As the cost of living crisis continues, Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis has issued a warning to those using airfryers.
The personal finance guru wants to share a caution with the public. He says that it’s important to think twice before only using the kitchen appliance.
Airfryers have been hailed as a healthier and cheaper alternative to frying food, or using the oven. Unlike frying, where food is submerged in oil, an airfryer uses convection heat to cook food. It also relies on a chemical process to crisp up the outside of food.
Martin Lewis on airfryers
But where Martin says people need to be careful, is when they use the airfryer in the false belief it’s cheaper.
The example he uses is a single jacket potato. While it makes more sense to cook it in the microwave to save energy, it wouldn’t work for everything. For example, cooking a roast dinner would be cheaper in the oven.
Speaking on his podcast, TV host Martin said: “The problem with the equation for heating equipment is an oven is going to be about 2000W.
“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.
“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.”
Martin explained that when cooking bigger meals, it’s probably more economical to use the oven.
How to decide which appliance to use
He explained: “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.”
Martin added: “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.
“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.”
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