Many Texas electricity consumers often use a lot of heat to cook their dishes in ovens and microwaves when just a dash of heat would have been adequate. If you want to control your electricity usage, you can use some simple steps as mentioned below that won’t let you compromise on the taste of your dishes but can bring home huge savings on electric bills.

• Use less time for cooking: You can save on your energy usage by keeping your cooking time down. Simple steps like defrosting food kept in the refrigerator before cooking, using a minimum pre-heat time, not using heat-blocking foil on the racks, not peeking in every now and then etc can help you to control your electricity usage. Cooking multiple portions, if possible, is yet another good idea rather than cooking small amounts. This way, you will simply need to re-heat the food and not cook it all over again.
• Use energy efficient devices: As compared to a conventional oven, 20% less electricity is used by a convection oven. Again, using a toaster oven can bring down your energy usage by about 50%, while a microwave lets you save almost 66% on your energy usage. So, using your microwave whenever you can instead of the traditional oven can help you bring down your electricity bills. Whether you need to cook dishes, heat the leftovers, or defrost a frozen item, try using your microwave.
• Use your oven to the optimum: To ensure that all the heat and space in your oven is put to use, it’s advisable to cook as much as possible in one go. Other steps like boiling potatoes before roasting, using ceramic or glass utensils that need lower temperature for cooking, cutting food into smaller pieces, inserting stainless steel skewers into joints of meat and baked potatoes to speed up the cooking process etc can also help you in energy efficient cooking. Turning your electric oven off ten minutes prior to the end of the cooking time is yet another step that can help you to save on your electricity bills.
• Proper food arrangement in microwave: Avoid piling up food inside the microwave as it won’t allow proper cooking and even consume more electricity. If you need to cook multiple pieces at once, you can arrange the pieces in a circle where thicker pieces are placed toward the edge and thin pieces toward the center of the dish.
• Use the minimum cooking time in microwave: Most dishes have an ideal time range to get cooked. It’s advisable to use the minimum cooking time to cook food and check if it’s done. You can always continue cooking for undercooked food. But if you overcook the food, you can’t do anything to salvage the dish.

There are many other microwave shortcuts and oven tips that can help Texas electricity consumers save on their utility bills. So, use the steps mentioned above and read more on such other tips that can help you control your electricity usage.