Keep Above
Air fryer or oven
The same dinner can come out of an air fryer or the oven, and the two draw very different power for different lengths of time. Put in each one's rated watts from its rating plate, how many minutes it would run for this kind of cooking, and your own price per kWh from your power bill — the page lands both on a cost per use, per week and per year. No winner is declared; the figures are yours.
On the rating plate or label
On the rating plate or label
Put in your price per kWh from your power bill, then each side's rated power and how long one use runs. Nothing here is read from your budgets, and nothing is saved.
| Option A | Option B | |
|---|---|---|
| Rated power | — | — |
| Energy one use takes | — | — |
| Cost of one use | — | — |
| Cost a week | — | — |
| Energy a year | — | — |
| Cost a month | — | — |
| Cost a year | — | — |
Why does the amount of food change this comparison?
An oven heats a cavity; an air fryer heats a much smaller volume of air close to the food. Part of every oven run goes into bringing that cavity, its shelves and its door up to temperature, and that part is the same whether the tray holds one portion or six. A preheat is part of the run, so the honest entry is the minutes from switch-on rather than the minutes the food is in there.
Because the warm-up is fixed and the meal is not, the comparison moves with the size of the meal. One portion carries the whole cavity on its own, while a full tray spreads the same warm-up across everything on it. Heat still in the cavity when the door opens has been paid for as well, which is why a short oven run costs more per minute of actual cooking than a long one.
This is one of the tools built into Keep Above
Keep Above is a budgeting app where you enter your bills and income and it works out the balance you need to keep — so you can see what's safe to spend. No bank connection, no ads on your data.
Running costs never arrive as a bill with a date on it; they show up inside the balance — budgeting apps with no bank connection sets out what each one asks you to keep entering.
About this calculator
What about cooking in batches?
An air fryer's basket is smaller than an oven cavity, so a meal that fits the oven in one round can take two or three rounds the other way. The minutes field is per use, so the honest entry is the total minutes it would actually run for this meal — batches included.
What if the oven is cooking other things at the same time?
Then the oven run is doing more than this one job, and charging the whole session to it would overstate that side. The honest entry is the minutes the oven would run for this dish alone — time it is on anyway belongs to whatever else is in there. There is no field for splitting a session, so that judgement stays with you.
Does the oven really draw its rated watts the whole time?
Not once it is up to temperature. A thermostat holds the setting by cutting the element in and out, so the draw across a long roast sits under the plate figure. An air fryer's element is controlled the same way, but it heats a much smaller volume, so it reaches its setting sooner and the coasting starts earlier in the run. Both sides are therefore priced here at their upper end, and neither figure is a meter reading.
Where is the rating plate on an oven or an air fryer?
On a built-in oven it is usually on the frame the door closes against, visible with the door open; on a freestanding one it can be on the back. An air fryer carries it underneath or on the rear panel, near the cable. Either way the plate gives watts (W) or kilowatts (kW, where 1 kW is 1 000 W). The price per kWh is the one figure that comes off your bill rather than off the appliance.
Why can't each side have its own uses a week?
Because a use here is a dinner, and the dinner happens whether it comes out of the oven or the basket. Splitting the figure would quietly compare two households — one that cooks four times a week and one that cooks three — instead of two ways of feeding the same one. What does change is how long a dinner takes each way, and that has its own field on each side.