnaces or heat pumps. We'd just use our cooking appliances to heat the whole house. But, there's another problem. For lots of cooking, you need to run a fan to get rid of either moisture (boiling water), or smoke (frying), or combustion bi-products (gas). Cooks love to rave about natural gas ranges. They're considered the "pro's choice". Well, that's great, but you're probably not a pro, so I don't know why you need their equipment. I don't drive a race car around town just because that's what Jimmie Johnson rides in. They probably get crummy gas mileage, not to mention requiring a pit crew to follow you around.

To ventilate the kitchen, you have to run the fan, which costs energy. Also, in the winter, ventilating the house is expelling all that nice warm air you paid to heat. When warm air goes out the range hood, it sucks cold air in through all the little gaps in your house. And that air needs to be heated again. So, cooking methods that require you to vent are big energy wasters.

So, the solution is to (use the microwave), avoid boiling water in open pots, and prefer electric range tops to gas. Let's face it, for most cooking operations, you don't need pinpoint control over your heating. I actually have a dual gas-electric range. I normally use one of the two electric burners (with no ventilation required), but have the option of firing up a gas burner, only when needed. Much more efficient. Plus, you really should be paying your utility for renewable electricity (as I am), so electricity has another big benefit over natural gas - which is still a fossil fuel, and produces greenhouse gas - not to mention consuming the oxygen in your home that you need to breathe.

In addition to the gas-electric range, I also have energy efficient cookware from Royal Prestige. This stuff is pricey, but it lasts forever, and uses a fraction of the energy that normal pots and pans do. You heat up a little water in the bottom of the pot, throw in the food once it's boiling, and then keep it on low (or off!) the whole rest of the time. Very little heat escapes from the sealed cooking chamber. That means energy savings, no ventilation required, and it doesn't fog up all your kitchen windows in winter, either.

Posted at 11:26PM Nov 17, 2008 by Nathan in Environment  |  Comments[0]