Martin Lewis issues warning to anyone who uses air fryers instead of an oven

Martin Lewis has issued a warning to people using air fryers instead of ovens.

The kitchen gadget is sometimes billed as a more cost effective than the conventional oven. However, the finance guru explained during an appearance on This Morning that this isn't always the case.

He said: "I heard you on the show mentioning someone was gonna cook dinner in an air fryer. Is that right? If that's being done for energy reasons, I would be somewhat sceptical whether that is a good idea.

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"If it's being done for taste, I don't want to get involved. I mean, the benefit of an oven is when you're cooking a lot for a lot of people, and you can fill all the racks and have it on consistently. Air fryers are good for small things that cook quickly. If you're gonna have to use your air fryer 15 different times for different items generally on energy usage, you'd be better off to use an oven. So it's an interesting thought." - as Bristol Live reports.

The finance guru shared a scenario when it would be more cost effective to use an air fryer. He said: "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.

The Money Saving Expert shared a formula for people to consider as he said: "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."

He 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."

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