For many people the cost of living crisis has made them reassess what is the best way to go about doing normal things, like cooking your dinner in the most cost effective way. With power costing unprecedented amounts, many have bought items like air fryers on the basis that they are cheaper to run.
In his latest podcast Martin Lewis, renowned for his financial advice, has spoken to cooks who have been using microwaves and air fryers more. Mr Lewis said that in some cases it actually was more power efficient to use the traditional oven instead, the MEN reports.
He said: “The problem with the equation for heating equipment is an oven is going to be about 2000W. A microwave I believe, from memory, a best guess explanation, a microwave gives you consistent heat whereas an oven is warming up to full temperature and then topping it up, so it isn’t running at full power the whole time.
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"But if you’re doing a jacket potato for 10 minutes it’s going to be far cheaper [in the microwave] than doing a single jacket potato in an oven and keeping it on for an hour and a half. However if you were doing a full roast dinner and you were cooking many of them, that is where it’s probably cheaper than putting five or six jacket potatoes in a microwave because each additional object you put in a microwave, you need to keep it on longer because a microwave just heats the individual object.
“The general equation is, find the wattage of an item, then work out how many kilowatts or what fraction of a kilowatt it’s using, then multiply that by 34p per hour of use.” The same advice can be applied to air fyers and halogen cookers.
Martin continued: “If you had a 1000W microwave and you put it on for 10 minutes, one KWH for a sixth of an hour, a sixth of 34p is about 6p, shall we say? So it’s 6p turning the microwave on for that amount of time. So yes it’s a very useful equation.”
Research carried out by energy supplier Utilita and supermarket chain Iceland has compared how much an oven, a microwave and an air fryer costs to run. The research, which is based on the average amount of time each appliance is used for per day, revealed that the microwave was the most economical way of cooking.
According to the research, an electric cooker costs 87p to run per day, while a microwave costs only 8p. This means that while an electric oven could cost you up to £316.54 to run per year, a microwave will only cost you £30.02 per year.
The research ranked the air fryer as the second cheapest appliance to run, costing around 14p per day, £4.40 per month and £52.74 per year. The second most expensive is the dual cooker, which is part electric and part gas, which costs £264.03 to run per year.
This is followed by the gas cooker, which costs £120.83 to run per year, and then the slow cooker which costs £59.76 per year.
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