Money for the Rest of Us

Electricity is expensive, and little things, such as light bulbs, can make a huge difference in your bill. Well, how about your coffee maker?

It turns out that your coffee maker may be costing you a lot of money. I got an email from a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend (you know the deal) that detailed this out. (Their focus was actually on saving the environment, but saving the environment can save money!) It looks like the original email was written by EcoPrint:

“We had been keeping a drip coffee maker on nearly 4 hours per day, continuing to warm the coffee made first thing in the morning. A quick check of its consumer information label showed it using over 1000 watts of electricity per hour—the equivalent of ten 100-watt bulbs! It seemed reasonable to offer employees a hot cup of coffee when they wanted one, but what was the environmental cost? So, we calculated: 4 hours/day x 250 workdays/year x 1,000 watts/hour = 1,000 Kilowatt-hours per year. Whoa!

That translates to 1,200 lbs of CO2 emitted [but they use fan power electricity] and about $140 per year added to our electric bill.

The alternative: A Thermal Carafe coffee maker. Coffee drips into a well-insulated carafe that stays hot for hours. Once finished brewing, the appliance simply turns itself off! This is resulting in a 97% energy savings from that one appliance each year, because an insulated carafe needs no constant heat source to stay warm. These coffee makers can be purchased for between $50 to $150 (easily recouped with the first year’s energy savings). “

Hopefully you don’t leave your coffee pot on for four hours at home, but maybe you do at work. Either way, it shows how something so seemingly insignificant can make an enormous impact. A quick check at Amazon.com showed that you can buy one for as little as $40.