According to home services company Hometree, using an oven typically costs £1.02 per hour.
Financial expert Martin Lewis has issued a warning that converting from an oven to an air fryer or a microwave may not result in appreciable energy bill savings.
Mr. Dot Lewis cautioned that microwaves and air fryers might not be more economical than ovens as the cost-of-living crisis continues.
In some cases, using the oven to prepare food may be more economical than using a microwave or air fryer, according to the podcast by the money-saving expert.
Mr. Lewis argued that while it makes sense to cook a single jacket potato in the microwave for a brief period of time to save on energy costs, it is probably more expensive than using an oven to prepare a full roast for a large number of people.
He explained, “The problem with the equation for heating equipment is that an oven will be about 2000W.”.
A microwave evenly distributes heat throughout the cooking process, as opposed to an oven, which warms up to temperature before topping off.
However, it will be significantly less expensive to microwave a jacket potato for 10 minutes than to bake a single one for one and a half hours.
However, since a microwave only heats the particular item, cooking a full roast dinner would likely be less expensive if you were preparing a large quantity of them. Longer use would be beneficial.
The financial expert gave a simple equation to use in calculating how much it will cost to run an appliance.
The standard formula is to calculate the wattage of an item, calculate how many kilowatts or what percentage of a kilowatt it consumes, and then multiply that number by 34p for each hour of use.
One KWH for a sixth of an hour would cost approximately 6p if you had a 1000W microwave and used it for 10 minutes. It is therefore 6 p.m. when the microwave is turned on for that long.
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Thus, it is a very useful equation.
According to home services provider Hometree, the average oven uses about 3kW, which equates to a cost of about £1.02 per hour.
According to the company’s analysis, microwaves and slow cookers—which typically cost about 30p per hour to operate compared to air fryers, which have an average wattage of 1kW—are the kitchen appliances that use the least energy.
Hometree estimates that a slow cooker costs 5p per hour to run, compared to a 700w microwave’s 23.8p per hour operating cost.
