I have talked about trying to avoid Paying for the Peaks but what do you do if you have already paid for something, and cannot get back the investment? I have been thinking about this scenario since reading Seth Godin's post about sunk costs.
One way you can use past mistakes to your advantage is to distribute what you need to do over your current capacity. If you already have dropped a lot of cash on double oven it serves no purpose to remove it and install only what you need for daily use. Instead you can use the current oven at a reduced capacity to take advantage of what you already have spent.
This may seem like common sense, but it really has a huge effect on how much of your time is taken to accomplish your required activities. If you have a sudden increase in demand for something, and you have already spent the money in the past, you can balance your need over the extra capacity and not have to work as hard to accomplish your goal.
I have seen a similar effect at work. When a products life is over and the production line cannot be used for anything else, we do not remove it until we need that space. It costs money to remove things. I saw the most extreme example of this in Japan. New space was needed inside a plant. The calculated how much would be required, then instead of destroying the old building, they cut out only what they needed and left the remaining building standing until more space was needed.
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