dfk41 well it’s about £70 to £100 less than I would spend if I bought an air fryer, because I’ve already got it.
Air Fryers
Pompeyexile I was really close to buying an air fryer but I have a Panasonic microwave convection oven combo. Doesn’t the fan assisted convection oven bit do the same as an air fryer?
I don’t think that a convection oven does exactly the same thing as an air fryer, although they are very similar in how they work. We have a Breville combination toaster oven/convection oven/air fryer. Judging from how it works in different modes, I see three ways that the air fryer mode is different from the convection oven mode.
- The air fryer mode uses the top and bottom heating elements, and the convection oven only uses the bottom one. This is true even if the air fryer is at the same temperature setting as the convection oven mode.
- The fan runs at a higher speed in air fryer mode.
- You need the wire basket for good air frying results, so if a combination oven doesn’t come with a wire basket, it’s probably not meant to be used as an air fryer.
These three differences make sense to me. A convection oven uses the fan to circulate air around a little bit to help eliminate hot spots in the oven, leading to better baking. Once you’re at your target temperature, you don’t need much extra heat to maintain that environment for baking.
The air fryer mode doesn’t just bring the heat up to the target temperature. To get that frying effect, you also need to carry away moisture from the surface of whatever you’re air frying. I think this is why you need the wire basket and to heat from top and bottom, so that all sides of the food are exposed. This is also why the fan is cranked up, to help carry moisture away from the surface of the food.
Looking at the Panasonic combination microwave oven combos, I see one model where it says it has an air fryer function, so if your unit had that mode, I’m sure Panasonic would have let everyone know about it.
The £100 or so that an air fryer costs would allow you to run a standard 2 kw convection oven for about 150 hours even at current domestic prices - maybe even more depending on the efficiency of the oven. You need to cook a lot of chickens before you get pay back from an air fryer purchase. :-) Plus you can put your potatoes etc in the oven with the chicken to roast at the same time!
Gagaryn A 2.5 kg chicken in a normal oven would take circa 3 hours @ 2kw per hour. In my air fryer, it takes 60 minutes @ 1700 watts. Roast potatoes take 25 minutes which is jus a nice amount of time to let the chicken rest, before carving and doing the rest! My fixed tariff is approximately 20p per KwH so that is 120p versus 34p on the chicken alone. Not enough to go on holiday with I grant you, but when added to the other small savings we make in trying to achieve energy efficiency it certainly helps
wilburpan it’s called turbo bake on mine, and it can be combined with the microwave.
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I was in Tesco last night and did scope out their Tesco Go Cook specially made super high quality finest air fryer for £70.
I thought, I’ll keep an eye out for this to be £35 after Xmas….once the fad ends!
One needs a lot of counter space for all those appliances we absolutely must have to save energy. 🙃
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The amount of stuff we need is staggering, thinking of buying a large diesel 4X4 to transport it all.
seriously though I have managed to get my leccy usage down to about 5.5kW per day now. I expect it will rise when I actually turn the consumer unit back on 🙄
On a serious note My old Fridge Freezer was using far more energy than I realised and wasn’t getting as cold as it should (which I only realised when I replaced it. Mine was a 50/50 split 16 years old and meant to use 361kW per annum. I purchased one (70/30 split) which had more capacity in fridge and freezer compartments for the same size. It uses 169kW per year. My old one was using far more than it’s original specifications after 16 years and I noticed a significant energy saving one I installed the new one. I’m talking probably 1.5kW per day or more and it actually gets properly cold. It should pay for itself in about 4 or 5 years!!
dfk41 these values people are branding about for consumption of appliances are not strickly acurate, for instance just because a oven is rated at 2KW it does not mean that it will consume 2KWh over a hour as the on/off cycle of the thermostat needs to be taken into consideration, for instance I timed mine once up to temp at 200deg C and found it to be off for 100 sec and on for 43 sec I believe it has a 1.8kw element so I would put the consumption as 0.774KWh for one hour of use whilst up to temp, and assuming it takes 10min to get up to temp 0.3KWh to get up to temp.
Has anyone connected a power consumption meter to one of these Air fyers to see what the actual consumption is
ken0062 That’s what I was referring to above when I mentioned more efficient 2 kW ovens. Of course it’s trickier to measure usage on a hardwired oven without a clamp meter or similar but you are right that the duty cycle will be significant. The insulation on modern ovens is remarkable - 200 C inside for hours and the outside doesn’t even get warm - this wasn’t the case for my 20 plus year old AEG oven I replaced a couple of years back. That heated the room, as did my old fridge freezer! I would expect air fryer’s to be using power for a higher proportion of the time than a conventional oven - but with the benefit of shorter cooking times.
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That duty cycle I quoted was for a 18 year old stoves oven, got me thinking now about how much I could save by getting a more modern oven (the missus has been bending my ear about upgrading the kitchen anyway).
Anyway had been looking into getting a air fryer but the only advantage I can see is that with it having a much smaller enclosure should take less time too heat up and I would assume would have a smaller heat loss
I think we all may have opportunities to make savinbgs medium term by spotting those appliances that we really could upgrade, to fit our lifestyle. I purchased a heat pump tumble dryer, uses far less leccy. Of course I hang clothes on a washing line whenever I can, but there are times, like tomorrow, when I won’t be able to.
I treated myself to a 1080p LED projector last year, I now enjoy a 100+ inch screen 800 ansi lumens, sporting Android TV and 50W, power consumption. My OLED 1080p TV uses around 140W!. Guess what I use more.
ken0062 I accept your point that an oven does not use 2 kwh all of the time, but there again, neither does my air fryer use 1700 watts continually!
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dfk41 True, I have no doubt that a air fryer is more efficient, it’s just that without knowing the real world consumption of both it’s a job to know if the difference is worth it, there appears to be so many press articles about energy at the moment using an electrical items power rating to calculate it’s actual usage
I was interested if anyone had actually measured the energy consumption difference between an oven and air fryer, and found the following well written article: https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/house-stuff/is-an-air-fryer-more-energy-efficient-than-an-oven.html
Short version is that used properly overall an air fryer uses less energy than an oven, however the difference is quite small and even at 50p per kWh prices will take several years to break even. So if you have one then it makes sense to use it, but if you don’t have an air fryer then the upfront cost of buying one will make you worse off.
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hornbyben I would imagine my small Panasonic combi oven consumes very little more than an air fryer. So much so, it could take a decade or more to get my money back in savings. Anyone who has one knows for anything requiring it to be warmed up, it warms up in minutes.