10 Kitchen Efficiency Tips To Save You Time And Money

If you can efficiently run your home, it’s a life changer. If that sounds good to you, check out our list of Kitchen Efficiency Tips To Save You Time And Money.

For more help saving, check out all of our frugal posts.

When we bought our house, it was brand new. Not just new to us, but it was a new construction, so it was completely new. We picked out every aspect of our house — from the colors of the roof to the types of doors, from the flooring to the exact slab of granite for our brand new kitchen.

When we moved in, the builder left us a huge binder, separated by tabs, and anything we needed to know was covered in that binder. During our first week here, Pete was on spring break and our Internet wasn’t set up, so all he did was sit on the porch and read the instruction manuals for our kitchen appliances. 

He learned so much about our home and how to use it for maximum efficiency. “Lucky for you I’m a nerd,” he told me that week. But now, lucky for you he’s a nerd because I’m passing on a few of the simple tips he learned.

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Part of having an efficient kitchen is having a clean kitchen. Make sure you’re cleaning everything by checking out our list of 10 Things You Forget To Clean In The Kitchen.

And, listen, I get it. I’m asking you to do a whole bunch of things in this post to save you some money. They’re small changes, but they do take time and require you to change some habits. Like cooking in bulk. Or just cooking in general. So, do you have time to clean? I don’t know. Maybe not.

But you’re gonna be spending more time in your kitchen, so you want it to be a clean kitchen. So, do yourself a favor and head over to Groupon where you can purchase discounted cleaning services. You can use the code SAVEMORE for extra savings. When you have a clean, comfortable kitchen, everything will feel a little bit easier.

Kitchen Efficiency Tips To Save You Time And Money

Run the dishwasher at night

You want to run the dishwasher at night. Most likely, your home — and the energy grid in general — is using less energy in the evening. That means there aren’t as many other appliances in your home to take away from the dishwasher’s needs, making it more effective and efficient. But it also means that, in general, since there are less energy demands in the evening, the electric companies charge less for electricity used during that time. So it’s cheaper for you.

Just a quick note: For safety reasons, only run your dishwasher when you’re awake and at home. Appliance fires are possible and you want to be awake just in case. 

You also want to run the dishwasher by itself, not at the same time as the washing machine or when someone’s taking a shower. That will add demand to your heating and water systems, which means your dishes won’t get as clean as they could if you just waited.

If you skip the heated drying, you’ll save energy since the unit won’t need to heat up. Sure, you might open the dishwasher and end up with some non-dry dishes, but you can easily wipe those down with a towel. It’s worth the money you’re saving by using less energy.

You want to make sure you clean the dishwasher also. I always say: clean the things that clean your things. Wipe it down, clean out any food items stuck in the filter, then run two cycles (one with vinegar and one with baking soda). A clean dishwasher will wash more effectively, use less force, and use less energy.

Leave your oven ajar in the winter

If you’re cooking during the winter and have your oven on, that’s a heat source for your home. So, after you take dinner out, leave the oven door ajar. The heat will escape and heat your kitchen … and you won’t have to touch the thermostat.

Just, of course, be careful of this tip if you have small children or pets as this could be a safety hazard for them.

Small aside, but our builder actually told us that turning the thermostat on and off uses a considerable amount of electricity. The best way to run it is to lower it if you’re not home and then turn it up when you are. There will be less demand on the system to heat it up a few degrees than heating it from cold when you get home.

We have a smart thermostat now that can detect if we’re home or not and adjusts accordingly, which is a huge help.

Don’t use foil to line the oven

I’ll be honest: I’m not the best one to explain the science behind this, but if you line your oven with foil, it can potentially block the vent openings at the bottom of the oven and impair air flow, so the oven doesn’t run as well. It’s similar to what happens when you don’t clean out the lint trap in the dryer. More force needs to be used, which means more electricity — and higher bills for you. So skip the foil.

You can read more about that here, if you want to know the mechanics behind that.

If you are worried about your oven staying clean, we actually use a grill mat to line the bottom of our oven. That doesn’t seem to have the same blocking properties that foil does, plus it doesn’t heat up like foil does, which can potentially cause other damage in your oven.

Cook in large batches

If you are cooking meals, a really good idea is to cook a couple at a time. Soups make a lot of servings, so you can freeze the leftovers and have them when you need an easy weeknight meal. Same with something like baked ziti. I can make a huge tray and it will last for a few meals. Cooking less reduces the time the oven is on. It means less electricity used and, in the summer, less heat in the home.

Because, let’s be honest, when it’s 90 degrees out, the last thing you want is to turn on the oven. So if you can cook two nights of dinner at once, then heat leftovers in the microwave, that’s the way to go.

If you don’t want the same meal two nights in a row, think with a meal prep mentality and cook something that can be made into something else. Roast a whole chicken one day, then use leftovers to make chicken salad the next. A little creativity can go a long way.

Don’t season over heat

If you’re cooking, you want to keep your spices in the cabinet closest to the stove. That way, you have easy access to them when you need them. We actually have this fantastic spice rack with pull-out shelves that are labeled so we can easily find our spices. I highly recommend it.

But, when you’re cooking, you want to resist the temptation of seasoning directly over a hot pot on the stove. If you hold the bottle over hot food, there’s a good chance the steam will get into the container and cause clumping (You can read more about that here). 

Instead, add the simple step of using a measuring spoon to your routine. This will extend the life of your spices, so you’ll buy less, which means you’ll save money.

​Grow an indoor garden

Before we moved into our new home, I got Pete a hydroponic herb garden as a gift with the idea that we would grow basil, oregano, and parsley on the windowsill in our kitchen. We didn’t have enough room for it anywhere in our apartment, but we had this gorgeous big windowsill in the kitchen in our house, so we wait until we moved.

That set was great until our herbs outgrew the mason jars that they came in so we planted them in our garden outside.

Now, we grow green onions on the windowsill at all times. It’s so convenient to just go to the windowsill whenever we need green onions rather than going to the store. Plus, we’re saving money by not buying them.

If you have the counter space, you could buy a nice sized hydroponic garden and grow all sorts of vegetables and herbs in your kitchen. That way, you have fresh herbs or veggies when you need them.

Don’t overfill the freezer

I stockpile, which is hard to do in a small freezer like we had in the apartment. I did it anyway, though, and the items ended up blocking the ducts in the freezer so the entire fridge stopped working.

Maintenance was able to fix it quickly, but I was so worried that we’d not only lose all the food but the fridge itself. Everything worked out well, thank goodness, but it was a good lesson. Don’t overfill the freezer and don’t block any vents where air might be coming in.

Know what’s in your fridge

A lot of inefficiency comes from not having the right ingredients to make what you want to make. So, you change your mind, decide to make a different recipe, and the produce you bought for the first recipe gets forgotten about. And then thrown away.

Leftovers get stuck in the back of the fridge and thrown away too. And that’s money getting thrown away. So if you can refuse food waste, you can save money overall.

Part of that is cooking what you have. If you have a random tomato that didn’t make this week’s salad, throw it in with pasta. This weekend, Pete took our leftover rice and beans from earlier in the week and served them under a fried egg for breakfast. It was a great way to eat our leftovers in a completely new way, making them really interesting.

If you struggle with this, I suggest buying new, clear, glass storage containers. That way, you can see what’s in them and that will make it just a little bit easier for you to actually use them.

Upgrade to Energy-Efficient Appliances

Buying all new appliances is super expensive and I don’t recommend that. However, with that being said, if you do a kitchen renovation or one of your appliances dies, definitely purchase energy-efficient appliances. At least, for some of your appliances.

Clearly, your refrigerator is on all the time. So if you need a new fridge, an energy-efficient one will save you a lot of money. If you’re someone who hand washes dishes but you have a dishwasher in your home for resale value, then having an energy-efficient dishwasher won’t save you money because you’re not using it.

So choose what makes sense.

Use smaller appliances

The oven uses a lot of energy. So if you need to reheat something, it’s gonna take less electricity to do it in the air fryer, which means it’s cheaper for you.

There are also things I prefer to make in the air fryer than in the oven, like crispy chickpeas to snack on. They’re delicious from the air fryer and just okay from the oven. And baked potatoes. They take less time in the air fryer than the oven, so again, less electricity use.

Yes, the air fryer takes up valuable counter space that you might not be able to sacrifice if you have a small kitchen, but it’s worth it.

And, this is a small tangent, but you want to keep your kitchen space as neat as possible. An organized kitchen feels better, and that means you’ll have a better chance of actually using it. So, keep your countertops as bare as possible.

Things you need for everyday use, like a coffee pot, can stay out. But, find extra cabinet space for the majority of your kitchen equipment — food processors, blenders, pots and pans, etc. If there are items you don’t use that are just taking up extra space, well, maybe you don’t need them.

Speaking of small appliances, don’t sleep on the slow cooker. I love using mine to make soups in the winter. It’s also really great for when you’re having a party and need the oven to make other recipes. Yes, it’s on longer than an oven, but the amount of electricity it uses is so low, so it definitely costs less to run that for a long time than to use the oven.

What are your tips for kitchen efficiency? Be sure to leave them for us in the comments.