Photograph from chippenziedeutch on Flickr Finance blog The Simple Dollar has seven tips on how to get the most out of your refrigerator and freezer for less money. For example, cleaning the dust off the coils at the back of your refrigerator will make it more energy efficient. Also, if your freezer is fairly empty (unlike the one above), fill it with empty jugs of water to keep the other items cold and make your freezer work less hard. If you're really hardcore, you can build a chest refrigerator, which cuts energy use by about 90 percent over a typical standup refrigerator. Related: Serious Green: 10 Cheap & Green Kitchen Tips...
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As a committed tree-hugger and very recent graduate, I find myself plopped firmly at the intersection of cheap and green. Keeping things environmentally friendly while keeping costs down is important to me. Below, some of my best time-tested, budget-approved ways to keep both your wallet and the earth green and happy. 1. Fill Your Oven Photograph from KirrilyRobert on Flickr Every time you turn on your oven to roast or bake something, make sure that baby is full. It takes a lot of energy to get an oven to 400°F, so you might as well fill all the rack space. Even if roasted sweet potatoes aren't part of tonight's roasted chicken dinner, I throw them in; they'll get put into...
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A few weeks ago, the website Blackle.com crossed my path and I was instantly fascinated, but I'm going to spare you a click and give you the long and short of it: It's Google search, but it's not sponsored by Google, and its black. Fine, go. Click, I know you're going to, anyway. Despite being a black-clad, large sunglasses-sporting stereotypical New Yorker, it wasn't the site's chi-chi and fashionable affect that drew me in, but that it was built on the notion that the color black uses less energy on the web, and even eensy amounts of savings—especially when you consider the scale of a web behemoth such as Google—add up. Sadly, this premise that black uses less energy than...
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Killing germs by microwaving sponges. We've covered this before on Serious Eats, but the New York Times brings it up today. Effective but not without risk, the paper says. Namely from too-dry sponges, which can catch fire after a spell. Serious Eats reader pageycooks offers another perspective: "I tried this once—afterwards, I had to 'de-stink' my microwave." Yuck. That's another argument for just throwing it out and buying a new one. They're cheap!...
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