Reduce Your Energy Bill with These 6 Easy Home Tasks

Winter’s here, and with it, higher utility bills as you try to keep your home toasty warm. Don’t just watch those numbers go up, though! There are steps you can take to balance out that increase. A few simple chores that will carry those savings through the summer months, too. In this article, we’ve laid out six surprisingly easy kitchen tasks that could lower your energy bills in a significant way. Let’s check them out!

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6 Tips to Reduce Your Electric Bill

You might be surprised by how much you can save just by keeping up with maintenance and cleaning in your kitchen. Lower your bills and extend the lives of your appliances: give these six tips a try and see how your utility bills look later in the year.

1. Make sure your oven door has a good seal.Your oven door comes with a rubber or high-temperature safe fiberglass seal, called a gasket, that helps to keep the heat inside during use. Without a good seal, your oven could lose more than 20% of its heat, forcing the range to work harder to maintain its internal temperature — and making your electric or gas bills higher as a result. If your casseroles are taking an unusually long time to cook, or your roasts are coming out uneven, it could be that the gasket on your oven door is letting heat out. Check the gasket every so often for debris or signs of damage. They could be obvious, like brittle corners, tears, or cracks, but a visual inspection may not be enough.

   With enough years under their belt, all door gaskets, regardless of the appliance, will start to compress and deteriorate and no longer be effective. If you feel an unusual amount of heat around the oven door when it’s on, the gasket could be too worn out to keep a proper seal. A grimy gasket is an easy fix: just clean it up while your oven is cool and let it dry completely before using your oven again. But even if the gasket has gone bad, you don’t need a whole new appliance. Replacing a door seal is a quick and easy repair, and you can have the part you need in just a few days if you purchase from AppliancePartsPros.com!

2. Mind your refrigerator’s gaskets, too!Just like your oven, your refrigerator’s doors are lined with rubber gaskets that keep cool air in and warm air out, and exposure to moisture, cold, and pressure can leave them brittle or warped. A bad seal on your fridge or freezer means your refrigerator is going to have to run longer to keep everything cool, driving up your electrical bill.

   Wipe down the gaskets on your fridge and freezer with soap and water as part of your regular cleaning routine to ensure gunk and debris don’t mess up the seal. If your gasket is warped, you can try reshaping it by carefully warming them with a hair dryer, but if the gasket is too damaged, you’ll need to replace it.

   How do you know if your refrigerator or freezer door gasket has gone bad?
   Start with a visual inspection. You’re looking for debris, warping, cracks, tears, or crumbling. Run your hand over the gasket. You could feel damage or debris that you couldn’t see. Look for condensation, or “sweating”, on the door itself or food near the front of the fridge. Warm air mixing with cool surfaces will create this condensation, so this can happen either if the fridge door is left open too long or if there’s an improper seal on the door. If your refrigerator door won’t stay closed, or if there’s no resistance when you open it, the gasket may have an issue. If cleaning isn’t cutting it, you can replace the gasket on your fridge in just a few minutes. We’ve even got a guide ready to help you along. Check out our how-to for replacing refrigerator door gaskets on our blog.

3. Don’t leave your freezer empty.Your freezer is most efficient when it’s full. Why is that? Well, it works the hardest when it’s trying to cool down the warm air that’s come in after the door has been opened. If your freezer is already full of frozen goods, it doesn’t need to eat up much energy to maintain the proper internal temperature. Don’t worry, if your freezer’s a little sparse right now, you don’t need to go out and splurge on a bunch of whole frozen chickens to keep cooped up in there. Ice packs, gallon jugs, or ziplock baggies of water can take up plenty of space and will help keep the temperature in an otherwise sparsely packed freezer consistent. Bonus points – if there’s a power outage, you’ve already got ice on hand that can keep your freezer and your fridge cool longer. Just remember to move some of the ice into the refrigerator when that happens.
4. On the other hand, don’t overfill your fridge or freezer.Be mindful of how you load food into your fridge and freezer compartments. An overcrowded fridge could block airflow, making it harder to keep everything cool. Overworking your refrigerator won’t just run up the electrical bill, it could put a strain on your appliance that shortens its lifespan. So, as you’re putting the haul from the weekly grocery run away, make sure you aren’t blocking any vents or overcrowding shelves, and clear out any food that’s well past its expiration date. Keep everything sorted, and you’ll be in good shape!
5. Make sure the refrigerator itself isn’t too cramped.Many kitchens feature cubby holes meant for refrigerators, but you don’t want that fit to be too snug. Refrigerators need a bit of clearance around the back, sides, and top – at least one to two inches of space each way – to ensure good airflow. The cooling components on a cramped fridge will have to work longer and harder to maintain your appliance’s internal temperature, and if they’re really enclosed, they might overheat.
   If your refrigerator is crammed into place, especially if that spot makes it harder to open the fridge doors or surrounding cabinets, you may be better off moving the appliance to a new location or getting a smaller fridge entirely. Check out our guide on measuring for new refrigerators to get a bit more information on how to find the best fit for your fridge.
6. Clean those refrigerator coils!Keeping the coils on the back of your refrigerator clean can reduce the amount of energy your fridge uses by up to 30%. That comes out to some pretty nice savings on your electrical bill.We recommend cleaning the coils on your refrigerator once or twice a year – more if you have pets, since that fur can build up fast. Don’t know how? We’ve got you covered. Check out our guide: How To Clean Refrigerator Coils in 5 Easy Steps.

Wrapping Up

Clean appliances with well-maintained components will last longer and work less hard to get their jobs done, netting you savings in the long run on all sorts of bills – utility and repair. We hope you see some savings after you’ve taken up some of these kitchen tasks, and if you’re happy with your results, keep us in mind the next time you need tips, tutorials, or genuine OEM replacement parts. At AppliancePartsPros.com, our friendly staff is happy to help you fix and maintain your appliances yourself.