With the average energy bill rising to £2,500 from this month, many households have been making changes in a bid to cut costs amid the cost of living crisis.
Lots of people have been switching things up in the kitchen, with sales of air fryers and slow cookers surging as shoppers find alternatives to using the oven. These appliances have become more popular due to their energy efficiency - but how much money will they actually save compared to more conventional cooking methods?
Researchers at Hometree have looked at how much energy a typical air fryer and slow cooker uses to give people an idea of how much they will cost to run per hour, WalesOnline reports . You can estimate an appliance’s energy use by multiplying its wattage by the number of minutes or hours it’s left on, as explained by Martin Lewis .
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Hometree found that a slow cooker will use about the same amount of energy as a lightbulb even if you leave it on all day, helping to cut energy costs compared to an oven or hob. On average, slow cookers use around 1.2kW over the course of eight hours, working out at just 5p per hour.
Air fryers, meanwhile, are more energy-efficient than most ovens due to the fact that they cook food much faster. The average air fryer wattage is 1kW, so using it for ten minutes would cost around 5p - working out at 30p per hour.
While microwaves may not be as versatile as other cooking methods, they do have their uses for the likes of reheating and defrosting food. They also work out cheaper per hour than air fryers - an average 700w microwave will cost about 1.98p when used for five minutes, or 23.8p over the course of an hour.
An electric hob, meanwhile, comes in at around 17p per 15-minute use with an average wattage of 2kW, or 68p per hour. An induction hob is the most energy-efficient, followed by electric - although electricity is more expensive than gas, so a gas hob may end up saving you a few pounds a year overall.
Finally, research found that using an oven, whether gas or electric, is unsurprisingly the most costly. The wattage of the average oven is around 3kW, meaning it costs around 34p to run for 20 minutes - working out at £1.02 per hour.
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