Martin Lewis offers warning to air fryer users ahead of Christmas Day

The UK's favourite finance guru is at it again by issuing a warning to air fryer users ahead of Christmas Day.

From air fryer Yorkshire puddings and roast potatoes to fast vegetables and party-ready canapés, the device will be used up and down the country on Christmas.

And Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis - who has said in the past that air fryers are much cheaper to run than conventional ovens - says he is now 'somewhat sceptical' of energy consumption during the festive period.

In an appearance on ITV’s This Morning, the 51-year-old said: “I heard you on the show mentioning someone was gonna cook a Christmas dinner in an air fryer.

“Is that right?

“If that’s being done for energy reasons, I would be somewhat sceptical whether that is a good idea.

“If it’s being done for taste, I don’t want to get involved.

“I mean, the benefit of an oven is when you’re cooking a lot for a lot of people, and you can fill all the racks and have it on consistently.

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“Air fryers are good for small things that cook quickly.

“If you’re gonna have to use your air fryer 15 different times for different items generally on energy usage, you’d be better off to use an oven.

“So it’s an interesting thought.”

For an alternative, Martin suggested: "A microwave I believe, from memory, gives you consistent heat whereas an oven is warming up to full temperature and then topping it up so it isn’t running at full power the whole time.

“But if you’re doing a jacket potato for 10 minutes it’s going to be far cheaper [in the microwave] than doing a single jacket potato in an oven and keeping it on for an hour and a half.

“However if you were doing a full roast dinner and you were cooking many of them, that is where it’s probably cheaper than putting five or six jacket potatoes in a microwave because each additional object you put in a microwave, you need to keep it on longer because a microwave just heats the individual object.

“General equation is, find the wattage of an item, then work out how many kilowatts or what fraction of a kilowatt it’s using, then multiply that by 34p per hour of use.”

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He explained: “If you had a 1000W microwave and you put it on for 10 minutes, one KWH for a sixth of an hour, a sixth of 34p is about 6p, shall we say?

“So it’s 6p turning the microwave on for that amount of time.

“So yes, it’s a very useful equation.”