Air fryer vs oven: which is cheaper to run?

CHOICE's roast implies an oven pulling about 1.6 kWh an hour, while our oven calculator uses 1.0 kWh an hour. Both are right for what they describe: the calculator's figure is a moderate baking temperature in a typical fan-forced oven, and CHOICE was roasting hotter in an older one. An oven's real draw moves with its temperature, its age and how well its door still seals, so treat any single oven figure as a starting point and check it against your own bill. For your own estimate, start from our calculator's 1.0 kWh an hour if you mostly bake at moderate temperatures, and add about 60% to it if you roast hot in an older oven, which is exactly the distance between the two figures here. That adjustment is the one to make when you open the oven and cooktop running cost calculator to price your own cooking. The same caution applies to the air fryer side, since CHOICE tested one machine of each.

Nothing here says an oven ever cooks a given tray of food for less. What it does is cook more of it at once, so the question is how many air fryer loads a single oven load is worth. Capacity is the limit, and it deserves a number instead of a shrug. The oven cooked that tray of frozen snacks in one go for 1.06 kWh. The air fryer did the same job for 0.25 kWh in a basket that holds a good deal less. So how many basketfuls before the saving is gone? About four. Run the basket four times over and you have spent what the oven spent once, and anything under that leaves the air fryer ahead. The catch is that plenty of cooking never gets the chance: a Sunday roast for six needs the shelf space, and no number of batches will make a basket hold it.

This page prices electricity and nothing else. The annual figures here all assume the same thing: three of those frozen-snack trays a week, every week, on your state's reference rate, which comes to roughly $35 a year saved in the Australian Capital Territory at the bottom and $48 in South Australia at the top. That is the frozen-snack tray. Of the three meals the sausages and vegetables saved the fewest kilowatt-hours, and the same three-a-week habit on that meal saves $30 to $41 a year instead, which is the bottom of the honest range. Three a week is CHOICE’s own cadence for its cooking-appliance running-cost figures, not a guess of ours, and the dollars are rounded because a test of one machine does not support them to the cent. An air fryer is also a purchase. The price on the box moves too much for this page to quote a market figure, so work it as arithmetic: an air fryer bought for $120 pays itself back in about two and a half years at the South Australian saving and about three and a half at the ACT one, and any other price scales the same way. Divide what yours cost by the saving for your own state. It is worth keeping the figure in proportion as well: heating and cooling, hot water and the fridge between them account for well over half a typical Australian power bill, so this is real money without being the biggest lever in the house. Our guide to what uses the most electricity at home ranks the rest of them.

All three meals CHOICE cooked both ways, with the energy behind the cents it published.

Times and costs are CHOICE’s own published test results. The kWh figures are ours, worked back from the cents CHOICE published at the 32¢/kWh rate it stated, then rounded, which is what lets the table above price the same test on your state’s rate instead of CHOICE’s. The oven times include preheating where CHOICE preheated; the air fryer was not preheated.