Measuring what your own air fryer uses

Questions this answers

• How do I measure how much electricity my air fryer uses?
• Can I use a smart plug with an air fryer?
• What energy monitor do I need for an air fryer?
• How do I compare my air fryer with my oven?

Check the rating before you plug anything in

This is the part to get right and it is quick. An air fryer is a high-current appliance — the models in this catalogue run from about 1,400W to 2,600W — and a plug-in monitor sits between it and the wall carrying all of that current.

The monitor must be rated for at least the load you are putting through it. Its rating is printed on the body, usually as a maximum wattage or a maximum current in amps. If the appliance's rating plate says 2,400W and the monitor says 13A or 3,000W, that is fine. If the monitor does not state a rating you can read, do not use it for this.

Do not chain it through an extension lead. Electrical Safety First's guidance is to plug an air fryer directly into a wall socket, and a monitor plugged into the wall with the appliance in it keeps that arrangement. A monitor on the end of an extension lead does not.

Check the plug and the monitor for heat during the first cook. Warm is normal for a plug carrying this much current; hot, or any smell of scorching, means stop and unplug.

What to measure

Cook something you actually cook, in the quantity you actually cook it. A measurement of one chip is precise and useless.

Reset the monitor's kWh counter before you start and read it when the cook finishes. Include preheating if you preheat — it is part of what the meal cost.

Note the food, the quantity, the temperature, the time and the reading. The reading on its own is not much use six months later.

Repeat it once or twice on the same dish. Air fryers are affected by how cold the food was and how full the chamber is, and one reading tells you nothing about how much that varies.

Comparing with your oven, properly

This is where most published comparisons go wrong, and doing it right in your own kitchen is straightforward.

COOK THE SAME AMOUNT. If the air fryer needs two batches for the quantity the oven does in one, measure two batches. That is the honest comparison and it is the one nobody runs.

COUNT THE PREHEAT ON BOTH SIDES. The oven's preheat is part of the oven's cost.

A built-in oven is usually hardwired or on a cooker circuit rather than a 13A plug, so a plug-in monitor will not fit it. If you have a smart meter with a real-time display, you can watch the difference during a cook instead — cruder, and enough to see which way the answer goes.

What to do with the number

Put it into this site's cost calculator in the measured field. It replaces the rated-power estimate entirely rather than adjusting it, and the result stops being a ceiling and becomes what the cook actually cost at your own tariff.

You will probably find it is meaningfully below the upper bound, which is the point. The gap between them is the duty cycle nobody publishes, measured for your machine.

What AirfryerHQ has not established

AirfryerHQ recommends no monitor, has tested none and has no commercial relationship with anybody selling one. The guidance above is about the rating you must check, not about which product to buy.

Nobody here has performed this measurement. The instructions are what the safety guidance in this catalogue supports and what the arithmetic requires, not a write-up of an experiment we ran.

Evidence and confidence

Appliances

• Basket air fryer