How much money do you save bringing lunch to work?
Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I鈥檓 going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.
Kathy said, My husband takes his lunch almost every day to work. If my son and I go out we鈥檒l take our lunch as well. This equates to big meal cost savings but now that we鈥檙e using TONS of tupperware to cart our bag lunches I have to run the dishwasher constantly. With water, electricity, soap, etc. Are we still coming out ahead? Is this saving us big dollars or just cents?
Let鈥檚 do the math, shall we?
To test out Kathy鈥檚 question, I took out a bunch of our own reusable containers that we use for our lunches and filled up the dishwasher with them. I wanted to see exactly how many it would take to fill up our rather typically sized dishwasher.
What I found is that I was easily able to get eighteen containers with lids into our dishwasher pretty easily. Some of these were pretty large containers, while others were pretty small, so I think eighteen is a pretty good average.
Energy Your mileage may vary somewhat, but indicates that the typical dishwasher uses 2 to 5 kilowatt hours per load (including heating the water). We鈥檒l use a 3.5 kWh average. A kWh of energy costs roughly $0.11, so the energy cost is about $0.38.
Soap You can find soap or detergent at a lot of different prices. I was able to quickly find dish detergents and soaps that varied from $0.10 per load to $0.35 per load. Let鈥檚 figure $0.20 per load.
Water The average dishwasher load uses about 15 gallons of water. Water is usually sold by the acre-foot 鈥� 325,851 gallons for $120 (or so). You鈥檒l end up spending a cent or two on the water depending on how your municipality taxes it.
Your cost per load of dishes is about sixty cents, all told. This means that your cost per container for running them through the dishwasher is just a hair over three cents.
Remember, each time you use a container, you鈥檙e eating inexpensive leftovers for a meal instead of eating out. You should easily be saving multiple dollars each time you use a container.
What about the cost of the containers? Unless you鈥檙e drastically overpaying for such containers, you shouldn鈥檛 have spent more than a few dollars per container. It only takes a leftover meal or two to recover the initial cost of the container.
Thus, the math pretty clearly shows that washing your own containers and using them for leftovers saves dollars, not pennies.
Of course, there is a small time investment of loading and unloading the dishwasher, but the savings for that small amount of time makes it quite worthwhile.
