I ordered a pack of 4 individual meat pies using Asda online. By mistake, I ordered the frozen ones and they need to be oven cooked for 30 to 32 minutes.
I hate waiting that long. These pies probably taste perfectly alright but they could be going in the bin!
Just out of interest, would it cost more to run an oven for 2 hours than what I paid for the pies? The pack of 4 cost ?1.80.
pamela was thinking very hard :
Usually no, just a few pence at most.
Why not cook all 4 in one go, and then warm them up individually in the microwave? You can even re-freeze them in the cooked state if you like and then thaw/warm them in the microwave when you want to eat them.
Cook the first one from frozen and thaw the others before cooking.
1000W oven for an hour cost 1 unit of electricity. 24 pence for a couple of hours?
Gas probably half that.
I like it.
But... "cook from frozen for best results"
From Google it seems an electric oven is closer to 3 kW. However I don't know what power reduction occurs as it heats up and needs only to maintain at cooking temperature.
I was sort of hoping someone here had put a power consumption meter on an electric oven for the initial half hour. In fact, my oven is gas but calculating for electric gives a worst case scenario.
This is UK diy we dont read the instructions FFS
pamela wrote on 29/04/2017 :
Electric I would guess at 10 - 20% of rating once up to temperature. Electric will be more efficient Kw wise, because gas needs to vent to breath. Gas is around 1/3 - 1/4 the cost per Kw.
The power consumption of our ovens is logged and varies from about .4kWhr to 1.3 kWhr per day. They're fairly new Ikea (Whirpool) models and seem to be quite well insulated.
One was on for about an hour this evening and clocked up 0.7kWhr. In the mode we normally use (fan with rear heating element) the peak consumption is about 1.2kW and switches on for about 40% of the time once the oven's up to temperature. (25 seconds on every minute)
It could not possibly cost more than about 2KWh - or 40p worst case.
That's less energy intensive than I expected. At 14p a kWh that's about 10p an hour. I guess this would be a few pence less for a gas oven, maybe 6p an hour, and perhaps 16p an hour for an old electric oven.
That means my pies have just been saved from the bin. :-)
In fact as I have already paid for them then putting them in the bin makes no sense but it would stop me feeling bad that I bought the wrong pies and then paid even more to cook the things.
The Natural Philosopher pretended :
Not even that worst case 2x 14p (more than many will pay per Kwh) =
28p. In practise it will not be on full bore for more than a few minutes, before it begins cycling.In message , pamela writes
Biggest issue here is frozen meals that come in foil packs so can't be microwaved:-(
>
But what do they taste like, that's the question?
Ask for a smart meter to be installed, and it might tell you
It happens that Andrew formulated :
:-)
Most single ovens are around the 2 to 2.5kW range.
You can tell from watching the stat light normally - typically it will be full on for the first few mins as it warms up, and then will drop into a pattern of on off cycling. The proportion of on time dictated by the selected temperature and the rate of heat loss of the oven. I would expect a 20% to 40% duty cycle for lower temperatures.
Not much point - there are too many uncontrolled variables including the ambient temperature and how much you put in the over as well.
Do you have a dodgy fish and chip shop nearby? Get pals with the owner and he'll let you keep them on standby in the counter oven.
Then you can pop in any time and have them faster than I can say "food".
(with great chips, mushy peas and curry sauce as well...)
If we're talking about a temperature setting of 200 deg C, more like 20 to 30 minutes at full bore before the oven temperature indicator light extinguishes to show that the target temperature has been reached.
It might take even longer on an oven without the luxury of triple glazed doors[1]. Mind you, this is my experience with the smaller upper oven on our Bosch built in unit. The full size fan assisted oven may get to temperature quicker but this only gets used once a year if that, for the winter festival turkey and suchlike, so I can't recall how that compares.
[1] Me and the XYL were browsing our local Wickes store earlier in the week and I noticed an off brand knock-off of our Bosch Double oven. Just out of curiosity, I took a closer look at the oven door, which like the Bosch and most such ovens, hinged up and down. It appeared to have the same door hinge release mechanism but I couldn't get the little 'release levers' to budge so assumed it was just for show and didn't actually have one.Then, I turned my attention to the door construction itself and was surprised to find it wasn't even double glazed. True it used two sheets of glass but the outer was more of a heat shield than the outer of a DG unit where the space between the panes would be enclosed to prevent convective heat loss. In this case, the gap between the inner and outer glass panels was more than amply ventilated top and bottom so I dread to think how much more expensive such a piece of s**te would cost to run compared to the Bosch unit it was aping.
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