10 tips for the day

10 tips for the day:

1.    Preheating your oven is often unnecessary for any food requiring more than a full hour of cooking time, says the Chicago Solar Partnership. Check your recipe instructions. Don't open the oven door when cooking; it will let heat escape and cause your oven to work harder. And thaw meat before you cook it. Roasting time will be shortened, energy will be saved and the meat will be more uniformly cooked.

2.    Boiling water for tea in a pot on your gas stove uses one-third the energy of a plug-in kettle, according to Godo Stoyke's The Carbon Buster’s Home Energy Handbook.

3.    Don’t fill up your kettle. Only pour in as much water as you need right now. If every Canadian did this, we’d save enough electricity to power every street light across the country, according to Change The World for Ten Bucks: 50 Ways To Make A Difference.

4.    To cut heating energy and costs in winter, on sunny days open your south-facing drapes and let the sun in, says SaskEnergy. It's a natural source of heat. If you have large windows that don't receive direct sun, keep the drapes closed. And close your drapes and blinds during the night.

5.    Buying a new computer? Choose a laptop - it uses about six times less electricity than a desktop, according to The Carbon Buster’s Home Energy Handbook.

6.    Screen savers don’t save electricity. Instead, set your computer to go into sleep mode when you aren’t actively using it. That can cut your power consumption by five times, cutting your electricity bills by more than 500 kilowatt hours per year, according to The Carbon Buster’s Home Energy Handbook.

7.    Two large power plants have to run constantly to supply enough electricity to run North American television sets WHILE THEY ARE TURNED OFF. They’re called power vampires, as they suck energy to stay in a constant state of standby. Plug your television into a power bar and turn that off when you aren’t watching. That will save about 40 kilowatt hours over a year.

8.    9Get rid of that old fridge in your basement that chills a few lonely bottles of beer. A 1975 fridge sucks up four times as much electricity as new Energy Star model, according to the Ontario Power Authority. It will even pick up your old fridge for you.

9.    Wash your clothes in cold water. Since 80 per cent of the electricity in washing your clothes comes from heating the water, using cold rather than hot water will save you as much as 2,500 kilowatt-hours of power a year - more than twice the average household’s monthly energy bill. (Source: The Canadian Energy Efficiency Centre)

10.  Set the photocopier to print double-sided only. It takes ten times as much energy to make a piece of paper than it takes to copy onto it, according to Godo Stoyke's The Carbon Buster’s Home Energy Handbook