The meter cost $25, and since June 6 it has been plugged into something on our kitchen counter almost every day. Matt calls it the lie detector. The question I wanted it to answer was simple: what does it actually cost to cook dinner with each of our appliances in June, when the AC is already running most of the day?
How I measured
A Kill A Watt plugs into the wall, and the appliance plugs into it. It shows how many kilowatt-hours the appliance used over a cooking session. I ran each appliance the way we normally cook dinner, several times over the month, and took a typical number.
The oven is a different story. It's hardwired, so I estimated it from the bake element's rating and how long the element actually stays on, which I timed with my phone by watching the indicator light. The oven number is an educated estimate, not a reading.
For the rate, I divided our latest electric bill by its kilowatt-hours: $301 for 1,955 kWh, which works out to about 15.4 cents per kWh all-in, delivery charges and fees included. That's on our current 12-month fixed plan, which ends in October.
What each one costs per dinner
- Oven at 400°F, a 12-minute preheat plus 45 minutes of cooking: about 2.1 kWh, 32 cents
- Ninja DualZone air fryer, both baskets for 25 minutes: about 0.65 kWh, 10 cents
- Crock-Pot 7-quart, on low for 8 hours: about 1.5 kWh, 23 cents
- Instant Pot, a one-hour cycle including the time it takes to come to pressure: about 0.4 kWh, 6 cents
- Presto electric griddle, 20 minutes: about 0.45 kWh, 7 cents
The Crock-Pot surprised me. It draws very little at any moment, but eight hours adds up, and it lands closer to the oven than to the air fryer. The Instant Pot is the cheapest by a mile, which makes sense once you think about it: sealed, insulated and done in an hour. The air fryer cooked the same eight chicken thighs I used to roast in the oven for about a third of the electricity.
The part the meter can't see
Here's the honest catch. The cooking itself is pennies. If we ran the oven for dinner every single night in June, it would come to about $9.60 for the month, and our June bill was $301. The appliances aren't the bill. The air conditioner is.
The direct savings are easy to figure. In summers past we ran the oven for dinner about twelve times a month. Twelve oven dinners is $3.84, and the same twelve in the air fryer is $1.20, so that's $2.64.
What the oven really costs in a Dallas summer is the heat it dumps into an open kitchen, which the AC then has to pull back out. A $25 meter can't measure that. I tried a rough version anyway: on the one night this month I broke down and baked a frozen lasagna, the AC ran almost nonstop from about 4:30 until 8, and on air fryer nights it cycled on and off like normal. Putting rough numbers on that run time, my best guess is that skipping the oven saves us somewhere around $6 to $10 a month in summer, counting both the oven's own electricity and the extra AC. It isn't nothing, but it won't change our budget either.
Why the oven stays off anyway
Comfort. On the nights we skipped the oven this month, the kitchen at 5:30 felt like the rest of the house. On lasagna night it felt more like 80 by the stove, and Rosie was sweaty and cranky in her booster seat by the time we sat down. That difference is worth more to me than the $6 to $10.
The numbers also made me less precious about the Crock-Pot. I'd assumed it was nearly free to run. It isn't, though 23 cents for a whole pork shoulder's worth of carnitas is still a bargain, and it keeps working while I'm at the office.
These are our numbers, with our appliances and our rate. Anyone else's will be different depending on what they cook with and what their own bill says per kilowatt-hour. Ours will change in October when our contract ends, and I'll be comparing plans before then.
The meter is going on the chest freezer in the garage next. It was 104 out there this afternoon, and I'd like to know how hard that freezer is working.
