On Thanksgiving day, Americans cook roughly 45,000,000 turkeys. The average turkey is 20 lbs and cooks for 5 hours.
The average home oven is rated at 40,000 BTU/hour energy consumption.
The BTU content in natural gas is 100,000 BTU/therm.
Let’s conservatively estimate that the average cost of gas in late November is $1.00/therm.
Let’s estimate that the average American bastes their Thanksgiving turkey twice per hour, for a total of 10 times in 5 hours.
Let’s estimate that opening the oven adds about 5 minutes each time to the overall cooking time, for a total of about 60 minutes, or one hour.
If a therm costs $1.00, and we consume 40% of a therm every hour we cook our turkey, and we add an additional hour of cooking time by basting twice an hour, we each spend $.40 extra to cook our turkey.
$.40 x 45,000,000 = $18,000,000
That means that as Americans we waste $18,000,000 worth of energy on Thanksgiving day, whereas we could have been eating a finer turkey in less time by simply using the Überbaster!
Well said