Monday, January 6, 2014

Unnecessary Digital Clock


Out of the 1,440 minutes in a day, how many of those minutes are used to actually warm up food in your microwave?  Let’s pretend that maybe you cook a quick bowl of oatmeal in the morning for 3 minutes and another 3 minutes later that night to warm up some leftovers sitting in the fridge for dinner?  That’s a total of 6 minutes out of 1,440 minutes, or about 0.004% of the day. 

Now that we have noticed how little the microwave is used everyday, why do we keep it plugged in?  The answer to that would be, for the extremely convenient digital clock that we quickly check the time as we are running late after sleeping in an extra fifteen minutes that morning or when we wake up at 3 o’clock in the morning for a midnight snack…  This digital clock on your microwave may be convenient, but do we really need it? 

Try keeping your microwave unplugged until you need to use it for that 0.004% of the day. It may be difficult to remember to keep unplugging your microwave after you use it, so try putting a note above the plug as a friendly reminder.  This will reduce your energy consumption as well as reduce your energy bills.  It may not seem like a lot to just simply unplug your microwave, but in one year you will prevent over half a million minutes of energy to be consumed by your little microwave.