Martin Lewis has issued an important warning for households opting to use their air fryers instead of microwaves and ovens.
Air fryers have been flying off the shelves in recent weeks and months, with households subbing in the kitchen "must have" in a bid to cut cooking costs as energy prices remain at an all time high. However, the Money Saving Expert has advised that people should think carefully before ditching the more traditional kitchen appliances when trying to save some cash, reports MEN.
Speaking on the latest episode of his podcast, Martin Lewis explained the thought process people should take when cooking. He said: "The problem with the equation for heating equipment is an oven is going to be about 2000W.
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"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."
He continued: "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.
"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 added "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."
The guidances comes following separate research carried out by Which?. The consumer experts identified the cheapest cooking appliances for popular meals, testing the majority of foods groups to find out whether or not an air fryer is the quickest and most cost effective option.
Emily Seymour, Which? Energy Editor, said: "There has been a surge of interest in air fryers and smaller cooking appliances in recent months, and our research shows that the hype could be justified in some cases, as we’ve found these products cost less to cook certain foods than conventional ovens."
Despite this, the energy expert agreed with Martin when speaking about larger meals: "The cost savings will soon be lost if you have to cook more than one batch though, so it’s still better to use your oven if you’re cooking large quantities."
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