One example is bread. I was baking bread the other day, and obviously the cost of the ingredients I put in the loaf are less than the cost of buying a loaf at the supermarket, but that doesn’t include the cost of putting the oven on.
Or dry beans vs canned beans; does the cost of boiling the beans actually bring the cost up to be equivalent to canned beans?
I know that everyone’s energy costs are different so it’s not possible for someone to do the calculations for you, but I’ve never bothered to do them for my own case because bills I get from the energy company just tell me how much I owe them for the month, not “you put the oven on for 30 minutes on the 17th of June and that cost you X”. It sounds like a headache to try calculate how much I pay for energy per meal. But if someone else has done that calculation for themselves I’d be interested to read it and see how it works out. My intuition is that, in general, it’s cheaper to make things yourself (e.g. bread or beans like above), but I couldn’t say that for sure without calculating, which as I said seems like it would be a pain in the ass.
The costs of running an oven for an hour is probably costing you like 40 cents and most of that is pre heating. Buy a bread maker or a toaster oven to make your loaves in and it will be less than half that. For most cooking, the electricity used is a rounding error.
I think, but cannot be certain, that is includes some energy cost.
It really is excellent.
I don’t have a calculation to back it up, but I’m inclined to believe store bought will always have a cheaper production cost. Your can of beans wasn’t made by one person per one can of beans at a time. It is done in a factory producing millions of cans. That kind of industrial process will always be cheaper. It’s designed to be that way. Beans can be bought wholesale below the cost available to you. And with that operation at scale it will undoubtedly be more energy efficient per can of beans. The consumer cost is something else. You will save money buying the raw ingredients and making your own beans rather than buying canned.
I did the math a little bit ago because I was baking a lot of bread, and I think depending on the bread it was actually cheaper to buy the same kind of loaf baked in my grocery store than to buy the equivalent ingredients. This was a Publix though which at least in my area are on the more expensive end and they didn’t have store brand bread flour so I had to go with a fancy brand.
on dry beans v canned beans
Absolutely no comparison! In any cooking method, the energy cost is a few cents, but cooking from dry is 6-8x cheaper.
You also have to factor in the cost of your time. If it takes longer with one or the other that needs consideration too.
Yeah, that’s a factor that is fairly easy to calculate though. And for myself, I’m happy to spend more time within reason. I cook fairly high-effort meals if I think the effort (and time) will pay off. I was mostly asking about energy costs as that’s something I feel is quite hard to quantify properly. With time you know exactly how long it takes and can ask yourself whether or not it’s worth it for you.
https://healthyfamilycookin.blogspot.com/2013/05/frugal-friday-cost-analysis-of-dried.html
I’m interested to know what power company doesn’t give price for a kWh nor how many kWh you used in a billing period. It was essential when I made the switch to an EV and had to show my wife how much money we saved with electric vs gasoline.
If you don’t know what your electric appliance uses to cook, you can get energy monitors that can give you the exact amount. I have an emporia car charger and a plug monitor for my mower batteries. It’s as simple as setting you electricity rate in the app and setting the view to currency costs. Here’s my recent usage for mowing my yard ~2 acres:
It usually costs me $0.30 to mow and trim a week compared to gasoline equivalent of my old mower and trimmer of just over a gallon per week. I pay $0.14478/kWh where I live, gas is currently $2.899/ gal. The break even for my car in efficiency is gasoline has to be around $1.50/gal iirc.
I’m interested to know what power company doesn’t give price for a kWh nor how many kWh you used in a billing period.
Oh I get that too, I just meant that I don’t get a more detailed breakdown, just total kWh usage in a month and price. So I can’t see energy usage by day etc. I’d have to do calculations based on my oven specs and the cost of energy. Which is possible but I’m simply not bothered to do that.
Not sure if you noticed, or if sorghum noticed, but the link about dried beans they had in their reply refers to another blog post about your question. The author found that yes, homemade bread is cheaper when considering electricity costs, but obviously YMMV depending on power costs and the price of equivalent store-bought bread
https://healthyfamilycookin.blogspot.com/2011/12/is-making-homemade-bread-saving-me.html
Thanks. It’s why I showed what energy monitors can do to measure usage and make calculations easy. I knew home cooking from scratch was cheaper just from a budget standpoint, it’s just that I has never quantified it. I had done the paralell EV to gasoline cost analysis though, which is why I shared that.
No, but I do try to keep prep and cleanup times to under 1 hour for breakfast and lunch combined and 1 hour for dinner.
shrug i cook for myself because it generally tastes better than a good 80% of restaurants in my area, usually for less money. My finances are (thankfully) not so tight that I’m calculating how much it costs to keep an oven on for 30 minutes.
Dry beans weigh less
I’m not sure where you are, but I think homemade bread is not as bad for you as mass produced.
Not really, no.
Mainly because my mother-in-law has read/seen one too many horror stories on the state of eatery kitchens and insists on home cooked food 24/7.
To us, the electricity and gas bill is the cost of assurance that all our food is fresh, clean and healthy.
In Poland there are small bistros that follow a tradition of communist “milk bars”. Some of them even deliver in a subscription model. This totally makes sense financially if it’s for just one person. You can eat there for really nice prices.
Other than that, when it’s for a family of even 2, it never makes sense financially to get food delivered.
Ready to heat food is another topic. Those can also be very competitive in terms of costs and they can be really healthy as in EU it’s forbidden to do any preservatives in that kind of food (frozen or pasteurized).
I know my energy company will tell me how much they charge per which ever unit is used. And I believe most appliances, you can look up how much of which ever unit is used per minute.
It’ll take a little bit of research, but should be calculable.
Not really. Most appliances will give you the peak wattages, and that’s it. You’d need a sensor just for the appliance to know for sure.
Agreed for exact numbers, but you can still get an average number from looking it up.
It depends on your overall energy use but generally that would be negligible when compared to heating and hot water, especially during winter when the furnace runs 24/7.
In particular, during the winter, all excess energy from the oven is heat the furnace doesn’t have to provide so it’s basically free: you’d use that energy anyway.
Generally the economy of scale should technically favor the prebaked bread, at least before the store slaps its value added surcharge for it. The store still needs to pay for the energy (but probably gets it cheaper than you), but also needs to pay to maintain a factory, equipment, employees. So you kinda need to factor in the price of your oven too and its wear and tear.
I just buy the loaf because one thing I know for sure is if I factor in the value of my time, it’s way better and easier to work an hour than spend an hour baking a loaf of bread. The time to bake the bread costs more than if I used that time to work the equivalent time and buy 5 loaves of bread with the money.
Doing the calculation isn’t hard. It’s harder to know how much energy (be it electricity, gas, or whatever) you actually use. It also varies wildly with meals, as some need multiple stove tops (is that the right term?), possibly for varying lengths of time and/or the oven.
Please note that you can not really deduce the energy consumption from a power rating, as those usually are max values and not what it’ll actually need.
I have good enough energy monitoring that I can measure the usage (sort of), and having rather high electricity cost at around 0.40 €/kWh I do pay some attention to it. Running the oven for like an hour will be roughly 1€. Boiling water for pasta or something is probably more like 20 ct (includes cooking the pasta). Just using a lid actually helps a lot here if you make use of a lower power setting after reaching a boil and putting in the pasta.
It’s gonna have to be a very elaborate meal to break 3€. So while it does matter and add up, compared to buying fully prepared food from a restaurant, it isn’t that dramatic even with very high energy prices like these.
Cooking appliances use a lot of power, but they don’t run for whole days at a time, so the energy used also isn’t that dramatic. There’s a relatively recent video by technology connections that goes into detail, and might be of interest (link).
