Air Fryer vs Wall Oven: Which Is Cheaper to Run? I Did the Math - CNET

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Here's how much energy (and cash) you can save by swapping one for the other in 2024.

An air fryer can trim money from your energy bill if you use it in place of the big oven. It'll also turn out some rather tasty eats.

I've got a long list of reasons to love an air fryer and it turns out saving energy belongs on it right there with speed, convenience and results. Air fryers also pose no risk of contaminating your air like natural gas ovens do. Better still, you don't have to spend more than $100 to get a good one.

But back to that energy savings thing. To see how much an air fryer can save you versus a wall oven in a year, I did some math. By my calculations, air fryers use roughly half the less total energy, and that's before factoring in the shorter total operating time needed for most food since air fryers cook faster and have almost no preheat time.

Here's how we got that figure and a breakdown of how much you can save using your air fryer instead of the oven.

The answer won't be the same for everyone since energy costs vary by state in the US. Oven efficiency also varies and newer models tend to use less gas or electricity. For this exercise, we'll use some averages and estimates to assess how much you can potentially save if you fire up the air fryer instead of the oven. Oh, and saving money on energy is just one of many reasons we think air fryers are a worthwhile investment. More on that in a bit.

So how did we get these numbers? The easiest way to figure out how much an air fryer might save you versus a big oven was to calculate the wattage pulled per hour versus how much an electric stove would use. The same goes for a gas oven, although for that you need to figure out the amount of natural gas used for a stove as well as the cost of natural gas in your state.

Don't worry. We did the hard part.

Ovens have become more energy efficient but they still can't hold a candle to air fryers.

Depending on what type of oven you have, gas or electric, operating costs will vary since natural gas prices and electricity costs vary rather dramatically by state and service provider. While both use a similar amount of energy and have somewhat similar upfront costs, if you own an older oven there's a good chance it's less energy-efficient than a newer model.

Natural gas-powered ovens are thought to cause health complications among children.

To calculate the operating cost of your gas stove and oven, we take the energy rating of the oven in Btu and divide it by 100,000. Multiply the result by the cost per therm of natural gas in your state, which varies greatly, then multiply by the number of hours the oven is used. You should be able to find the energy rating of your oven online if you know the model name or number. It is likely somewhere on the unit itself. If you still have the owner's manual, you can find the energy rating there, measured in Btu.

To calculate the operating cost of an 18,000-Btu oven, you'll divide 18,000 by 100,000, giving you 0.18. We'll also need to find the average price per therm of natural gas in your state. This chart has the most recent prices via the US Energy Information Administration. Note that this chart is listed in dollars per thousand cubic feet, so you'll need to divide by 10. For instance, if the chart price is $23, you'll use $2.30 to calculate the cost.

In New York where I live, the price is currently $2.20 per therm (about average for the US). Next, we'll multiply that price for a therm by the number you calculated in the last step (0.18 in this example) to get the operating cost per hour of using your gas oven.

For me, it would cost about 40 cents per hour to run an 18,000-Btu oven. If I were to run an oven for 1 hour per day, it would cost $146 per year. In some states (including Georgia, Florida and Ohio), natural gas is about 30% higher than the national average. In Hawaii, it's more than double.

In New York, an electric oven costs about 50 cents an hour to run.

To determine electric stove consumption you'll calculate the wattage pulled per hour of cooking. Most electric ovens draw around 3,000 watts, depending on the temperature. Once you find the wattage of your oven via the appliance tag, owner's manual or an online product listing, multiply that by the number of hours you use the oven each day (we'll use 1 hour for this calculation), then divide by 1,000 watts to find the kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity used.

Next, find the average price per kWh of electricity in your state. For that, you can consult this chart that has the 2020 prices listed in cents per kWh. The prices for 2021 won't be released until December 2022, but if you do some web searching, you should be able to find the latest figures. Multiply that amount by the number you just calculated (3 kWh in this example) to determine your operating cost per day.

Working with New York's current electricity rate of 17 cents per kWh, a 3,000-watt oven would cost about 51 cents per hour when run at high heat. If I used my oven for roughly 1 hour per day for one year that would equal roughly $182 per year. This cost doesn't include energy used by the range and burners.

A standard 1,500-watt air fryer has both gas and electric ovens beat handily when it comes to energy efficiency.

Air fryers are electric appliances, so we can use the same methodology as above to find the operating cost. The wattage for air fryers varies and larger models will use more energy, but a standard 4-quart fryer such as this Ninja (our top-rated model) uses about 1,500 watts.

Considering that's exactly half the wattage pull of the average full-size oven from our stove calculation, we can project that the air fryer will use roughly half as much electricity to operate.

Using New York's electricity prices, we safely say a standard 4-quart air fryer will cost about 25 cents per hour to run. That's 50% more energy-efficient than the average full-size electric oven and about 35% more efficient than the average gas oven (calculated with New York state's average energy costs).

Ninja's 4-quart air fryer oven is one of the best we've tested.

These numbers are a rough estimate, of course. The numbers will vary based on your state's energy cost, how much cooking you do in a year, what temperature you're cooking at and the type and size of oven you're using.

But that's only half of the equation. Air fryers are even more energy- and cost-efficient than these raw numbers illustrate.

Here's why…

Air fryers do the work of wall ovens in less time and using less energy.

Because of the smaller cooking chamber and superconvection (intense fan blowing heat into food), air fryers generally cook foods much faster than your traditional gas or electric stove. Often in about half the time it takes to make a similar recipe in a full oven.

Below are some examples of cooking times for air fryers versus stoves. The cooking website Taste of Home compiled a list of average air fryer cooking times for popular foods. We compared those with standard cooking times pulled from Food Network recipes for oven-baked or oven-roasted versions of those foods.

Don't forget most air fryers also don't require any preheating time, making them even more efficient. The average full-size oven takes at least 10 minutes to preheat but usually more like 12 to 15 minutes. Preheating requires as much (or more) energy as actual cooking. In the chart above, I added a modest 10 minutes to each of the oven cooking times to account for preheating.

If you consider that an air fryer does the work of an oven in half the time (even faster when you include preheat time), 300 hours of cooking in a standard oven in a year would likely take fewer than 150 hours when done in an air fryer.

Chicken wings made in an air fryer are extremely tasty and cook in half the time.

An air fryer is not a pound-for-pound replacement for an oven. There are plenty of foods that you probably won't want to cook in an air fryer. Others just plain won't fit in a standard air fryer. Certain models are spacious enough to cook a whole chicken, but for larger roasts, a Thanksgiving turkey or that Sunday lasagna -- not to mention most baking projects -- your air fryer may not be the best option.

That said, for someone who doesn't bake much or cook whole turkeys and racks of lamb on the regular, an air fryer can shoulder a whole lot of the cooking that your more expensive, less energy-efficient oven has been handling.

Don't throw your big oven away just yet. You'll still want it to cook that Sunday lasagna and a turkey on Thanksgiving.

An air fryer won't cook everything better than your oven, but there are some air fryer foods that a big oven can't touch. Because air fryers cook so fast and at high temps, foods like chicken wings, french fries and most frozen apps will get crispy on the outside without drying out on the inside the way they might when stuck in the large oven for 30 or 40 minutes.

As mentioned, air fryers don't require any preheating time either. Most of the models I've used are also extremely simple to operate, safe even for children to use and easy to clean.

The Instant Pot air fryer lid turned out some excellent fried chicken in about 20 minutes. Can your big oven do that?

You can pay in the hundreds for an air fryer but many of the best ones we tested are less than that. You can pick up our favorite air fryer, the Ninja 4-quart, for $100, or cheaper if you find it on sale. And our favorite budget air fryer, the Gourmia 4-quart, can be found for just $60.

And if you're curious, Instant Pots and multicookers also use significantly less energy than an oven. If you have an Instant Pot but no air fryer, you can snag the Mealthy air-frying lid for $85 or Instant Pot's lid attachment for Instant Pot's lid for $50.