Sunday, March 1, 2009

My coffee maker sucks...power

I am in the middle of a project to reduce my gas and electric use. I will publish more on that later, but for just a moment, I want to talk coffee. The most popular beverage in the world...and apparently the most expensive. If Juan Valdez were here I'd show him my electric bill.

We have a new Cuisinart coffee maker that uses 126 kilowatt hours a month! About $15! We run it four hours a day every day. Excluding the A/C and the refrigerators, it ranked second only to my electric clothes dryer for the month. I was shocked!

So of course I did a little research. Did you know there are no Energy Star ratings for coffee makers? Consumer Reports doesn't even rank them for energy use?

An internet source says we burn about 400 million in electricity a year making coffee. We use the equivalent of one decent sized coal fired electrical generation plant a year!

Bottom Line - We do care about how much energy a coffee maker uses because we use them often and for long periods of time. Our solution was to just buy a nice insulated carafe. (Already recommended by coffee connoisseurs to eliminate scorching). We brew, (10 minutes), pour the coffee into the carafe, turn off the burner. The coffee is now closer to me and hot! The pay back on that little purchase is less than three months.

If I were buying a coffee maker, I would buy one with the insulated carafe already part of the set up...and turn off that burner before we cut the top off of another coal bearing mountain in West Virginia!

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