Cheapest way to cook? Gas cooker v Pressure King Pro

prudent_2

I cook from scratch pretty much all the time (for a family. No meat). I've had an electric pressure king pro for a couple of years and only really used the slow cooker option, even though it's got 24 different settings for frying, baking, pressure cook, soup etc. How can I work out it it's cheaper fuel wise to use that rather than the gas hob or oven? Thanks.

LadOnTheHill

You can get a plug in energy monitor that goes into the wall,  then you'd plus the pressure cooker into it to show you how many kW it takes to cook food. The cost per kW will be on your bill, probably around 25p. The monitors are around £15 on the big river website.

The gas cooker should have a rating on it, somewhere, or in the manual. It's a bit more inaccurate, in that you possibly won't be running the oven at its maximum output at all times. I have a gas hob with a 3kw ring, meaning it uses 3kw of gas every hour its turned on to full. If it's turned down to half, then it might be using one and a half kW of gas per hour, it might not. If you have a smart meter, you could turn your other gas using appliances off, such as your boiler or gas hob, read the meter, then turn the cooker on, cook the food, read the meter again and see what value you get. Your cooker manufacturer might be able to help you more, too, with the rating of the cooker.

Gas is probably going to be cheaper than electricity. Boiling a litre of water in a gas kettle is a lot cheaper than boiling a litre of water on electricity.

maisie_cat

The cost per KW for gas will be cheaper but the gas hob loses heat around the pan supports so has a lower efficiency.
A pressure cooker is a sealed container that cooks much quicker.
I also cook from scratch, mainly batch cooking and have a few plug in meters.
We use around a KW per day cooking, most individual items use 0.1 KW, bread 0.15KW. We would use at least twice that using the cooker, depending on what you are cooking, it's hard wired so I cannot measure the consumption.
We barely use our oven now

Farway

You have to bear in mind the heat from the gas flames around pan / cooker is not "wasted" because it goes towards the heating the kitchen in winter, maybe wasted in summer with windows open of course