Mini Ovens. Which one uses least electricity?

Cool_Mint

I bought a mini oven/grill from Wilkinsons last year for £13 and it's very useful in a bedsit but I'm worried about how much electricity it might be consuming; it uses halogen heating and I'm told that halogen lights can use a lot of power.

At the moment the most energy efficient way is for me to wait until some is using the proper oven in the kitchen and put my food in then, but it's not very convenient.

Is there a mini oven that is genuinely cheap to run or a way to measure the cost based on wattage? I use the mini oven very frequently so I'm quite happy to pay around £100 for a new one.

elastic_trickery

Hello Cool Mint

It is usually very easy to compare any electrical heating products because they are (almost) 100% efficient. For a given amount of electricity input you will get a given amount of heat.

The things that would affect an appliance such as an oven would be the amount of insulation around it. The larger kitchen appliance would have more insulation and hence use less energy to maintain a set temperature inside it. However, the kitchen oven is larger, hence more air has to be kept hot inside it than your small halogen heater.

There may be some wastage inside your halogen heater because I have a nagging suspicion that some of the energy is dissipated in the form of light and not heat, however, this too is offset by the fact that halogen heater transfers energy more efficiently into the food by operating at a different freqency to "normal" heaters.

Sorry this answer is turning out to be rather non commital.....

Another factor is any inefficiency in insulation in the smaller oven is converted into heat which would warm the room anyway so it's not entirely lost.

To work out what it costs to run your heater find out what the kw rating is and find out how much you are paying for electricity in kwh

The cost for running your halogen heater for one hour will be the kw rating multiplied by the cost of electricity per kwh.

Cool_Mint

Thanks Trickery, I finally found this calculator:
http://www.cactus2000.de/uk/unit/massstr.shtml

But silly as this may sound I don't know how much electricity costs!
I live in a bedsit so I don't know what the price is per hour and it's infuriatingly difficult to find any website that tells me what the average price of electricity is in the UK (I want to know peak-time and off-peak).

Can you give me a rough guide for a 1300W halogen oven?

elastic_trickery

The problem with the question you pose is that there seems to be a great variance on the cost per unit paid by many people.

I have just signed for a new deal at 7.67pence per unit on my business premises. However there are people paying over 10pence per unit so the accuracy of your calcualtions would be based upon what you are paying as an individual. It is shown on the bill you receive.

Lets assume 10pence per kilowatt hour.

Your Oven costs

1.3 x 10pence = 13pence per hour to run.

Hope this is of some help.

Elastic_Trickery

Cool_Mint

Thanks again Trickery, I thought it might be about that price but I wasn't sure. :beer: